Evaluation Goals
Table 1. Evaluation Goals.
Data Collection
Formative evaluation
The main source of formative evaluation data for the Ebola awareness campaign is existing information about the disease and the country. This existing information would come from media reports, publications from global and local health agencies, local census data, demographic data and government health records. This data would provide valuable information about the need for the awareness campaign (American Evaluation Association, 2012).
Process evaluation
People who are involved in the implementation of the Ebola awareness campaign would be the main source of information during the process evaluation phase. This source of information is validated by Windsor (2015) who says that people are among the most reliable sources of information for program evaluation. For example, the people involved in the implementation of the Ebola awareness program may be able to report on changes on the ground regarding the effect of the program on the people, or if the strategies associated with the campaign are effective, or not (Wukitsch, 2012).
Impact evaluation
People would also be the main source of information for the impact evaluation phase. However, unlike the process evaluation stage where stakeholders involved in providing data are those involved in implementing the Ebola awareness campaign, the people who will provide data for the impact evaluation phase are residents of Sierra Leone who are the target population of the campaign.
Outcome evaluation
Information for outcome evaluation would be collected from seeing and listening. Harris (2016) calls this type of data source the observation technique. It involves a structured, or unstructured, process of observing how selected samples of Sierra Leone communities change their lifestyles to prevent the occurrence of Ebola. By doing so, it would be possible to know whether the campaign had an effect, or not (Smith et al., 2010).
Table 2. Evaluation Data Collection Strategy.
Evaluation Stakeholders
The stakeholders that would be involved in the Ebola awareness campaign are the residents of Sierra Leone, the Sierra Leone government, campaign implementers and media. Residents of Sierra Leone are those who live within the country and could be affected by an occurrence of Ebola. They are also the main target population for the campaign. They are considered an important stakeholder group because they have an ethical responsibility to take care of their own health (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014; Jennings, Arras, Barrett & Ellis, 2016).
While it is unreasonable to force this stakeholder group to change their behaviors to prevent the occurrence of Ebola, it is reasonable to expect that this stakeholder group would be more aware of the disease and take proactive measures to prevent themselves from being victims (Jennings et al., 2016).
The media are another stakeholder group and involves the main agencies that would transmit information about Ebola awareness to the target population. This stakeholder group is comprised of television networks, radio stations, and local magazine publication companies. The government of Sierra Leone is also an important stakeholder group in the Ebola public health campaign. It is defined as such because it controls the country’s health infrastructure. Furthermore, it formulates the policies of the health sector that are likely to affect how the Ebola awareness campaign would be implemented (McKenzie, Pinger & Seabert, 2016).
Lastly, the implementers of the Ebola awareness campaign are another stakeholder group because they would be primarily involved in designing and implementing the campaign. Thus, they would be involved in the formative, process, and impact evaluation phases of the campaign.
Table 3. Evaluation Stakeholders.
Evaluators
The main types of evaluators that would be involved in the evaluation process include the campaign coordinator, data analyst and research scientist. The campaign coordinator is part of the evaluation team because of his understanding of different processes associated with the awareness campaign. He also understands the roles of each participant in the project implementation phase. His expertise would help to furnish the project implementation team with information regarding the efficiency of the campaign (Fertman & Allensworth, 2017). The role of the research scientist would be to collect information from different stakeholders, synthesize it and provide scientific and verifiable data regarding the campaign’s efficiency and outcomes (Fertman & Allensworth, 2017).
In this regard, the role of the research scientist would include formulating the best data collection methods, such as focus groups and interviews, to understand the effects of the Ebola awareness campaign during the impact evaluation phase. The role of the data analyst would be to gather and analyze data from different centers of information, such as the media (how many listeners?), social media campaigns (how many people share information relating to Ebola?) and the likes to get a snapshot of the effectiveness and impact of the campaign on the target population. The table below shows the role of each evaluator in different evaluation phases.
Table 4. Evaluators.
References
American Evaluation Association. (2012). American evaluation association statement on cultural competence in evaluation. Web.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (2014). Ebola outbreaks 2000–2014. Web.
Fertman, C. I., & Allensworth, D. D. (Eds.). (2017). Health promotion programs: From theory to practice (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Harris, M. J. (2016). Evaluating public and community health programs (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Jennings, B., Arras, J., Barrett, D., & Ellis, B. (2016). Emergency ethics: Public health preparedness and response. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
McKenzie, J., Pinger, R., & Seabert, D. (2016). An introduction to community & public health. London, UK: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Smith, M. C., Lambert, W., Boehm, F., Finkelstein, J. L., Singler, J. M., Léandre, F.,… & Mukherjee, J. S. (2010). Economic risk factors for HIV infection among women in rural Haiti: Implications for HIV prevention policies and programs in resource-poor settings. Journal of Women’s Health, 19(5), 885–892. Web.
Windsor, R. (2015). Evaluation of health promotion and disease prevention programs: Improving population health through evidence-based practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Wukitsch, K. (2012). MAP-IT: A model for implementing Healthy People 2020. Web.