Practical Approaches to Evaluating Progress and Outcomes in Community-Wide Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiatives

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the key evaluation components for a set of community-wide teen pregnancy prevention initiatives. We first describe the performance measures selected to assess progress toward meeting short-term objectives on the reach and quality of implementation of evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention interventions and adolescent reproductive health services. Next, we describe an evaluation that will compare teen birth rates in intervention communities relative to synthetic control communities. Synthetic controls are developed via a data-driven technique that constructs control communities by combining information from a pool of communities that are similar to the intervention community. Finally, we share lessons learned thus far in the evaluation of the project, with a focus on those lessons that may be valuable for local communities evaluating efforts to reduce teen pregnancy.

Keywords: Evaluation methodology; Performance measurement; Pregnancy in adolescence; Primary prevention; Synthetic control.