Building Capacity for Data Collection
The Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act (JJCPA) aims to provide a stable source of funding for local community programs that have proven effectiveness in curbing crime among at-promise youth and youth who are involved in the juvenile justice system.
This toolkit is intended to provide JJCPA-funded programs with assistance to effectively collect data that can be used to evaluate program implementation and effectiveness, as programs that receive funding are generally required to submit data about youth served and program outcomes. Though the specific requirements related to data collection have changed over time and are likely to continue evolving, there are some foundational evaluation principles that can be used as the basis for recommendations related to data collection. Moreover, data collected using the guidance of this toolkit could be used by programs to evaluate themselves or partner with an external evaluator. This toolkit may also be of interest to other youth-serving programs that are interested in improving their collection of data that can be used for evaluation purposes.
The research described in this report prepared for the Los Angeles County Department of Probation and conducted in the Justice Policy Program within RAND Social and Economic Well-Being.
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