Choosing program improve your future

Be realistic about your current health and level of fitness. If you are a beginner, the physical demands of certain activities such as running may be too much at first.

Choose a gentler alternative and work your way up. Considering different physical activities Consider the advantages and disadvantages of the following activities to help you decide which may be best for you. Cycling Things to consider include: Benefits — cycling is weight-bearing activity that is gentle on the joints. It burns plenty of kilojoules and improves your cardiovascular health. It can also be built into your day as a means of transport.

You need to regularly check your bicycle for signs of wear and tear and fix it if necessary. Protective equipment including a helmet is essential. Be traffic conscious and plan your route. Online videos or DVDs Things to consider include: Benefits — online videos or DVDs used at home can give you the expertise of an instructor without the expense or inconvenience of attending a gym.

You can also work out whenever you have the time. Issues to keep in mind — you may need to use a variety of online videos or DVDs to keep your workouts interesting. You might like to exercise with a neighbour, to break the routine, or borrow new DVDs from the library or download more videos.

You also need to follow instructions carefully and include warm-ups to avoid injury. Make sure the instructors on the videos are qualified. Just because someone is a celebrity does not mean they have relevant qualifications or knowledge. Gym membership Things to consider include: Benefits — gyms stock a wide range of equipment and often offer classes such as aerobics or pilates.

Taking full advantage of your membership should give you plenty of opportunities to improve your all-round health and fitness. Instructors should be on hand to help you use equipment correctly and reduce your risk of injuries.

Issues to keep in mind — gym memberships can be expensive and gyms can be very busy at peak times, such as after work. If you think you may feel embarrassed or intimidated working out in front of people, find out when the gym is less busy.

Home fitness equipment Things to consider include: Benefits — examples of home fitness equipment include stationary bicycles, treadmills and cross-trainers that work the arms and legs at the same time. You can also exercise while watching television or listening to music if you want to. Issues to keep in mind — home fitness equipment is expensive and takes up a lot of space.

Think about whether you are motivated enough to regularly walk, run or cycle in the one spot. Many people stop using their home fitness equipment within five years of buying it. Running Things to consider include: Benefits — running is a weight-bearing activity so it helps to build strong bones.

The need for equipment is minimal, although it is recommended you buy a good pair of running shoes. Issues to consider — Running-related injuries can be caused by the heavy load running places on joints, ligaments, tendons and muscles throughout the body. Swimming Things to consider include: Benefits — swimming is a low-impact activity.

The buoyancy of the water supports your body so the risk of musculoskeletal injury is small. Swimming strokes exercise the entire body but particularly the muscles of the back, chest and arms. Swimming is an ideal form of exercise for most people, particularly people who are frail, elderly or obese.

Issues to consider — swimming is a learned skill. You may need to take swimming lessons if you are a beginner. Swimming is not a weight-bearing activity, so unlike activities such as walking or running, you will not strengthen bones or burn as many kilojoules, Team sports Things to consider include: Benefits — team sports offer friendship and fun. It is easier to exercise when you are enjoying yourself. Most team sports, such as soccer or netball, quickly build cardiovascular health because of the required running and quick bursts of activity.

Issues to consider — the stop—start nature of most team sports may put strain on the joints and ligaments, which can increase the risk of l injury, particularly of the knees and ankles. Read carefully about every degree of the Universities you are planning to attend. If at the end you still have doubts about choosing your career , we suggest you to visit a career counseling.

Remember, this is an important decision to make, and once you choose your career, commit to it, study hard and persevere! Good luck!! This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember you.

We use this information in order to improve and customize your browsing experience and for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media. To find out more about the cookies we use, see our Privacy Policy. A single cookie will be used in your browser to remember your preference not to be tracked. Where you do have the capacity to evaluate all sites, it will be helpful to build into the evaluation a method of comparing them.

This will allow you to identify and adopt at all sites methods, conditions, or activities that seem to make one site particularly successful, and to identify and change at all sites methods, conditions, or activities that seem to create barriers to success at others. If you can't evaluate each site separately, you'll have to decide which one s will give you the information that will most help in adjusting and improving your program.

If, on the other hand, your chief consideration is learning whether a particular new or unusual method or situation is working, you may find yourself evaluating the site s least like the others.

If sites appear only minimally different, some other considerations that may come into play are:. Programs sometimes are organized so that different methods are used or different services provided at different sites. In other cases, conditions may vary from site to site because of the sites' geographical locations or the available space.

The ideal situation is to evaluate all sites and compare the effects of the different methods, conditions, or services. When that's not possible, you'll have to decide what's most important to find out. If the methods, services, or conditions at a particular site are new or innovative, you may want to evaluate them, rather than those that have a track record. There may be a particular method or service that you want to evaluate, in which case the decision about which site to choose is obvious.

The decision should be based on what makes the most sense for your program, and what will give you the best information to improve its effectiveness. When you have the capacity to choose more than one site to evaluate, it often makes sense to choose two or three sites that are different - especially if each is representative of other sites in the program or of program initiatives - so that you can compare their effectiveness.

Even where sites are essentially similar, you'll get more information by evaluating as many as you can. Another factor to consider is the participants whose behavior, activity, or circumstances will be evaluated. If your program is relatively small this might not be an issue - the participants will simply be all those in the program. However, if you don't have the resources - whether finances, time, or personnel - to evaluate the whole program, there are some situations in which the choice of participants may be important:.

There are a number of reasons why there might be multiple groups of participants in a program. You might also be trying different strategies with different groups. The Brookline Early Education Project BEEP , a program aimed at school readiness for children aged pre-birth through 5, recruited pregnant families in three cohorts over the course of three years.

In addition, families in each cohort were assigned to one of three levels of service. Thus, there were actually nine different groups among BEEP participants, even though, by the third year, all were receiving services at the same time. Once again, if there's no problem in evaluating the whole program, participants will simply include everyone. If that's not possible, there are a number of potential choices:.

Evaluate your work with only one group, with the expectation that work with the others will be evaluated in the future. In this case, you'd probably want to choose the one for whom you consider the program most crucial.

They might be at greater risk of heart attack, of school failure, of homelessness, etc. Include a small number of groups in your evaluation. You might want to choose groups with contrasting characteristics different ages, for example, or addressed by different strategies. On the other hand, depending on the focus of your evaluation, you might want groups that are essentially similar, to see whether your work is consistent in its effects.

Choose a few participants from each group to focus your evaluation on. While this won't give you a complete picture, it should give you enough information to tell where your program is accomplishing its goals and where it needs improvement. The differences in the ways participants in different groups respond to the program assuming there are differences can also give you ideas for ways to change what you're doing. Cultural factors can have an enormous effect on participants' responses to a program.

They can govern conceptions of social roles, family responsibilities, acceptable and unacceptable behavior, attitudes toward authority and who constitutes authority , allowable topics of conversation, morality, the role of religion - the list goes on and on. In planning a program that involves members of different populations and cultures, you essentially have three choices:.

In any of these instances, it would probably be important to understand how well your approach is working with members of the various populations. If you can evaluate the whole program, make sure that you include enough members of each group so that you can compare results and their opinions of the program among them.

If your evaluation possibilities are limited, then your choices are similar to those for multiple groups of other kinds, and will depend on what exactly is most useful for you. There are interactions between the choice of sites and the choice of participants here.

You may be concerned about the effects of your program on a particular population, which may be largely concentrated at one site. In that case, if you have limited resources, you may want to evaluate only that site, or that site and one other. Regardless of other considerations, you may want to set some guidelines about whom you include in the evaluation.

How long do people have to be in the program, for instance, before they're included? In other words, what constitutes participation? This also sets a criterion for who should be counted as a drop-out: anyone who starts, but leaves before meeting the standard for participation.

What about those whose attendance is spotty - a few days here, a few days there, sometimes with weeks in between? Do they have to have attended a certain number of hours to be considered participants?

These issues can be more complex than they seem. People may start and drop out of a program numerous times, and then finally come back and complete it. Many others start programs numerous times, and never complete them. It's usually impossible to tell the difference until someone actually gets to the point of completion, whatever that means for the particular program. In a reversal of the start-many-times-before-completing scenario, there can be a few people who stay in a program right up till the end and then drop out.

This may have to do with the fear of having to cope with success and a change in self-image, or it may simply be a pattern the person has learned to follow, and will have to unlearn before being able to complete the program.

Should any or all of these people be included in or excluded from an evaluation, either before because of their history in the program or after the fact? That's a decision you'll have to make, based on what their inclusion or exclusion will tell you. Just be sure that your evaluation clearly describes the criteria that you decide to use for your participants.

Up to this point, we've largely ignored the evaluation difficulties faced by evaluators not directly connected with the organization or institution running the program they're evaluating. If you've been hired or designated by the organization or a funder to evaluate the program, you have to establish trust, both with the organization and its staff and with participants, if you hope to get accurate information to work with.

You also have to learn enough in a short period about the community, the organization, the program, and the participants to devise a good evaluation plan, and to analyze the data you and others gather.

If you're an independent researcher - a graduate student, an academic, a journalist - you face even greater obstacles. First, you have to find a place to conduct your research - a program to evaluate - that fits in with your research interests. Then, you have to convince the organization running that program to allow you to do the research. Once you've jumped that hurdle, you're still faced with all the same tasks as an outside evaluator: establishing trust, understanding the context, etc.

Let's look first at the process you as an independent researcher might follow in order to choose and gain access to a setting appropriate to your interests. Once you've gained that access, you've become an outside evaluator, so from that point on, the course of preparing for the evaluation will be the same for both.

If you're an academic or student, you can probably find an appropriate program by asking colleagues, professors, and other researchers at your institution. If none of them knows of one offhand, someone can almost undoubtedly put you in touch with human service agencies and others who will. Other possible sources of information include the Internet, funders, professional associations, health and human service coalitions, and community organizations. Public funding information is often available on the web, in libraries, or in newspaper archives.

The wider you spread your net, the more likely you are to find the program you're looking for. The right program will obviously vary depending on your research interests, but some questions that will inform your choice include:. Once you've found an appropriate setting, you'll have to convince the organization to collaborate with you on an evaluation. The next three steps are directed toward that goal. Just as you wouldn't go to a job interview without doing some research about the employer, you shouldn't try to gain the cooperation of an organization without knowing something about it - its mission, its goals, whom it serves, who the director and board members are, etc.

If someone told you about the organization, she may have, or may know someone who has, much of the information you need. If the organization maintains a website, much of that information will be available there. Funding agencies may also have information that's a matter of public record, including proposals. Find out whom by name as well as position you should talk to about conducting a research project in the organization you've chosen.

Depending on the organization, this could be the board president, the executive director, or the program director if the program you're interested in is only part of a larger organization. In any case, it might be wise to involve the program director even if he's not the final decision-maker, since his cooperation will be crucial for the completion of your research. There are several purposes for this meeting, besides the ultimate one of getting permission and support for your project or at least an agreement to continue to discuss the possibility.

They include:. Assuming that your presentation has been convincing, and you're now the program evaluator, the rest of the steps here apply to both independent researchers and outside evaluators. This may play out differently for outside evaluators than it does for independent researchers, but it's equally important for both. It means finding out all you can about the community, the organization, the program, and the participants beforehand - the social structure of the community and where participants fit in it, the history of the issue in question, how the organization is viewed, relationships among groups and individuals, community politics, etc.

If you're an outside evaluator, you can pick the brains of program administrators, staff, and participants about the community, the organization, and the issue. Ask them to steer you to others - community leaders, officials, longtime residents, clergy, trusted members of particular groups - who can give you their perspectives as well.

Understanding how the issue plays out in the community, the nature of relationships among groups and individuals, and what life is like in the neighborhoods where participants live will help a great deal in analyzing the evaluation of the program. If you're an independent researcher, learn as much about the context as you can before you contact the program. Learning about the community, the organization, and the participants beforehand will both help you determine whether this program fits with your research and help you advocate for its cooperation with your project.

Once you have that cooperation, you can follow the same path as an outside evaluator since that's what you are to learn as much about the context of the program as you can. This can be the most difficult part of an evaluation for someone from outside the organization. There's no magic bullet or predictable timeline, but there are several things you can do:. We've discussed above the involvement of all stakeholders to the extent possible.

Involving participants, program staff, and other stakeholders in participatory planning and research can often get you the most accurate data, and may give you entry to people and places you normally might not have.

On the other hand, participatory planning and research, as we've explained, takes time and energy. If you have limited time, you may not be able to set up a fully participatory project. You can, however, still consult with stakeholders, and involve them in ways that don't necessarily involve training or large amounts of your time. At least the people in charge of the program, and probably those implementing it as well, will expect to be part of the planning of the evaluation.

They are, after all, the ones who need to know whether their work is effective, and how to improve it. Involving participants as well, in roles ranging from informants about context to actual researchers, is likely to enrich the quantity and quality of the information you can obtain. That collaboration should be at the highest level of participation possible, given the nature of the program, the time available, and the capacity of those involved if program participants are five-year-olds, they probably have relatively little to contribute to evaluation planning The actual planning involves ten different areas, each of which will be the subject of one of the remaining sections in this chapter:.

Once the planning is done, it's time to get started on conducting the evaluation. And when you're finished - having analyzed the information and planned and made the changes that were needed - it's time to start the process again, so that you can determine whether those changes had the effects you intended. Evaluation, like so much of community work, is a process that goes on as long as the work itself does.

It's absolutely essential to the continued improvement of your program. Choosing evaluation questions - the areas in your work you'll examine as part of your evaluation of your program - is key to defining exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish. For that reason, those questions should be chosen carefully as part of the planning process for the program itself, so that the questions can guide your work as well as your evaluation of it.

The more that stakeholders can be involved in that choice and planning, the more likely you are to create a program that successfully meets its goals serving the community.

Choosing those questions well entails understanding the context of the program - the community, participants, the culture of any groups involved, the history of the issue and of the social structure of the community and the organization - and if you're an outside evaluator without ties to the program establishing trust with administrators, staff members, and participants. That trust will enable you to conduct a participatory evaluation that draws on the knowledge and talents of all stakeholders, and to plan an evaluation that fits the goals of the program and accurately analyzes its strengths and weaknesses.

With that analysis in hand, you'll be able to make changes to improve the program. Then you're ready to start the whole process again, so you can evaluate the effects of the changes you've made. CDC Evaluation Brief: Developing Process Evaluation Questions addresses how to develop process evaluation questions, including a step-by-step process to formulating questions.

The Magenta Book - Guidance for Evaluation provides an in-depth look at evaluation. Part A is designed for policy makers. It sets out what evaluation is, and what the benefits of good evaluation are. It explains in simple terms the requirements for good evaluation, and some straightforward steps that policy makers can take to make a good evaluation of their intervention more feasible.

Part B is more technical, and is aimed at analysts and interested policy makers. It discusses in more detail the key steps to follow when planning and undertaking an evaluation and how to answer evaluation research questions using different evaluation research designs.

It also discusses approaches to the interpretation and assimilation of evaluation evidence. Performance Measurement for Public Health Policy is a new tool designed by APHA and the Public Health Foundation to help health departments and their partners assess and improve the performance of their policy activities; this tool is the first to focus explicitly on performance measurement for public health policy.

The first section of the tool gives a brief overview of the role of health departments in public health policy, followed by an introduction to performance measurement within the context of performance management. It also includes a framework on page 5 for conceptualizing the goals and activities of policy work in a health department. The second section of the tool consists of tables with examples of activities that a health department might engage in and sample measures and outcomes for these activities.

The final section of the tool provides three examples of how a health department might apply performance measurement and the sample measures to assess its policy activities. It offers several links to guides, tools, and examples to assist in developing effective evaluation questions. Chen, H. Practical program evaluation: Assessing and improving planning, implementation, and effectiveness.

Holden, D. A practical guide to program evaluation planning. Fawcett, S. Rothman and E. Thomas Eds. Fawcett, S, Boothroyd, R. Journal of Prevention and Intervention in the Community, 26, Wholey, J. Handbook of practical program evaluation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Skip to main content. Toggle navigation Navigation. Operations in Evaluating Community Interventions » Section 1. Chapter