Pathway International, a nonprofit organization offering home-based family and community services for Hoosiers in the Indianapolis area and surrounding counties, has enlisted the expertise of the Research Design Studio (RDS) starting in fall 2021.

RDS will serve as an external evaluator to document the efficacy of Pathway’s “SMART” program, an educational intervention program designed to prevent human trafficking by reducing risky behaviors in adolescents and young adults. These programs, delivered over 12 weeks, are held in local schools, juvenile detention centers, community agencies and other settings.

The ultimate goal of this project is to help Pathway obtain credentialing as a “Promising Practice” by the California Evidence Based Clearinghouse (CEBC), a recognition which demonstrates Pathway’s programming as successful and would open the organization to new sources of grant funding to sustain and improve its operations.

In the first stages of the evaluation, RDS is overseeing the digitization, cleaning and organizing of hundreds of hand-entered surveys by program participants while ensuring privacy and confidentiality are maintained. Organizing these data serves as a critical first step in the evaluation process that will allow RDS to begin analyzing initial program outcomes. Afterward, RDS will recommend ways that Pathway can revise its questionnaires to better measure participant learning and program success in future iterations of the program.

By helping Pathway build new capacities and competencies for data collection, Pathway will be well-positioned to begin collecting new data for the SMART program that can eventually be utilized by RDS to produce methodologically rigorous research necessary to achieve CEBC designation.