Testing the Retrospective Pretest with High School Youth in Out-of-School Time Programs

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/jyd.2019.635

Keywords:

out-of-school time, high school, program evaluation, survey, pretest, response-shift bias

Abstract

Practitioners and evaluators face several constraints in conducting rigorous evaluations to determine program effect. Researchers have offered the retrospective pretest/posttest design as a remedy to curb response-shift bias and better estimate program effects. This article presents an example of how After School Matters (ASM) tested the use of retrospective pretest/posttest design for evaluating out-of-school time (OST) programs for high school youth participants. Differences between traditional pretest and retrospective pretest scores were statistically significant, but effect sizes were negligible, indicating that both pretests yielded similar results. Interviews with youth led to 3 key findings that have implications for ASM using retrospective pretests with youth: response-shift bias was more prominent in youth interviews than in quantitative findings, youth recommended reordering the questions so that the retrospective pretest appears first to increase comprehension, and acquiescence bias emerged in the interviews. This study demonstrates that the retrospective pretest/posttest design can be an alternative to the traditional pretest/posttest design for OST at ASM. These findings are important for ASM and other youth-serving organizations, which often have limited capacity to survey youth multiple times within 1 program session.

Author Biography

Jill Young, After School Matters Loyola University Chicago

Jill Young has over 10 years of experience in nonprofit research and evaluation. She is currently the Senior Director of Research and Evaluation at After School Matters in Chicago, Illinois, where she leads research and evaluation efforts for 25,000 after-school and summer program opportunities for teens each year. Previous to After School Matters, Ms. Young worked as a statistical analyst at University of Chicago and as a research manager at Northwestern University. She graduated from Drake University with honors, earning her BA in journalism and mass communication. She earned her MA and PhD in research methodology from Loyola University Chicago, where she is also part-time faculty.

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Published

2019-03-12

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Research & Evaluation Studies

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