Building an evidence base: Insights from the Bringing Up Great Kids program evaluation
Professionals in child and family services work to make a meaningful difference for the families they support. While the impact of their everyday work is often visible, evaluations can provide a clearer understanding of the difference their work is making, and for whom, as well as identifying areas that can be improved.
The Evidence and Evaluation Support team at the Australian Institute of Family Studies has put together a four-part webinar series to share examples of evaluative practice and ideas for collecting and using evidence in the context of Australian child and family services.
In part one, Kat Goldsworthy, Research Fellow in the Evidence and Evaluation Support team, sits down with Hanif Jaberipour, Senior Advisor at the Australian Childhood Foundation (ACF), to discuss the recent national evaluation of the Bringing Up Great Kids (BUGK) program – a parenting program that aims to build positive and nurturing relationships between parents and their children.
The BUGK evaluation ran over multiple years and included two groups of parents – one who attended the parenting program and one who didn’t. Although difficult to implement, including this comparison group will allow ACF to better understand the effectiveness of the BUGK program.
The webinar will discuss the strengths of the BUGK program, the aims and design features of the evaluation; the process, challenges and benefits of collecting comparison data; and some early results.
This webinar will give you:
- insight into the implementation of a real-world evaluation of a parenting program using a comparison group
- an understanding of strategies you can use to generate evidence for benchmarking
- an understanding of the role of program theory in choosing evaluation measures.
This webinar will be of interest to practitioners, managers and evaluators working in child and family services who wish to understand the effectiveness of their programs and/or collect data for benchmarking.
