Vice President of Program Evaluation Dainis & Company, Inc. ROANOKE, Virginia, United States
Abstract Information: People with disabilities have historically been left out of program evaluation research, due to the diverse and sometimes profound barriers participants might experience with frequently used data collection strategies. While the gold standard for this population typically centers around 1:1 interviews, many community-based organizations serving people with disabilities lack the resources and expertise to apply this approach to reliably and accurately measure the effectiveness of their programming. This will discuss how two members of the Virginia Disability Inclusive Sexual Health Network (DSHN) are developing and piloting an innovative approach to engaging youth with disabilities in evaluation data collection through the Waterfall Chat, a gamified survey-style method used during Zoom-hosted sexual health education sessions.
Relevance Statement: New strategies are needed to effectively engage individuals with disabilities in the evaluation of the services and programming available to them. One on one interviews are expensive and time consuming, and certainly out of reach to many community-based organizations developing and delivering these programs. In order to support innovations in services, parallel innovations in evaluation methodology must occur. The Waterfall Chat is a survey-style data collection strategy developed by partners of the Disability-inclusive Sexual Health Network in Virginia, and demonstrates a promising option to small organizations to collect high-quality data from diverse populations in an accessible and engaging format.
