Evaluating Area-based Interventions: The Case of ‘Communities for Children’

Abstract

Increasingly, governments in wealthy countries are designing early intervention initiatives around principles of ‘community regeneration’ or ‘place management’. Because these initiatives are multi-site, aimed at long-term systemic change, and implemented amidst a range of other initiatives, assessing their quality and outcomes demands departure from conventional programme evaluation approaches. This article analyses the challenges of evaluating area-based interventions in the child welfare field, and shows how the National Evaluation of Australia’s ‘Communities for Children’ initiative seeks to overcome these through its mixed method design and the longitudinal Stronger Families in Australia study.