Issue addressed: Rates of sexually transmissible infections among young people are high, and there is a need for innovative, youth-focused sexual health promotion programs. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Sharing Stories youth theatre program, which uses interactive theatre and drama-based strategies to engage and educate multicultural youth on sexual health issues. The effectiveness of using drama-based evaluation methods is also discussed. Methods: The youth theatre program participants were 18 multicultural youth from South East Asian, African and Middle Eastern backgrounds aged between 14 and 21 years. Four sexual health drama scenarios and a sexual health questionnaire were used to measure changes in knowledge and attitudes. Results: Participants reported being confident talking to and supporting their friends with regards to safe sex messages, improved their sexual health knowledge and demonstrated a positive shift in their attitudes towards sexual health. Drama-based evaluation methods were effective in engaging multicultural youth and worked well across the cultures and age groups. Conclusions: Theatre and drama-based sexual health promotion strategies are an effective method for up-skilling young people from multicultural backgrounds to be peer educators and good communicators of sexual health information. Dramabased evaluation methods are engaging for young people and an effective way of collecting data from culturally diverse youth. So what?This study recommends incorporating interactive and arts-based strategies into sexual health promotion programs for multicultural youth. It also provides guidance for health promotion practitioners evaluating an arts-based health promotion program using arts-based data collection methods.

Evaluation of public health programs, services and policies is increasingly required to demonstrate effectiveness. Funding constraints necessitate that existing programs, services and policies be evaluated and their findings disseminated. Evidence-informed practice and policy is also desirable to maximise investments in public health. Partnerships between public health researchers, service providers and policymakers can help address evaluation knowledge and skills gaps. The Western Australian Sexual Health and Blood-borne Virus Applied Research and Evaluation Network (SiREN) aims to build research and evaluation capacity in the sexual health and blood-borne virus sector in Western Australia (WA). Partners' perspectives of the SiREN model after 2 years were explored. Qualitative written responses from service providers, policymakers and researchers about the SiREN model were analysed thematically. Service providers reported that participation in SiREN prompted them to consider evaluation earlier in the planning process and increased their appreciation of the value of evaluation. Policymakers noted benefits of the model in generating local evidence and highlighting local issues of importance for consideration at a national level. Researchers identified challenges communicating the services available through SiREN and the time investment needed to develop effective collaborative partnerships. Stronger engagement between public health researchers, service providers and policymakers through collaborative partnerships has the potential to improve evidence generation and evidence translation. These outcomes require long-term funding and commitment from all partners to develop and maintain partnerships. Ongoing monitoring and evaluation can ensure the partnership remains responsive to the needs of key stakeholders. The findings are applicable to many sectors.

No abstract

No abstract

The problem of getting honest, objective, and straightforward answers to personality and interest inventories has been of concern to test users for some time. A related problem and the concern of this paper, is how to find out whether or not a particular inventory, in this case the Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory, can be falsified. There are at least five published studies (1,2,4,5,6) of the fakability of the MTAI. Each of the investigators had Ms subjects complete the inventory twice under differing conditions. However each used somewhat different instructions and report somewhat different findings. Since it appeared that some of the discrepancies in findings might be due to the fact that each investigator was concerned with the effect of different conditions of administration, it was decided to conduct a study which incorporated all these conditions in a factorial design. The report which follows will present the findings of that study and compare them with those of earlier studies. It will also discuss some of the implications of the findings for fakability studies in general. Review of Three Representative StudiesCallis (1), one of the authors of the MTAI, worked with three groups of college students. The students in one group first completed the inventory under standard directions. Four to six weeks later they repeated the inventory under directions to "fake good," i.e., to make as high a score as possible by answering the items the way they thought a good teacher would. In a second group the students were asked to "fake good" on the first administration of the inventory. A week to 10 days later they repeated the inventory under standard directions. A third group, the control, was also tested twice, a week to 10 days iThis study was supported in part by the Fund for Occupational Research of the School of Education, UCLA.