10 Jul In your opinion, what criminal justice programs in your community

In your opinion, what criminal justice programs in your community (State of Alabama) would benefit from evaluation research? Which type of evaluation research do you think would be most appropriate for evaluating the program you identified? What obstacles to evaluation research do you think evaluators might face when attempting to evaluate the program you identified? Be sure to provide justification for your response.ANSWER THE ABOVE QUESTION AND THEN REPLY TO MY CLASSMATE’S RESPONSE TO THE ABOVE QUESTION AND EXPLAIN WHY YOU AGREE? (A MINIMUM OF 150 WORDS or MORE)                                           CLASSMATE’S RESPONSEIn Kentucky, participation in a divorce education program is required for parents who are filing for divorce (Kentucky Court of Justice website, n.d.).  Divorce continues to be more and more common, often resulting in on-going problems for families with children.  The program aims to reduce reappearances in court by educating parents about how to cope appropriately with divorce-related problems.  However, the programs vary by county across the commonwealth in terms of focus, design, and length. To evaluate the divorce education program, monitoring would be most appropriate.  Monitoring in evaluation research means to inspect a program to determine if the program is accomplishing the obligations it should be (Hagan, 2014).  For the divorce programs across the state, monitoring will allow researchers to study the activities that result after participation in the varied programs and compare efficiency.   Obstacles that evaluators may face when examining the divorce education program include outside variables effecting the data and privacy restrictions.  It is difficult to gage what variables may have impact on participants outside of the education program they attend.  Circumstance, location, family support, and/or finances can affect behavior and should not be discounted when determining if later results are due to a specific program.  For instance, if the child of divorced parents later drops out of school, it would be difficult to tie that action directly to the divorce education program.  There are too many outside variables to factor.  Privacy restrictions would also hinder researchers.  Accessing public court data would allow researchers to collect information on participants of divorce education programs, but following later court contact of parents or children would be difficult due to privacy issues. If researchers were able to gather the data, analysis would show which programs were most beneficial.  This could result in policy change so that more locations could offer the best programs.                                                                ReferencesHagan, F. (2014). Research methods in criminal justice and criminology (9th ed.).       Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Kentucky Court of Justice website. (n.d.). https://kycourts.gov/courtprograms/divorceeducation/Pages/default.aspx