Title: Following the P.A.T.H. measuring change in volunteers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes towards cultural and natural heritage, and life
Publisher: CCIVS
Type: Project report
Theme: Other
Related project: PATH
Short Description: One of the most popular definitions of impact assessment, given by Rossi, Lipsey and Freeman in Evaluation: A Systemic Approach (2004), reminds us that at the beginning of any research should reside the essential step of clarifying the goals and objectives of the program assessed – that is, in order to evaluate the impact of the projects, we first need to clarify its explicit program logic: “Impact assessments are undertaken to find out whether programs actually produce the intended effects. A program effect, or impact, refers to a change in the target population or social conditions that has been brought about by the program, that is, a change that would not have occurred had the program been absent, […] establishing that the program is a cause of some specified effect.” The PATH project answered very successfully this initial, often forgotten challenge by investing an important amount of time and resources in building, in particular during the Stakeholders Forum in Paris, a deep understanding and consensus around the specific objectives that the project, and in particular the camps implemented by each partner, wanted to achieve. In an effort to promote participative research the representatives of the 27 partner organisations were involved in drafting the very questions that were later submitted to the volunteers before and after the local projects took place.
Format: PDF