Towards a faith-based program theory: a reconceptualization of program theory

A meta-program theory is proposed to overcome the limitations and improve the use of program theory as an approach to faith-based program evaluation. The essentials for understanding religious organizations, their various programs, and faith and spirituality are discussed to support a rationale for developing a faith-based program theory that captures the complex nature of religious program phenomena. Implications for public policy are examined. New concepts based on structural approach and four program theories are formulated for program analysis. Several theoretical concepts for faith-based program evaluation to guide methods for describing patterns that reflect the religious beliefs and values are suggested.     

Barriers to substance use disorder treatment in a sub-acute setting

ABSTRACT

With the changing times, it is essential integrate behavioral health within the primary care of patients. The need is based on the research that links a number of health issues being directly to substance use and mental health diagnosis. With the current opioid epidemic there is a need to address substance use disorders when treating patients in different health care settings. Despite the necessity of integrated care, there are barriers to addressing addiction in sub-acute care settings. With the lack of buy-in from the patients and health care providers and the stigma surrounding addiction it is time to address the barriers that prevents integration of care where it is most needed.     

Barriers to equality: why British fathers do not use parental leave

In 2011, the UK passed the Additional Paternity Leave (APL) policy, but less than 1% of eligible fathers took APL in its first year. This study investigates reasons for nonuse of APL. We find four main reasons: financial costs, gendered expectations, perceived workplace resistance, and policy restrictions. First, most fathers emphasized the role of finances in their leave decisions, sometimes taking annual leave for their second week because statutory pay was not enough. Second, both mothers and fathers largely assumed that mothers would take longer maternity leave due to gender differences in earnings and a greater emphasis on maternal over paternal bonding. Third, fathers felt that their workplaces would not be fully supportive of longer leave. Fourth, APL provides low pay and little flexibility. Gender plays a prominent role in each of the four themes. We discuss implications for Shared Parental Leave (SPL), which recently went into effect. Based on our findings, SPL is unlikely to be effective.     

A systematic approach to increasing use of management-oriented program evaluation data

With the implementation of Management Information Systems (MISs) in human service delivery settings, came the expectation that managers would make data-based decisions. There is substantial evidence, however, that this has not occurred. The present authors describe a systematic approach to correcting this deficiency. The approach involves a behavioral definition of management information use, the identification of disruptions in the behaviors comprising information use, and an intervention designed to reduce disruptions and promote use. Conclusions about the effectiveness of this approach gained from its implementation in a community mental health center are described.     

Barriers to achieving health

The morbidities that affect children who have limited access to health care and who are at risk of failing to reach their optimum health and potential are as much the result of social circumstances as they are the result of an inaccessible health care system. Children growing up in poverty encounter many obstacles that prevent them from seeking or receiving the services of one of the most sophisticated health care industries in the world. A combination of financial barriers, hurdles of distance, inappropriate hours, fragmented and impersonal services, the absence of outreach and follow-up, and cultural differences deprive children of needed services.     

Teaching theory in an empirically-oriented graduate program

The role of theory is to facilitate cognitive integration, both for sociology and for sociologists. Integration has a vertical dimension (abstract to concrete) and a horizontal one (across schools and substantive fields). Attention to these dimensions of integration competes for time in sociology courses, with the result that trade-offs are required. Teaching theory in an empirically oriented graduate degree program, the author has decided to stress horizontal integration over the upper level of vertical integration.     

Barriers to Marital Infidelity

This study used a qualitative approach as a means of exploring barriers to marital infidelity. There has been a substantial amount of research on marital infidelity in recent years, but there is no significant empirical research that looks at protective factors that act as a barrier to keep the marital relationship safe from marital infidelity. This study focused on establishing themes that represent opportunities to have a marital affair, as well as identifying protective factors that act as a barrier to marital infidelity. Semi-structured interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed using thematic analysis, a process for encoding qualitative information (Boyatzis) served to identify themes and categories from the recorded participant experiences. Three themes emerged that represent an opportunity to have a marital affair and three themes emerged as barriers to marital infidelity. Opportunities to have a marital affair were represented by direct attempts, flirtatious behavior, and establishing emotional intimacy. Finally, the barriers to marital infidelity were love, religious values and commitment, and communication. Clinical implications are discussed, as well as the limitations of the current study.     

Barriers to the implementation of medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorders: the importance of funding policies and medical infrastructure

Despite growing interest in the use of evidence-based treatment practices, adoption of pharmacotherapies for treating substance use disorders (SUDs) remains modest. Using data from telephone interviews with 250 administrators of publicly funded SUD treatment programs, this study estimated a model of adoption of medication assisted treatment (MAT) for SUDs and examined the relative importance of regulatory, cultural, medical resource, patient-level, and funding barriers to MAT implementation. MAT-adopting programs had significantly greater medical resources, as measured by the employment of physicians and nurses, than non-adopting programs. Administrators of non-adopting programs were asked to rate the importance of 18 barriers to MAT implementation. The most strongly endorsed barriers were regulatory prohibitions due to the program's lack of medical staff, funding barriers to implementing MAT, and lack of access to medical personnel with expertise in delivering MAT. Barriers related to insufficient information about MAT and unsupportive staff attitudes were not widely endorsed. These findings suggest that efforts to promote the implementation of MAT that are inattentive to funding barriers and weaknesses in medical infrastructure may achieve sub-optimal results.     

Unmasking the Barriers to Financing Social Enterprises

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The institutional complexity of social enterprises (SEs) often hinders their access to financing from conventional...     

The use of evaluation models for decision making: Application to the community anti-crime program

Evaluations are typically designed to provide useful information, including measures of program effectiveness. Although this information is intended to be useful, the general literature on evaluations suggests that instances in which evaluations are explicitly used for decision making are rare. This article discusses the use of decision-theoretic evaluation models, and their applicability in practice as well as in principle. A case study is presented from the evaluation of LEAA's Community Anti-Crime Program, in which a decision analysis based on a decision-theoretic evaluation model influenced a programmatic decision which arose during the conduct of the evaluation.     

Evaluation utilization research-Developing a theory and putting it to use

This article presents the findings of a two-stage study that had two key objectives: to develop a theory about evaluation utilization in an educational organization and to apply this theory to promote evaluation utilization within the organization. The first stage involved a theoretical conceptualization using a participatory method of concept mapping. This process identified the modes of evaluation utilization within the organization, produced a representation of the relationship between them and led to a theory. The second stage examined the practical implications of this conceptualization in terms of how different stakeholders in the organization perceive the actual and preferable state of evaluation utilization within the organization (i.e. to what extent is evaluation utilized and to what extent should it be utilized). The participatory process of the study promoted the evaluation utilization by involving stakeholders, thus giving them a sense of ownership and improving communication between the evaluation unit and the stakeholders. In addition, understanding the evaluation needs of the stakeholders in the organization helped generate relevant and realizable evaluation processes. On a practical level, the results are currently shaping the evaluation plan and the place of evaluations within the organization.     

The Cedar Project: Understanding Barriers to Consistent Condom use over Time in a Cohort of Young Indigenous People who use Drugs

ABSTRACT Little information exists on the use of condoms as protective barriers to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among indigenous people in Canada. This study explores risk factors of inconsistent condom use (during consensual sex) over time among participants in the Cedar Project, a prospective cohort study of indigenous young people living in Vancouver and Prince George, British Columbia, who use drugs. Due to the serial measurements for each study subject, generalized estimating equations modeling with logit link was used to accommodate the temporal correlation within subjects. For young women, inconsistent condom use over time was predicted by having a recent STI (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.76, 95% confidence interval [CI] [1.12, 2.79]), smoking crack daily (AOR = 1.63, 95%CI [1.02, 2.61]), and having experienced recent sexual abuse (AOR = 2.07, 95%CI [1.20, 3.56]). Among young men, living in Prince George (AOR = 1.63, 95%CI [1.14, 2.39]) and daily crack smoking (AOR = 1.56, 95%CI [1.02, 2.40]) were associated with inconsistent condom use over time. Among participants who used injection drugs, inconsistent condom use was associated with smoking crack daily (AOR = 1.59, 95%CI [1.04, 2.43]) and sharing needles (AOR = 1.78, 95%CI [1.26, 2.51]). The availability and effectiveness of sexual health services must be prioritized for indigenous people, and the design of culturally safe sexual health programs requires the meaningful involvement of young indigenous people.     

The Father Friendly Initiative within Families: Using a logic model to develop program theory for a father support program

The transition to fatherhood, with its numerous challenges, has been well documented. Likewise, fathers’ relationships with health and social services have also begun to be explored. Yet despite the problems fathers experience in interactions with healthcare services, few programs have been developed for them. To explain this, some authors point to the difficulty practitioners encounter in developing and structuring the theory of programs they are trying to create to promote and support father involvement (Savaya, R., & Waysman, M. (2005). Administration in Social Work, 29(2), 85), even when such theory is key to a program's effectiveness (Chen, H.-T. (2005). Practical program evaluation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). The objective of the present paper is to present a tool, the logic model, to bridge this gap and to equip practitioners for structuring program theory. This paper addresses two questions: (1) What would be a useful instrument for structuring the development of program theory in interventions for fathers? (2) How would the concepts of a father involvement program best be organized? The case of the Father Friendly Initiative within Families (FFIF) program is used to present and illustrate six simple steps for developing a logic model that are based on program theory and demonstrate its relevance.     

Addressing Barriers to University-Community Collaboration

Abstract

University-community partnerships, and COPC programs in particular, offer important opportunities for traditionally segregated groups to work together in collaborative relationships. The challenge of bringing people who possess distinct differences in background and social power together is a long-standing issue. Class, status, and organizational differences may impede collaboration. This article discusses the history of COPC as social policy and reviews an evaluation report of successful community-university partnerships. Drawing from the community organizing literature in sociology and social work, this article suggests community organizing methods that address structural obstacles to collaborative work. Especially in COPC programs characterized by multiple interactions, it is the community based organization (CBO) which has greatest facility to equalize the playing field between disparate groups. The role of community organizers in CBOs is to acknowledge and disrupt the structural inequalities inherent in these relationships. The community organizer must resist the role of expert or buffer between the community and university and instead strive toward authentic collaboration.     

Barriers to Birth Control Knowledge

This title may appear incongruous in a country such as Australia which is reputed to have the highest incidence of oral contraception intake in the world. The writer has found, however, in the course of participating in the establishing of three different family-planning clinics, that barriers do exist to both the spread of knowledge and the provision of family planning. These barriers can be either easily identified or largely hidden and will be discussed below.     

Barriers to communication management in the executive suite

For many years now, courses in public relations, advertising, and communication management, at universities throughout Europe have been attracting more students than ever. In many cases, the numbers of these students exceed those in economics, marketing, and law programs. This coincides with an explosion in practical and theoretical literature describing a new field that focuses on coordination and steering of parts of all organizational communications at a strategic level. A survey among 25% of all Dutch organizations with more than 50 staff shows that in the majority of these organizations, communications activities are indeed coordinated in a single department that generally has a high position in the organization’s hierarchical structure. In few organizations, however, is it such a specific task that it can justifiably be called “Communication Management” and regarded as a specialization at the managerial and strategic levels. The literature suggests there are two factors behind this: glass ceiling and encroachment. Although the profession is increasingly becoming dominated by women, even in The Netherlands, we found no evidence of a glass ceiling. We did, however, find evidence of encroachment, which does not seem to be caused by a glass ceiling.     

How to use programme theory to evaluate the effectiveness of schemes designed to improve the work environment in small businesses

Due to the many constraints that small businesses (SBs) face in meeting legislative requirements, occupational health and safety (OHS) regulatory authorities and other OSH actors have developed programmes which can reach out to SBs and motivate and assist them in improving the work environment. A number of conceptual models help to enhance our understanding of OHS interventions in SBs and their effectiveness. However, they have mainly been evaluated on output rather than the process relating to the change theory underlying the intervention, and hence have seldom been rigorously evaluated. Thus little is known about how particular features of SBs can be taken into account when designing and implementing national programmes. This paper shows how realist analysis and programme theory may be used as a framework for evaluating, developing and improving national intervention programmes for the improvement of the work environment and reducing injuries in SBs. It illustrates this for a specific New Zealand intervention: the Workplace Safety Discount scheme and its implementation in the agriculture sector. In practice, realist analysis should be performed during the planning, implementation and management stages so that ongoing findings can be fed back to the participant social actors to help them make appropriate changes to enhance the likelihood of success.     

Removing Barriers to the Use of Community Information Systems

Abstract

Community information systems (CINS) are emerging as important tools for community, government, and educational organizations. This paper considers the training, evaluation, and outreach efforts relating to the Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System (NIS), a collection of online applications that integrate and distribute housing and demographic data. It presents an overview of the types of NIS users and uses and some specific examples ofhow the NISisbeing used for individual property inquiries, community surveys, needs assessments, and research. Finally, the paper discusses the barriers to more analytical uses and offers recommendations for social work education aimed at preparing social workers to support community organizations in their efforts to harness the potential of CINS for social change.     

Using a systems orientation and foundational theory to enhance theory-driven human service program evaluations

This paper offers a framework for using a systems orientation and “foundational theory” to enhance theory-driven evaluations and logic models. The framework guides the process of identifying and explaining operative relationships and perspectives within human service program systems. Self-Determination Theory exemplifies how a foundational theory can be used to support the framework in a wide range of program evaluations. Two examples illustrate how applications of the framework have improved the evaluators’ abilities to observe and explain program effect. In both exemplars improvements involved addressing and organizing into a single logic model heretofore seemingly disparate evaluation issues regarding valuing (by whose values); the role of organizational and program context; and evaluation anxiety and utilization.