Center for Program Evaluation Partners with Student Affairs and Campus Life to Support Well-Being Initiatives
The center has been a crucial partner in evaluating the effectiveness of campus-based well-being programs.
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When the SPHHS Center for Program Evaluation (CPE) launched in 2021, it did so with the goal of helping community partners and local, state, and federal agencies make informed, data-driven policy decisions. CPE director Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson, professor of health promotion and policy and of epidemiology, and CPE co-director Gloria DiFulvio, associate dean for undergraduate academic affairs and a senior lecturer in health promotion and policy, helped to usher in a range of project evaluations ranging from substance use interventions to healthy aging programs and community needs assessments. Partners as diverse as the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the City of Northampton, the Goddard Foundation, and service provider Behavioral Health Network have all sought the team’s expertise in collaborative mixed-methods evaluation services, data collection and utilization.
But to date, the center’s bread and butter has been in conducting needs assessments and evaluating programs with the aim of improving and buffering mental health, including suicide prevention and postvention training programs for all personnel in K-12 schools in Massachusetts and the state’s suicide hotline.
For the past three semesters, the CPE team has teamed up with a partner even closer to home: the UMass Office of Student Affairs and Campus Life (SACL). Together, they’re working to ensure that the university is making the same informed, data-driven decisions in support of campus mental health and well-being.
“We were excited to work with SACL because these programs were designed to directly benefit UMass students,” says Bertone-Johnson. “We have all seen the increases in anxiety, depression and distress among students in the past several years. Programs like PART (Positivity and Relaxation Training) teach students skills that can positively impact their wellbeing over the long-term, not just during the semester-long course.”
To date, the CPE team has conducted evaluations of SACL three campus-based well-being programs: the PART curriculum; the Science of Thriving (Changing Minds, Changing Lives); and CoJourn, a peer-supported personal growth and goal achievement program. While all three programs focus on student well-being and connection, they each have different target populations and differences in how the programs are implemented.
“The PART mindfulness curriculum aims to improve student mental health, enhance resilience to stress, and promote well-being,” notes Bertone-Johnson. “Our evaluation provides data measuring student outcomes, and allows us to determine if PART is similarly effective in students with varying social identities.”
As part of its evaluation, the CPE team assessed changes in measures of mental health, stress management, mindfulness and wellbeing among all students enrolled in the PART program across three semesters. Their findings indicated significant improvement in psychosocial functioning and wellbeing among students enrolled in the course, with significant benefits observed for students of diverse gender and racial identities.
Findings for the Science of Thriving class also showed significant improvement across semesters in measures of resilience, emotional self-awareness, and perceived stress – a clear indication that the course is doing what it was designed to do. Analyses of data from the CoJourn project are in process.
Similarly, the CPE team is working with SPHHS administration to assess classroom belongingness within the school. Initial baseline data was collected in the spring ’23 semester prior to the launch of campus-wide classroom equity initiatives. The team will conduct a subsequent baseline assessment in Fall '23 prior to the implementation of initiatives in Spring '24.
The CPE’s focus on students goes beyond assessing student well-being; the center also provides a fertile training ground for SPHHS students to gain real-world experience as a public health practitioner.
“This is a big focus of the CPE and we have many students involved,” notes Bertone-Johnson. “We have paid student positions at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and also have had students work on projects via independent studies and MPH projects.”
In addition, the CPE has provided paid internships for undergraduate students through the Summer Public Health Equity Research Experience (SPHERE) program, a Department of Health Promotion and Policy funded initiative designed to offer UMass undergraduate public health students from historically underrepresented backgrounds hands-on mentored research experience. Ivana Akoachere ’24 gained invaluable experience working with the CPE team this past summer; former SPHERE intern Genesis Medina ’23 now works for the center full-time. She joins other SPHHS alumnae on a team that includes evaluation managers Suzanne Rataj ‘13MPH and Nora Finnerty ‘22MPH and research assistant Emilia Zaentz '23.
“I think this says a lot about our students who graduate from either the BS or MPH programs,” says DiFulvio. “They are committed to working with communities in intentional ways to improve the public’s health. We are lucky to have such great talent!”