Michael Baizerman

A critique of the research literature concerning pregnant adolescents 1960-1970.

A perspective on the research literature from 1960 to 1970 concerning pregnant adolescents (this literature was abstracted and reviewed in a previous publication) is presented. Research methodology and potential content for research are examined and suggestions made that would contribute to a stronger empirical base for the research. Several assumptions (of difference, of homogeneity, and of special need) regarding pregnant adolescents that seem to be implicit in the research are brought to light. Finally, an analysis of the “risk” concept is presented.

Developing evaluation capacity while improving evaluation training in public health: the American Cancer Society’s Collaborative Evaluation Fellows Project

Abstract The Collaborative Evaluation Fellows Project (CEFP) is a nationally administered model for the development of program evaluation capacity. It is innovative in that it requires collaboration between the American Cancer Society, Inc. (ACS) offices and faculty and students from local universities. One purpose of the project is to establish stronger links between the ACS and university-based professional training in program evaluation, primarily in schools of public health. Graduate students are selected according to uniform criteria to become CEFP evaluation fellows for 1 year. In the role of evaluation fellows, they design and carry out an actual program evaluation of an agreed-upon ACS program under faculty supervision using the utilization-focused model. During the first 3 years of the five-year grant-funded project, the ACS’s National Home Office and all 17 ACS regional offices (divisions) have developed partnerships and gained experience in using program evaluation data for program improvement and decision-making purposes. In addition, 97 students have gained practical, real-world cancer-focused program evaluation experience. It is anticipated that through the CEFP, program evaluation will be demystified for ACS staff and lead to the hiring of professionals to conduct evaluations of older, new, and modified programs in community cancer control. It is also anticipated that participating schools of public health will enhance their program evaluation courses, especially with a topical focus on community cancer control. In these ways, it is hoped the CEFP will have an impact on a national voluntary health agency, on schools of public health and on cancer control, on how public health professionals are trained, and on others who might adapt and adopt the model.

Can the First Pregnancy of a Young Adolescent Be Prevented? A Question Which Must Be Answered.

The title of this paper is a question, and the text of the paper presents some issues and ideas which are the sources of the question. Included are notions from the literature on adolescent cognitive development and their relation with the notion of “prevention”. It is argued that the notion of prevention is taken for granted in professional thinking about adolescent pregnancy and that a fuller understanding of this idea in the context of adolescent cognitive development could have clear consequences for research action.

Being practical, being safe: Doing evaluations in contested spaces

This final article summarizes and synthesizes the full special edition. This volume questioned evaluation as philosophy, enterprise, and practice from the point of view of doing evaluation under conditions of social violence, disruption, and division. In this final article, we clarify the issues and problems which challenge the professional practice of evaluation and propose guiding questions for evaluators designing and doing evaluation in worlds like these. We attend to the consequences for evaluation and evaluator of choosing to inhabit these violent worlds as an evaluator.

No place is safe: violence against and among children and youth in street situations in Uganda

This article explores street children’s exposure to and responses to violence based on data collected in 21 major towns in Uganda. Findings show that violence among Ugandan street children is endemic, perpetuated by both street children against each other and adults. Both male and female children suffer outright abuse from police, occasional strangers, and from each other. Boys were more frequently physically abused while girls were more frequently abused emotionally and sexually. The study recommends policy-oriented actions linked to addressing the variations in the vulnerability to violence among children on the basis of gender, age and other risk factors and targeting the change of attitudes and behavior among duty bearers in various settings, which result in violence against children on the street.

Professionalization in Youth Work? Opening and Deepening Circles of Inquiry.

In this article, the authors examine the claims of professionalization in youth work as both a process and outcome that aims to ultimately improve the lives of young people. The topic of professionalization is then approached through three circles of inquiry that reframe the issue(s) through the historical and sociocultural situatedness of professional movements; the contemporary sociopolitical and sociolegal context; and those self-referential questions that deal with the practice of youth work itself.

Toward analysis of the relations among the youth counterculture, telephone hotlines, and anonymity.

During the 1960s, there emerged a youth culture which had two major orientations: the Counterculture and the Movement. We are well informed about this youth culture, its social values, social norms, and emergent social roles (e.g., “hippie”, “freak”, “radical”, “dropout”). Part of these social and political movements was the creation of “alternative”, “counterculture”, or “radical” human service programs. Early examples were free medical clinics, drop-in centers, and telephone hotlines. Among the actual differences in these programs compared to older, “established” human service agencies was (is) the prominent position of the social value of client anonymity. This notion of client anonymity is examined in the attempt to understand its role in the relations among themes of the Counterculture, individual youth, their peers, and youth-serving agencies.

Professionalization Deconstructed: Implications for the Field of Youth Work—Guest Editors' Comments

In the recent book, Advancing Youth Work: Current Trends, Critical Questions, several trends in the field of youth work were presented that were at times consistent, at times complementary, and at other times, diametrically opposed. That book aimed to bring into one fold an inclusive set of voices and opinions across varied domains of youth work, including child and youth care, afterschool programs, recreation, civic engagement, and youth development. It is in the same spirit that we offer this special issue: ‘‘Professionalization Deconstructed: Implications for the Field Of YouthWork.’’ Here, we hope to deconstruct the underlying beliefs and narratives on professionalization in youth work and in related human service fields by examining the arguments for and against professionalization, by looking at the historically situated evidence within and outside of the field of youth work, and by exploring alternate conceptions of professionalization. It is always our goal to have young people and youth workers in the forefront of our mind; thus, our framing of the issues always rests on the questions: Is this good for young people and youth workers? Who decides and why? In the opening article, ‘‘Professionalization in Youth Work? Opening and Deepening Circles of Inquiry,’’ Fusco and Baizerman come to the topic of professionalization as if it were a classic Russian folk doll. After reviewing

Consultation as a political process

Consultation may be viewed as a political-bargaining process in which actors seek to maximize at minimal cost expertise, organizational position, and organizational reputation. A view of consultation as political process allows for a shift in language in discussions of consultation. Such a language shift suggests shifts in the social meaning of the consultation process. Emphasis was placed on four suggested functions of consultation: definition and legitimation of a situation or of facts as “problematic”; raising the priority of an issue on the agenda of action in a consultees agency;legitimation of deviant administrative behavior; and creation and sustenance of interagency linkages. A perspective is proposed that looks at the consequences as well as the intents of the process. This view of consultation can be studied empirically.

Evaluation Advisory Groups

Evaluation (like applied social science research and social work research) exists to be practical. This means that its very being and certainly its job in the world is to be used—used to help individuals learn, assess, reflect, and be useful in imagining, proposing, deciding, and recommending whether and how to refine, improve, close, or otherwise respond to the realities of organized efforts to ‘‘make a difference’’ in the material and other worlds of individuals, groups, organizations, programs, or the like. It exists to repair (Spelman, 2002). To do this right and well requires facts, values, beliefs, and ideas which can be placed over against criteria of rightness, goodness, appropriateness, efficiency, and effectiveness so as to conclude that a process, practice intervention, activity was/was not consequential and effective, that is, whether it ‘‘worked,’’ and if so, in the ways expected and desired, without major, troubling, or other anticipated and unanticipated consequences on/for the same or other persons, things, or processes. Conventionally, these ideas have informed the creation of the now widely accepted standards of program evaluation (Yarbrough, Shulha, Hopson, & Caruthers, 2011). To do this work well requires technical competence, facts and other information, thought, and wisdom. Needed is both Aristotle’s epistome and phronesis—practical wisdom. Doing evaluation well—responsibly, with credibility means to do it accurately, fully, openly, transparently, with awareness of one’s stance, biases in all directions, strengths and limitations, along with those of one’s approach, methods, tools, and hermeneutic practices, at least. It can, indeed should, mean to include as a corrective and for utility, that is, for use, evaluation should reflect multiple perspectives be multivocal, and include the ways of seeing, knowing, and doing, as well as the content of what is seen, known, and done, of multiple others, those with interest in what is being evaluated, how the evaluation is undertaken and completed, and how it can and well be used—for policy, program improvement, decision making, and conceptual clarification and refinement. The involvement of others can be as respondents, informants, observers, evaluation workers, or as advisers. Our focus here is on the latter. Advice is a primordial, socio-intellectual process—a system of soliciting and providing, of asking others for ‘‘input’’—perspective, technical ‘‘know how,’’ thoughts, and meanings. And of deciding whether or not to use what is offered. Advice is a way to help correct one’s limitations, or a way to solicit support, a way to increase the likelihood that a study will meet its life purpose by being used in the everyday world in ways practical, useful, meaningful, and consequential. Most researchers, including evaluators, bring advice to their work. This can be in the form of solicited and unsolicited others or interior self-inquiry—reflective practice, where one interrogates oneself to ensure, self-consciously, that one’s biases are explicit and clear; this is one way to minimize the errors brought by arrogance, incompetence, or normal human failing. Like all advice, it can prove preventive and corrective. Less common and the focus of this essay is the inclusion of advice using formal structures—groups, such as an advisory committee or council, or individuals, who can offer consultations and technical assistance on the evaluation enterprise, from contract through research to report and use. A review of the literature on the use of advisory structures in social work research texts shows that, just as with the literature on advisory structures in evaluation research texts, more is hortatory than practical, far more promotes this practice than describes, suggests, or evaluates advisory structures. Here are the two literature reviews. Both literature reviews used a similar method. Texts were found using general searches in Google Scholar, Google, Amazon.com, and the University of Minnesota library system. Publisher-specific searchers were also run on major evaluation and social work publishers. Text book indexes and table of contents were initially searched for the phrases: advice, advisory, advisory board, advisory committee, advisory group, steering committee, committee, and working group. Full text searches were made of texts available on Google Books (http://books. google.com). When such titles were available in table of contents, texts were also searched for phrases like ‘‘stakeholder engagement,’’ ‘‘advisory board,’’ ‘‘participatory evaluation,’’ ‘‘evaluation management,’’ and so forth. Few textbooks and handbooks available at the time of this survey (2011–2012) included the mention of evaluation or research advisory boards/groups/committees. No specific sections of any books examined contain specific or substantive