During the 2020-21 academic year, I helped my advisor, Dr. John LaVelle, expand on his previous research into the evaluation profession. He was preparing to publish on a study on the influence of evaluator values on evaluation practice (LaVelle et al., 2024) and I conducted a review of literature to examine if others had used the same instruments to study similar professions and whether we could feasibly use those studies to do a comparison.

Unfortunately, the studies that I found did not lend themselves to easy comparison due to differences in definitions, instrumentation, context, analysis, or reporting. There are means by which to reconcile these differences (not least of which is just reaching out to the authors), but John and I ultimately decided that the juice was not worth the squeeze.

Jan 2025 - PUBH 7250
Designing and Conducting Focus Group Interviews (Dr. John LaVelle)

Fall 2024 - OLPD 8596
Evaluation Internship (Dr. John LaVelle)

Fall 2020 - PA 5135
Managing Conflict: Negotiation (Margaret Anderson Kelliher)

Center for Healthy Youth Development
6/2021 - 5/2022 (Kara Beckman)

My primary project under Kara was the first-year evaluation of the Ramsey County (Re)Imagining Justice for Youth program (Beckman et al., 2023), which diverted justice-involved young people to restorative justice options when possible. The initial struggle was becoming familiar with not just the program, but also the research context. It was heartening to read scholarship demonstrating how effective restorative practices can be for healing communities and preventing recidivism. It was equally distressing to see the down-line failures of punitive practices, where neither the victims of crimes nor the community are served and where the offender gets caught in a whirlpool of shame, despair, and reactivity.

I conducted the initial qualitative analysis of data collected by the restorative justice providers who worked with the youth and their families (Appendix B in the Year 1 report). This included a visualization - I mapped out the themes and illustrative quotes. I used color coding mostly to keep things straight in my own head, but I received positive feedback and came to recognize that my way of explaining things to myself was useful to others!

Because this was a multi-year project and I would definitely not be the only person joining midstream, I also developed an onboarding guide to help newcomers get up to speed. Over the years, I’ve developed a notetaking system that helps me learn and retain new concepts and processes. It includes helpful definitions at a glance, relationships to concepts I already know, visualizations (as basic as arrows and call-out boxes), software tips (like Excel formulas), and hyperlinks to relevant documents. To make the next person’s life a little easier, I cleaned up my own notes, ran them by Kara to ensure accuracy, and transferred document ownership to her.

We received two technical assistance projects during my internship: providing a Theory of Change for the Conflict Resolution Center and providing a healthcare system with insights into why some of their community educators were exceptionally successful delivering a smoking-cessation program. We consulted with these clients to understand the issues underlying their questions and collaborated with them to determine the best approach to answer their questions. This collaborative approach is critical to the consulting process, and working with Kara served as a masterclass for building partnerships, identifying their needs, and translating those needs into questions that we could answer through credible, defensible methods.

Due to her experience, Kara recognized quickly that CRC was asking for a Theory of Change (ToC). I conducted the review of literature to identify mechanisms by which the organization was achieving its desired outcomes and we each developed a ToC visualization to explain how/why the program is effective. The final deliverable provided an executive summary, both visuals, the ToC narrative, and reference list.

For the second project (why certain nurses were exceptionally successful delivering a smoking-cessation program), I identified Department of Labor occupational attribute survey instruments that measure skills, abilities, work values, and interests. We combined and adapted the instruments, asking the nurses to pick their top answers for each category, and the clients administered the survey. This was a simple quantitative analysis because only two people were surveyed. However, the interpretation of the data is where things got interesting - where do their perspectives converge and diverge? What are the implications for replicating their successes in other contexts? The deliverable included an executive summary and the findings were reported in color-coded tables to facilitate visual digestion.