Key Elements of Employment Programs: Strategies from the Field for Identifying, Implementing, and Sustaining Core Components
Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse, OPRE Brief #2022-212
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Associated Project
Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse
Prepared for:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation
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Key Findings
As a results of a scan of the literature and informant interviews, the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse shares recommendations that can help organizations identify and document core components that have not been well specified, and provides suggestions for beginning the process of implementing core components and monitoring fidelity. The recommendations are to:
- Scan the available research to look for common features of evidence-based interventions focused on achieving similar results.
- Engage other agency staff and partner organizations to draw on their experience implementing program elements and begin to test implementation of those elements.
- Begin to develop descriptions of each core component of the intervention to establish a shared understanding that will guide future implementation.
- Take a deliberate, step-by-step approach to plan for a new intervention, considering model fit and consciously adapting as needed before implementation begins.
- Build and maintain an environment that supports successful implementation of core components by creating detailed intervention descriptions, securing funding and staffing to support this work, and expanding data management capacity to create a database to track partner implementation of core components.
- Use data from program monitoring and evaluation to understand how participants engage with individual program components as a way of monitoring fidelity.
- Use or build a fidelity monitoring tool
- Partner with researchers, key model developers or original staff, and experts to provide guidance on implementation.
- Make intentional adaptations during implementation as needed.
This special topics report is designed to provide guidance for employment service providers and other human services agency staff who wish to implement evidence-based programs but find little information about the core components of those programs. The report discusses recommendations from the literature and informant interviews about strategies to qualitatively identify core components. The report then summarizes the processes and methods that other human services agency staff have used to identify, document, and implement the core components of interventions.
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