Subject areas you need to know

(working on this...)
When doing program evaluation, you need to have some knowledge in a variety of areas.  Programs take place in organizations, so it helps to know something about organizations.  Programs also involve people working together, so social psychology is useful.  And so on.

Organizations

Organizational Theory: Determinants of Structure    http://www.analytictech.com/mb021/orgtheory.htm    brief introduction to some concepts used in describing and understanding organizational structure. More notes are here  http://www.analytictech.com/mb021/handouts.htm  brief introductions to various organization topics.


Formal Organizations.  http://www.unc.edu/~nielsen/  See the class, then class notes. Has some class notes with some basic info on organization behavior.


Overview of Organizational Change   http://www.managementhelp.org/org_chng/org_chng.htm   Assembled by Carter McNamara, MBA, PhD . Links to resources, and some basic overviews by Dr. McNamara.


Smith, M. K. (2001) 'The learning organization', the encyclopedia of informal education,  http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-organization.htm   summary of some theories of the learning organization, and links to other summaries related to learning orgs (some of which don't work).



Behavior or behavior change

These are pretty brief reviews, but can give you some ideas of what to look for.

Icek Aizen's theory of planned behavior   http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~aizen/index.html   click on "TpB" then the model.

Behavior Change Theories and Models   http://www.csupomona.edu/~jvgrizzell/best_practices/bctheory.html   very brief  review of theories.

Center for Health Communication Research   http://chcr.umich.edu/   click on 'how we do it' and then 'health behavior theories'.

Theory at a Glance   https://cissecure.nci.nih.gov/ncipubs/details.asp?pid=1302   This is about health promotion but also reviews theories of behavior.

Changing Minds   http://www.changeminds.org/index.htm   "the largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do. "  An interesting approach to how to change minds.



Organization change and resistance to change

Managing Successful Organizational Change in the Public Sector. Sergio Fernandez, Hal G. Rainey. Public Administration Review
Volume 66 Page 168  - March 2006.  http://www.aspanet.org/scriptcontent/index_par_t2p_archives.cfm   There are also commentaries here by Mary Tschirhart, and by Patrick E. Connor and  Fred Thompson, which offer a very brief summary and discussion.

J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2000 Mar–Apr; 7(2): 116–124.  Managing Change, An Overview. Nancy M. Lorenzi and Robert T. Riley.    http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=61464   says, for example, "Human beings do not necessarily resist change automatically; however, many people do resist being changed, i.e., having changes imposed on them." and "change always requires the effort to learn the new, which is a loss in terms of time and energy that could have been used elsewhere."


Teams

Team Diagnostics   http://team-diagnostics.com/   has some research and theory, and explanations of team behavior. For example, this page   http://team-diagnostics.com/index-2.html   has brief info about "What factors improve team effectiveness?"  There is also a little more info in this technical description of the survey here   http://team-diagnostics.com/index-1.html   and see some pages from Dr. Hackman's book here   http://www.leadingteams.org/    The first couple of pages from each chapter are available here.

Social Psychology

Social psychology is important because it deals, in general, with groups, how people interact with groups and how people interact with each other. These are some of the theories.

Social Psychology basics  http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/socpsy.html   brief chapters outlining some basic concepts in social psych, including social learning, persuasion, social economics (making decisions about social activities, etc), conformity.
 

Susan Losh's home page    http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~slosh//Index.htm     links to some of her classes, two of which are
group processess    http://edp5285-01.sp05.fsu.edu/Overview.html  
social psychology     http://syp5105-01.fa05.fsu.edu/Overview-2006.html   
The guides on these pages are brief overviews of group processes, social psychology


Resources for teaching social psychology   http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/crow/     links to links

Social psychology network   http://www.socialpsychology.org/     also links to links


Self Efficacy

Information on Self Efficacy   http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/self-efficacy.html   has definitions, articles, chapters, the place to start.

Self efficacy   http://www.positivepractices.com/Efficacy/SelfEfficacy.html   brief discussions of definitions, history, etc.



page last updated 3/19/08
last checked 3/19/08
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