Do you have 10 minutes? My January has been full of so many 10-minute conversations in an attempt to figure out how to accomplish #allthethings I want to accomplish this year. Many of these conversations have been about how to measure stuff. I lucked out when Rose Hennessy, from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, gave me 10 minutes to talk about measuring bystander intervention.
Lots of questions circled in our heads, but the following questions bubbled to the top:
- Are you measuring intentions or actual behaviors?
- Are you asking people if they ALWAYS intervene to stop abuse and harassment or if they SOMETIMES intervene?
- Are you capturing the real lives of people who might try to intervene by trying out a variety of ways to stop violence during the same incident?
If you are reading this, you might actually have 10 minutes to listen to Rose break down three challenges in evaluating bystander intervention-focused prevention programs and three ways to address those challenges in the video below.
If you have more time or are brand new to evaluating bystander intervention programs, check out an extended conversation with Rose to hear about overall research trends related to bystander intervention programming. Check out our bystander intervention research Special Titles List in the NSVRC Library. Continue your adventure by wandering over to NSVRC’s Evaluation Toolkit for more information about existing measures for bystander intervention.