Evaluation: Publication 14

Assessing Your Community's Needs and Assets: A Collaborative Approach to Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention

Assessing Your Community's Needs and Assets: A Collaborative Approach to Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention will assist you in planning your needs assessment and evaluating the potential intervention strategies for your adolescent pregnancy prevention program. The guide explains how to gather, analyze and present information by means of a step-by-step approach, including:

1. How to recruit residents & other stakeholders to assist with all aspects of the needs/assets assessment
2. How to determine the goals & scope of the needs/assets assessment
3. How to decide on the questions the community wants answered
4. How to collect information
5. How to analyze the information collected
6. How to present the results back to both the community & to other stakeholders, including funders of the needs assessment endeavor

Developed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Assessing Your Community's Needs and Assets is based on the experiences and advice of researchers and practitioners who have used and refined community-oriented approaches to needs assessment. The strategies are designed to assist both single-site programs and comprehensive, community-wide initiatives.