PACE - Our Evaluation Plan

We treasure this, so we will measure it- Our Evaluation Plan

The UoW’s Institute for Community Research and Development have designed the evaluation strand.  They are well positioned to meaningfully engage students in the evaluation and also to understand and access existing data available internally. The evaluation of this project will involve two core strands of activity:  1) Wrapped around the project delivery will be evaluation of the process and impact of taking part in coproducing a mh support intervention. This element of the evaluation will seek to understand how successful the collaborative and coproduced work has been. This strand will also seek to understand the impact on participants. Observations and qualitative exploration of working collaboratively with this variety of stakeholders will provide rich and meaningful data on engagement and collaboration. The findings from this element of the evaluation will be used to develop a model for coproduction in developing mh initiatives and for coproduction in University settings, which will be shared across the sector. Co-production will run through the evaluation with students and graduate members of the NHSRC.2)

We will embed appropriate monitoring and impact measures within the development and roll-out of the online suite of tools to understand impact and to ensure we continue to learn and develop the intervention. We will produce a clear outcomes framework to be implemented alongside the introduction of the intervention. We will establish baseline data collection protocols that will allow for follow-up data to be collected in the future understanding the longer-term impact of the project. A clear data collection framework will enable understanding of the impact of the intervention short, medium, and longer-term and enable testing of the relationship between factors. The outcomes framework for future evaluation of the intervention will take a quasi-experimental approach to understanding effectiveness and impact. We will: a) measure the ‘distance travelled’ of student groups on quantitative measures of MH (baseline data). Collecting this information pre-intervention and again directly after implementation of the intervention, and again six months later. b) compare the student groups taking part in the intervention with student groups not yet participating in the intervention (a ‘wait-list’ design, but controlling for differences in the student groups). Quantitative data will be collected at two time points, but no intervention will be provided. We will complete the cycle of co-production by recruiting peer researchers from UoW and NHSRC.