Evaluating your intervention

Many interventions for families where a parent has a mental illness are provided to families across Australia each year. However, very little hard evidence about the effectiveness of these interventions is available.

The information at the link below ('planning and implementing evidence-based practice') aims to address this gap by helping program planners and facilitators to:

• Understand what makes a good evaluation
• Select and use an evaluation tool that suits their interventions.

Why evaluate your intervention?

• To add to the pool of evidence about the 'children of parents with a mental illness' approach
• To help you find out what is and isn't effective
• To assist you to plan future interventions and apply for funding.

How to evaluate your intervention?

If you are new to planning an evidence-based program, intervention or research, please read the helpful information at the section below. It outlines the key points to consider, and provides links to further information and resources.

Planning and implementing evidence-based practice

Once you have implemented a planned intervention, you can look at ways to evaluate its success.

• Evaluation relies on knowing the outcomes and goals of a project and testing them against results.
• Effective evaluation comes from measurable data and clear objectives.

This 'Evaluating your intervention' resource will help you plan and implement an effective evaluation.

Resources to help you evaluate your program

The links below will give you technical help to evaluate your program. These links reflect the key 'children of parents with a mental illness' intervention and program areas.

For example, Young people' provides technical information about concepts such as self esteem and resilience. The 'Parents/Carers/Families' link provides information about parenting and family functioning and the 'Workforce' and 'Community' links provide information about workforce measures and social inclusion.

The technical information within each concept focuses on things such as definitions, theory behind the concept, how the concept is employed in other 'children of parents with a mental illness' programs and where you can obtain the questionnaire, scale or survey to measure that concept.

Click on the link to the program area that you are interested in:

• Young people
• Parents, carers and families
  
• Workforce
• Community