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Charting the Course for
Evaluation: How Do We Measure the Success of Nutrition Education
and Promotion in Food Assistance Programs?
BACKGROUND
"Charting the Course for Evaluation: How Do We
Measure the Success of Nutrition Education and Promotion in Food
Assistance Programs?" brought together nutrition educators,
traditional evaluators, market researchers, and experts at evaluation of
health promotion efforts to establish a dialogue to identify and push
forward the state of the art in evaluating nutrition education and
promotion efforts. The conference took place on July 13 and 14, 1995 in
Arlington, Virginia.
As the Food and Consumer Service (FCS) began to focus on
integrating nutrition education into all of its food assistance programs,
it became clear that the FCS needed to be able to measure the
effectiveness of such programs to ensure that limited resources were spent
wisely. The agency also was looking for mechanisms to identify what
program components worked best, under what circumstances, and at what
cost. The goal was to assist everyone at the program delivery level to
provide the best, most cost-effective nutrition programs possible.
To address these issues, the Food and Consumer Service
assembled people with experience to provide their perspective evaluating a
broad range of nutrition education, health promotion, and social marketing
programs. This report shares what was learned at the conference by
summarizing the major conference themes and presenting a synopsis of each
session. The conference was divided into three sections:
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A retrospective look at what traditionally has been
measured and how it has been measured in nutrition education programs.
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A look at state-of-the-art theories and methods for
selecting evaluation techniques.
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Some lessons learned from ongoing and past
programs.
February 1997
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