Targeting evaluations of youth development-oriented community partnerships

Community-based partnerships (CBPs) focused on youth development (YD) have the potential to improve public health outcomes. These partnerships also present opportunities for the design and implementation of innovative, community-level change strategies, which ultimately may result in new capacities for positive YD. Evaluation-driven learning and improvement frameworks facilitate the achievement of these partnership-related benefits. Partnerships are complex because they embody multiple levels of intervention (eg, youth-serving programs, youth participation as partners or evaluators, network development for collaborative projects and resource sharing, YD-oriented organizational or community policy change). This inherent complexity transfers to evaluations of CBPs. This article provides resources for meeting evaluation-related challenges. It includes a framework for articulating relevant evaluation questions for YD-oriented CBPs, a summary of relevant types of evaluation studies, and practical solutions to common evaluation problems using targeted evaluation studies. Concrete examples of relevant, small-scale evaluation studies are provided throughout