My Internship: For my summer internship I chose to
work with the Strengthening Relationships program. My
position as an intern is program evaluator. As a program
evaluator I will be a part of every aspect of the program
evaluation. My Main focus will be towards the quantitative
evaluation. Quantitative: As a quantitative as
a quantitative evaluator I conducted all cleaning of quantitative data
set. I then did all recoding and creation of test
variables. Once variables were created I ran all statiscal
anaylses. I also helped conduct a focus group at one of the
highschool sites. This focus group was intended to gather
information necessary to help the evaluation team revise the pre-test
post test questionaire. Once focus group was complete I created a
complete frequency analysis of the data collected. This in turn
helped our team to eliminate 109 questions and revise others. We
also eliminated one measure completely and replaced another. Most
importantly I created an SPSS syntax file of everything we did so
the program can use our evaluation as guideline for the comming
years. Qualitative: As a qualitative
evaluator I worked with a team on coding all focus group data obtained
from mid term and final focus groups conducted of the program
participants. The team meets once a week to address general code
issues while we also broke into consensus partners. Once
consensus was reached between all partners we then compared master
copies, of our coded focus groups, in order to create a single set of
coded focus groups. This data will later be entered in SAS and
analyzed. Conclusion: Overall the
experience has been great. This program evaluation has been a
direct application of many skills learned through my applied sociology
degree. This has also opened my eyes to a possible future career
in program evaluation.
