4-H Human Subjects Guide
Required steps when using the 4-H Life Skills Evaluation System

Step 2: terms and acronyms

Use the terms and acronyms below as you work through the 4-H life skills evaluation system. If you do not need to review the terms and acronyms, go to the Step 3 links above and choose your survey audience.

(A - H)  (I - O)  (P - Z)

Anonymity - an attempt to keep the participants unknown to the people who use the evaluation and, if possible, to the researchers themselves.

Baseline - information about the situation or condition prior to a program or intervention.

Benchmarks - specific times at which steps to implement strategies will be completed. These are the "when" and in some cases the "who."

Chronbach's Alpha - determines if there is internal consistency within the indicator statements.

CIRB - The Campus Institutional Review Board's purpose is to ensure protective oversight for human subject research activities, including compliance with the governing federal regulations for human subject research.

Confidentiality - an attempt to remove any elements that might indicate the subject's identify.

Data - information - either words or numbers.

Descriptive statistics - a branch of statistics in which the analyses "describe" the raw data, such as counts, percentages, measures of central tendency, and measures of variability (e.g., range, standard deviation, and variance).

Face validity - a form of content-oriented validity in which consensus is obtained among a group of subject matter experts that the indicators completely and comprehensively cover the life skill that it intends to measure.

Factor analysis - a statistical technique used to examine the interrelations among a set of variables, or items, in order to identify an underlying structure to those items.

Frequency - how often an event occurred (e.g., how many times did participants answer "strongly agree" to an item)

Goals - Broad statements describing the expected result of the team's efforts. The goals should reflect your mission. This is WHAT you want to do.

Human subjects protection - ethical principles and guidelines that protect the rights, privacy and well-being of human beings involved in research.

Impact - The social, economic, and/or environmental effects or consequences of the program. Impacts tend to be long-term achievements. They may be positive, negative, neutral; intended or unintended.

Impact indicators - expression or indication of impact. Evidence that the impact has/is being achieved. Good indicators are Simple, Available, Reliable and Valid (SARV).

Indicator - expression of what is/will be measured or described; evidence that signals achievement. Answers the question "How will I know it?"

Inferential statistics - the purpose of inferential statistics is to give an answer to the question, "could these results happen just by chance?" An inferential statistic will tell you how many times out of a hundred you could expect your result to have occurred just by chance (i.e., the probability level or p).

Instrument -  A technique used to measure an impact variable, such as a questionnaire, a skills checklist,  or other measurement tool.

Life skills - the abilities individuals can learn that will help them be successful in living a productive and satisfying life.

Mean - the average. This is one way to describe a middle value for the data. To generate a mean, add all the values and divide by the number of values. The mean of 70, 80, and 90 is (70 + 70 + 90) divided by 3 = 80.

Median - the score at which 50% of people are above and 50% of people are below. For an odd number of scores, the median is the middle number. If there is an even number of responses (so the exact middle would fall between two numbers), add the two middle numbers and divide by 2 to get the median.

Mode - the most frequent score. This is another way of describing a typical value. For the set of scores 20, 30, 40, 40, 50, the mode is 40. Unlike a mean, you can report the mode for non-numerical scores. For instance, if 9 people said "agree," 8 said "undecided," and 7 said "disagree," you could report that the mode (or modal response) was "agree."

Objectives - measurable definitions of who will do what differently and by what amount in order to accomplish the goal. This is HOW you accomplish the goal.

Outcome - the results or effects of the program. Outcomes answer the question "What difference does the program make in people's lives?" Outcomes may be intended and unintended; positive and negative. Outcomes fall along a continuum from short-term (immediate/initial/proximal), to medium-term (intermediate), to long-term (final/distal). Often, long-term outcome is synonymous with impact.

Outcome evaluation - evaluation focused on whether or not personal behavior changes have occurred as a result of the program.

Outputs - As part of the program logic model, outputs are the direct products of program activities.  Outputs are usually measured in units of service, such as number of meetings held or number of participants served.

Participatory evaluation - evaluation in which the evaluator's perspective carries no more weight than that of other stakeholders, including participants, and the evaluation process and its results are relevant and useful to stakeholders for future actions. This type of evaluation is practical and empowering to multiple stakeholders and actively engage all stakeholders in the evaluation process.

Percentage - the frequency of an event divided by the total number of events multiplied by 100. For example, if 30 of 50 people responding to a survey answered "strongly agree" to a question, that's 60% (30 divided by 50 multiplied by 100).

Post-then pretest - also known as retrospective pre-test/post-test; this describes data collection where program participants is asked about their perceptions of change following the program or intervention.

Program evaluation - systematic collection of information to be used in assessing program components in order to make decisions about the program (Jacobs, 1988; Patton, 1997).

Process evaluation - evaluation focused on how well a program is working by looking at the process of delivering a program, such as the setup of the program and the activities used to teach the content.

Range - the spread of scores, that is the difference between the maximum score and the minimum score. If the highest score was 100 and the lowest score was 70, you could report the range either as "the scores ranged from 70 to 100" or "the range of the scores was 30."

Reliability - whether or not the evaluation instrument can accurately measure the life skills when used repeatedly with different groups of program participants.

Retrospective pre-test/post-test - also known as post-then pretest - this describes data collection where program participants is asked about their perceptions of change following the program or intervention.

Secondary Data -  Data from existing records created for other purposes (secondary sources), such as data from report cards, membership lists, or social service agency records.

Significant/Not Significant -  Used in the sense of “statistically significant,” it means that the difference between two estimates is statistically different from zero.  The level of significance used is generally p<.01, p<.05, or p<.10.  To say that the difference between two means is statistically significant at a significance level of p<.01 means that we are 99 percent confident that the difference between the estimates did not occur by chance.

Strategies - specific actions, activities, programs, etc. that will be used to carry out the objectives. The objectives are the "what" and the strategies are the "how." These are the STEPS to meet the objective.

Targeting Life Skills (TLS) Model - Iowa State University's model of like skills or competencies that consistently emerge as being necessary for individuals to attain success in life (Hendricks, 1999).

Validity - this means the evaluation instrument measures what it is intended to measure.

WSUE - Washington State University Extension, founder of the life skills evaluation system.

Youth development - a process of mental, physical, social and emotional growth during which young people prepare to live a productive and satisfying life within the customs and regulations of their society.

Thank you: Credits

Please send comments and suggested improvements to Tammy Gillespie at gillespiet@missouri.edu
 

Last Revised 29-Jul-10