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Evaluation Plan & Tools



Tobacco Prevention & Control Coalition Project Overview

Five Texas communities are funded by the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) during FY 2011 to develop tobacco prevention and control coalitions and implement comprehensive community-based programs. The funded communities include: Austin (Travis County), Fort Bend County, Lubbock-Cooper ISD, referred to as the Llano Estacado area (Crosby, Dickens, Gaines, Hale, Hockley, Lubbock, Lynn, and Terry Counties), City of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District (Bexar County), and North East Texas, referenced as NET (Gregg, Harrison, Smith and Upshur Counties).

Cross-Community Evaluation Structure

Each community has a dedicated local evaluator. The local evaluators from the five communities, the cross-community evaluators from the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), and DSHS program staff comprise the Tobacco Prevention and Control Coalition (TPCC) Evaluation Team. The UT-Austin evaluators provide technical assistance to local evaluators on cross community studies to ensure uniform data collection, data analysis, and reporting at State and community levels. Community evaluators meet on a quarterly basis and are responsible for

1) implementing local data collection and analysis,

2) reporting evaluation results and facilitating distribution and use of the results to support the coalition’s ongoing data-based program improvement process as specified by the TPCC Program Evaluation Plan, and

3) providing local quality control on evaluation data.

Local evaluators collaborate with community program coordinators and the Community Evaluation Workgroup (CEW) to collect, summarize and distribute evaluation findings. Each evaluator is also encouraged to develop an optional local evaluation study that supplements the cross community evaluation. The purpose of each evaluation, determined by the local coalition, ranges from documenting the unique circumstances influencing program implementation to further examination of short term outcomes not measured by the cross community evaluation.

The Tobacco Research & Evaluation Team also convenes and manages the Texas Tobacco Epidemiology Workgroup. The workgroup membership includes representatives from the Department of State Health Services, the Comptroller's Office, Alere Wellbeing, which operates the Texas Tobacco Quitline, Texas A&M University, Texas Education Agency and other organizations. This workgroup meets twice a year to provide input to and comment on the state and community level evaluation efforts. Each community has a dedicated evaluator. The evaluators from the five communities and from the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) along with DSHS program staff comprise the Tobacco Prevention and Control Coalition (TPCC) Evaluation Team.