Teen Pregnancy Prevention: Ensuring Rigorous Program Evaluations

To continue to build the evidence base on teen pregnancy prevention, the Office of Adolescent Health (OAH) and Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) provided funding to a cohort of 2010-2015 Teen Pregnancy Prevention grantees to conduct independent, rigorous evaluations of their programs. The findings from these rigorous studies will expand our knowledge of promising pregnancy prevention approaches, and also lead to improvements in program design and operations.

As part of this effort, Mathematica is providing evaluation technical assistance to 43 grantees from the 2010-2015 cohort to ensure design and implementation of high quality effectiveness evaluations. We are also providing this technical assistance to 24 evaluations in the 2015-2020 cohort of funded Teenage Pregnancy Prevention grants from OAH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Project staff review and comment on evaluation and analysis plans and final reports, provide direct technical assistance to grantee evaluators through calls and site visits, deliver webinars and conference presentations to grantees and evaluators, and write evaluation briefs and newsletters. In addition, the project team also provides OAH and FYSB staff with evaluation training and technical assistance. The team will also conduct interviews with over 50 former grantees to determine whether the programs have been sustained post-funding.