223.632.01
Methods for Planning and Implementing Evaluations of Large-Scale Health Programs in Low and Middle Income Countries

Prerequisite:

Students must have taken 221.645 AND 140.623 OR 140.653

Description:

Do you want to know how to plan and run an evaluation of a health program in a low-income country given budget, capacity and temporal constraints?

Would you like to develop practical skills in how to run a household survey or a facility assessment survey?

Prepares students to design, implement, and analyze large-scale evaluations of health programs, focusing on low and middle income settings. Provides students with the skills to conduct household surveys, assessments of provider readiness and quality of care, and documentation of contextual factors, as well as overall planning, design, and analysis of program evaluations. Focuses on adaptation, development, and refinement of project-specific tools; sampling and sample size calculations; and various analytical methods appropriate for program evaluations.

Learning Objectives:

Upon successfully completing this course, students will be able to:

1. Justify a rigorous, feasible, and appropriate evaluation design for a particular program, considering constraints due to time, budget, capacity, and program design.
2. Generate an evaluation plan and timeline
3. Identify an appropriate comparison area for a quasi-experimental evaluation, based on available data
4. Calculate the appropriate sample sizes for the overall evaluation and for individual data collection activities
5. Propose an appropriate sampling design for household and provider assessments for large-scale evaluations
6. Create program-specific instruments for measuring program implementation and quality of care
7. Create a program-specific household survey to measure intervention coverage and impact.
8. Perform analyses of evaluation data, including difference in differences analyses, hierarchical models, and small area estimation.

Methods of Assessment:

This course is evaluated as follows:

• 10% Participation
• 40% Two assignments applying skills learned during the course (each worth 20% of the final grade). These are INDIVIDUAL assignments.
• 50% A small final group project to apply the skills and competencies from the course

Enrollment Restriction:

Graduate students only.

Instructor Consent:

Consent required for some students

Consent Note:

Consent required for any student who has not taken one of the prerequisite courses.

For consent, contact:

mmunos@jhsph.edu

Special Comments:

Students must attend one of the lab times each week.