Evaluation
By now, you should have identified that your problem is
mobile phone use by drivers. At least, that’s what we’ll
assume for now, but the basic message here applies to
whatever problem you might be encountering. At this
point, you should already be thinking about evaluation.
This might sound a little hasty, but the problem you
have identified will already be shaping the kinds of
answers that you want to be able to provide (to yourself,
to colleagues, to managers, to funders).
With the problem identified, we need to move towards
articulating your aims and objectives. Do you want to
know if you have reduced offending, or reduced ‘use’,
or filled a gap in knowledge, or changed attitudes, or
done any of these things in respect of a particular group
of people? How will you know the answers to these
questions? Ultimately, it is likely that we want to reduce
road death and injury, but it’s unlikely that we will ever
be able to directly measure our contribution to that, not
least because it is impossible to measure what doesn’t
happen (if we prevent a collision, for example). But it’s
also difficult to figure out if a change is the direct result
of what we did, as opposed to a range of things that
may have impacted on the same people at the same
time we were trying to influence them.
Evaluation is essential as without it you won’t know if
your approach worked or (importantly) how it worked.
When designed well, evaluation can tell us what we
should carry on doing, what we need to do a little
differently, and perhaps even what we should stop
doing completely¹. For example, we might think that by
training drivers more thoroughly we would make them
better drivers – but discover that we were actually only
increasing their confidence and belief that they can
handle risky situations (see the theories on p19-22 for
why this might be the case). A lot of what we do may
have an intuitive appeal, but just because we’ve always
done it that way doesn’t mean we should continue
doing it. At some point we are going to have to show,
understandably, that what we are doing is working.
Evaluation is often essential for arguing for
resources - or arguing that we should not lose the
resources that we have.
¹ RoSPA (nd). Road Safety Evaluation. Available from: http://www.roadsafetyevaluation.com/helpandguidance/introduction/evaluation.
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