Hold Team Meetings . Monitor and Evaluate Your Efforts . Sustain Your SART . Know Your Team . Critical Issues
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Types of Evaluation
When SART agencies collaborate, "they engage in a range of activities. Some of these activities are internally focused and some are externally focused."9 Internally focused evaluations, therefore, would involve the inner workings of the team, such as the decisionmaking process, team membership, or leadership. Externally focused evaluations would assess factors that affect stakeholders beyond the team itself, such as the frequency of sexual assault reporting, victims' experiences with medical and legal professionals and advocates on your team, the number of community referrals, how your SART affects victims' recoveries, and prosecutorial outcomes.
Evaluating how your team functions and evaluating whether it is ultimately meeting its goals are both important. This section reviews these two types of evaluation and also reviews a third, which covers the overall impact of your SART:
- Process evaluation: How your team functions.
- Outcome evaluation: Whether your team meets its goals.
- Impact evaluation: The intended and unintended long-term impacts of your team's approach.
There are no hard and fast rules about when to collect data, but timing can be very important. If you want to examine change over time, ideally, you would collect initial (baseline) data during the planning stages and then again at various points once the SART is established. Always leave enough time between the first time you collect data and those that follow so that desired changes have a chance to occur. Not doing so could lead you to erroneously conclude that an activity or response is ineffective.
Examples of Data Collected for Evaluations
| Victim Characteristics | Age, race, socioeconomic status, gender, and level of involvement with criminal justice |
|---|---|
| SART Services | Number of victims served and types of services |
| Team Information | SART membership, frequency of team meetings, and whether case reviews are performed |
| SART Outcomes | Victim satisfaction with services, cases investigated and prosecuted, and victim referrals |
| SART Impact | Changes in policies or resources |
For more information, see—
- In This Toolkit: Collect Data, which describes methods of collecting data in more detail.
- SANE Program National Database, which collects national victim data to identify SANE programs' strengths and weaknesses, improve their evidence collection, and enhance prosecution rates in future cases.
