Planning to Evaluate a Community-Based Crime Prevention Program? What Are Some Challenges?

The involvement of volunteers in community-based crime prevention programs poses unique challenges in obtaining data for evaluation.

Unlike programs with paid staff running the program and participants required to receive program services, community-based crime prevention programs are often staffed by volunteers and include participants who can control their degree of involvement. This can result in high turnover in volunteers or little time to participate in an evaluation. Evaluators must work closely and regularly with community-based crime prevention program staff and participants to ensure that they will support and participate in the evaluation.

The nature of community-based crime prevention programs makes it difficult to determine the effects of specific components.

Depending on the extent of problems a community faces, it may incorporate more than one community-based crime prevention program to address its problems. It is important to consider this when designing an evaluation to determine which program is responsible for the outcomes. Possible solutions to this problem are to evaluate the effects of all community-based crime prevention programs, or conduct a multi-site evaluation with other communities that are implementing the program of interest. If all of the communities implementing the program of interest obtain similar outcomes there is evidence to suggest that the program may be responsible for the outcomes. If either of these approaches is not feasible, the evaluation should, at a minimum, discuss the other programs or factors that may have affected the outcomes.

For many community-based crime prevention programs there is no standard program model. Rather, the program is an approach to prevention that is operationalized differently depending on the community needs and circumstances and/or the structure and operation of the criminal justice system. Community policing is an example of a crime prevention approach without a standard model. This makes it difficult to isolate the components of the program responsible for the outcomes and subsequently replicate the program in another site.

Adaptation of program designs to meet community needs creates challenges when conducting multi-site evaluations.

Communities typically adapt program designs to meet their needs and circumstances. For example, two communities may take different approaches to implementing a neighborhood watch program because of factors such as the type of community housing, willingness of residents to participate, or the nature of the crime problem facing the community. Evaluators must be careful not to "lump together" programs that are similar in name but are in fact implemented very differently.

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