Psychology week two assignment

Week 2 Discussion: Defining Evaluation Goals and Questions for Tides Family Services

Program Impact Vision

If Tides Family Services is highly successful, youth aged six to twenty-one in Rhode Island experience meaningful symptom relief, stronger family stability, and safer daily lives. Success looks like fewer crisis calls, consistent school attendance with better behavior, and reduced contact with the justice system, supported by rapid, community embedded response and home-based clinical care that keeps families together (Tides Family Services, 2025). In Fink’ A (2014) terms, this vision specifies the client level changes that define effectiveness and links them to the program’s theory of action so they can be observe and judged against explicit standards of success (Fink A (2014)

Desired Outcomes

With unlimited resources, I would prioritize two outcomes. First, clinically meaningful improvement or remission in adolescent depressive symptoms, captured as a reliable change from baseline. Second, improved school engagement, reflected by higher attendance and fewer suspensions. Depressive symptom change is a direct indicator of the program’s therapeutic value for a high-risk population, while school engagement reflects functional recovery and protection from downstream harm. Fink emphasizes that priority outcomes should reflect what matters to participants and stakeholders and should align with the program’s causal pathway from services to client change, which these two outcomes do (Fink. A2014 Tides Family Services, 2025).

Measurement Ideas

I would administer a validated adolescent depression scale at intake, at six weeks, three months, and six months to track trajectories. I would pair these data with school records on attendance and disciplinary incidents through data sharing agreements, and with program records on crisis contacts and service intensity. To capture experience, I would add brief caregiver and youth interviews about mood, coping skills, and perceived safety, plus a short text message follow up pulse once a week for eight weeks to monitor fluctuations between visits. FinkA (2014) recommends multiple methods to strengthen credibility and to triangulate findings across quantitative and qualitative sources, which this plan provides (Fink. A.2014,)

Ethical and Practical Considerations

Key challenges include privacy and consent for minors, participant burden from repeated measures, missing data due to mobility, and the risk that data collection interferes with care. Mitigations include assent and consent processes written in plain language, de identification and role-based access to data, short measures scheduled to coincide with routine contacts, and predefined rules that any positive suicide item triggers immediate clinical assessment. Independent oversight and clear separation of clinical and analytic roles reduce conflicts of interest, consistent with Fink’s guidance on systematic, respectful, and transparent evaluation practice (Fink; Tides Family Services, 2025).

References

Fink, A. (2014). Evaluation Fundamentals: Insights into Program Effectiveness, Quality, and Value (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc. Sage College Publishing

Tides Family Services. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved November 5, 2025, from https://www.tidesfs.org/