Step 3: Consider the intervention stage and corresponding types of evaluation

Identify your intervention stage:

Depending on your intervention stage, your evaluation plan may address one or more of the following four evaluation types:

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1. Formative evaluation

Planning stage → Formative evaluation

Formative evaluation is frequently referred to as "community assessment", or the examination of a community’s assets, needs, current resources, strengths, and challenges.

Asset mapping identifies the changes that need to occur in the community to improve health.

Needs assessment documents the resources and supports that already exist in your community.

A comprehensive formative evaluation can address:

• Decisions about where to focus resources and interventions in order to maximally benefit the community;
• Understanding of the relationships between pedestrian safety interventions, pedestrian and driver behaviors, and health and related outcomes;
• Characteristics of the partnership and the population prior to intervention to identify factors for tracking or monitoring change; and
• Contextual factors that can influence the intervention or evaluation (e.g., concentrated poverty or areas with a small local tax base, rural communities or areas with a small population density).

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2. Process evaluation

Implementation stage → Process evaluation

Process evaluation helps you and your partners determine how well the intervention is working.

Factors such as feasibility, cost, reach, and unanticipated barriers can positively or negatively affect implementation fidelity and the population’s satisfaction with the intervention.

Process evaluation involves an assessment of how well intervention activities are carried out (e.g., policies, media, partner or community meetings), including evaluation of both the partnership and the pedestrian safety intervention.

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3. Impact evaluation

If intervention implementation is partially or fully complete, impact evaluation can demonstrate how and to what degree intervention objectives have been attained.

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4. Outcome evaluation

If intervention implementation is fully complete, outcome evaluation demonstrates how and to what degree intervention goals have been attained.

View the Resource Table

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Multi-component and complex pedestrian safety interventions

You and your evaluation partners may have different policy, practice, environmental, programmatic, or promotional components in various intervention stages, thus multiple types of evaluation may be occurring simultaneously.

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"Downstream" and "upstream" intervention components

You and your evaluation partners are likely to evaluate your policy, practice, environmental, programmatic, or promotional components or your "downstream" intervention strategies.

To fully understand the change process and outcomes, it is also helpful to evaluate your complimentary "upstream" strategies and activities leading to these primary intervention components (e.g., community development and organizing, advocacy).

Visit Intervention Strategies for a list of potential pedestrian safety strategies.

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Next: Continue to Step 4