Evaluability Assessment of the President's Family Justice Center Initiative

• NCJ Number: 212278
• Author(s): Meg Townsend M.A.; Dana Hunt Ph.D.; William Rhodes Ph.D.
• Date Published: September 2005
• Length: 155 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2004TO179; T004
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation

Annotation

This report describes the development of a prototype evaluation design for use in both individual site and cross-site evaluations of fully operational sites in a federally funded pilot program for domestic-violence victims entitled The President's Family Justice Center Initiative (PFJCI).

Abstract

The goal of the PFJCI is to coordinate multiple local providers in 15 pilot sites in establishing support and justice services for domestic-violence victims in 1 physical location. The proposed evaluation plan is based on the progress and problems sites have faced over the 2 years of their operation. This report proposes a two-part evaluation of sites that focuses on the steps in establishing the PFJCI Centers, barriers and successes, costs, community cooperation, and history. In addition, when the programs begin serving clients, the evaluation will require counts of clients in order to provide a monitoring and research function. Because of the variety of programming activities across sites, the evaluation will focus on impacts that pertain to victim safety and outcomes that do not rely on the identification of clients, but rather on changes in events that affect the clients over time. Measures include types of police calls for service as a measure common to all sites and available from police records. Programs that focus on offender accountability might also use the number of successful prosecutions or the time to prosecution as measures. In all cases, measures should focus on the needs of victims and their families, increasing their access to services, and the provision of protection. 2 tables, 3 references, and appended Interim Report of July 2005