Developing Outcome Measures for Domestic Violence Programs’ Work With Children And Youth - Promising Futures

This paper is a companion to one that offers guidelines for enhancing children’s programming in DV programs (Lyon, Perilla & Menard, 2016). It explores some of the major complexities involved in developing and utilizing outcome measures for DV programs’ work with children. It begins with an overview of some of the major considerations involved. It then describes the process used to reach the measures proposed here, along with issues to be discussed and resolved in order to implement them. Although the importance and complexity of programs’ supports for survivor families would ideally suggest nuanced measures, a practical, incremental approach best fits DV program realities. The paper concludes with recommendations for a process to be used regionally or nationally to expand the discussion and refine the measures, in order to achieve a small number of measures that can be used easily by DV programs, yet accommodate the significant variations in what they do with the diverse survivor families with whom they work.