2 pages due 1130hrs

UNIT4ASSIGN EFF Problem Identification and Model PlanningScenario Return to the scenario of the Homeless Teen Program run by the Riverbend City Community Action Center (CAC)***SEE TRANSCRIPT BELOW***, presented in the course project overview. The main goal of the Homeless Teen Program is to help the teens find stable and secure housing (whether that is with their families or in the child welfare system). The program is successful: 83 percent of the teens have stable housing in less than one year of coming to the program. However, the director and staff of the Homeless Teen Program feel their success lies in their approach of addressing the underlying problems that led to homelessness in the first place, especially family problems. The family intervention programs are expensive, so it is important to justify their expense (while they consider expanding them). The CAC would like the teens who cannot be reunited with their families to have their own residential program rather than rely on Riverbend City’s overburdened foster care system, but that is also expensive. There is no question the CAC would like to receive another grant from Helping Hands, so they want to demonstrate that their focus on family intervention is important, but also consider funding their own residence for homeless teens. This means they need to provide more information than just establishing the percentage of teens who find stable housing. The Homeless Teen Program staff has collected various types of data on the teen clients, including: - Demographic data (such as race, gender, and sexual orientation). - Problems they are experiencing (including family conflict, academic problems, juvenile justice involvement, sex trafficking involvement, mental health problems, and substance use problems). - Services offered (for example, family counseling, individual mental health counseling, and legal support). - The outcome of the services offered after six months (such as rated levels of family conflict and scores on mental health evaluations) as well as housing status (for example, stable with family, stable with child welfare, or homeless). Note that this data is provided within the Riverbend City multimedia presentation. Problem and Data Selection The main problem that the Homeless Teen Program is addressing is homelessness, but your focus should be more specific. For example, you might choose to look at housing rates for a specific group of teens (such as LGBT teens, teens who have been victimized in sex trafficking, or suicidal teens) or look at the housing rates for teens who participate in specific programs (for example, family reunification programs, mental health treatment programs, or substance abuse treatment programs). With your group(***GROUP WERE NEVER ASSIGNED JUST SELECT FROM BELOW***), select one of the problem areas listed below to examine for your course project: - Is there a relationship between reported levels of family tension before and after participating in the Homeless Teen Program family intervention program? - Is there a relationship between reported levels of family conflict and the type of housing (with the family or another type of housing situation) that teens are in, after a year of participating in the program? - There is concern that LGBT teens are more likely to be rejected by their families and kicked out of their homes compared to other groups of teens. Is there a difference between LGBT teens and other teens in terms of reported levels of family conflict after participating in the family treatment program? - For teens involved in the juvenile justice system, was there a difference in levels of family conflict for those who received legal support, compared to those who did not? - Is there a relationship between the mental health scores after participating in treatment and housing status (whether or not the teen has stable housing)? - Is there a relationship between participation in individual mental health treatment and family tension? After you have identified a question (a problem), identify the data provided in the scenario that you will use to learn more about the problem. You need at least one type of qualitative data and one type of quantitative data. Note: You may think of another question to ask, as long as sufficient qualitative and quantitative data is provided by the Riverbend City scenario to address it. See if the data is available, and, if it is, contact your instructor to get feedback on whether or not your proposed question can be answered given the data available. Remember that you will need both qualitative and quantitative data. Instructions After you have identified the problem and the data that you will utilize, you must write your assignment individually. The assignment should be presented in three sections: - Identification of the Problem: - Identify your problem, explain it, and provide a rationale for why it is important to learn more about, in light of the scenario. Why would Helping Hands want to know about this issue? - Describe how the data analytics lifecycle can be applied to the selected problem. - Identification of Data Needed: - Identify the quantitative data. What variables will you use? Why are those variables appropriate? What type of statistical analysis will you conduct, and why is that analysis appropriate? - Identify the qualitative data. Why is that data appropriate? Explain how you will conduct a content analysis and why a content analysis is appropriate. - Group Collaboration: ***MAKE THIS UP...GROUP WAS NEVER ASSIGNED*** - Briefly describe your group collaboration process and how it contributed to your understanding of the problem as well as the data needed. This assignment should be 2–4 pages long. It should be well organized, free of mechanical writing errors, and in APA format. ***PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION & MODEL PLANNING SCORING GUIDE, SEE ATTACHMENTS*** *********RIVERBEND CITY TRANSCRIPT********** Introduction Welcome to your virtual internship at the Riverbend Community Action Center (RCAC)! Located in Riverbend City, a midsized city in the Midwest, this organization provides a variety of human service functions. In your internship, you will be focused on the Ruby Lake Teen Homelessness Task Force, which is centered in the neighborhood of Ruby Lake. You will be learning about the role of data analytics in a human services setting. Three years ago, RCAC received a seven-figure grant from the Helping Hands Foundation to help the center's work with homeless teens. Now Helping Hands would like to know what RCAC has done, and if their programs have been effective. Your focus will be on understanding how analytics could be applied to evaluate these programs and make the case for their effectiveness. Mentor TalkRiverbend City Community Action Center: Mentor's Office Check in with your CAC Mentor, Brenda. Hi! And welcome to RCAC! I'm really looking forward to working with you and helping dig into the landscape of data analytics in the human services. Like your acceptance letter said, the specific thing I'd like you to look at while you're here is an analytics-based evaluation of the effectiveness of our grant-funded work on teen homelessness in the Ruby Lake neighborhood. Well, that's all well and good, but what does that really mean? Let's jump in and talk about the data analytics process itself. To do that, we’re going to focus on the first step of the lifecycle. There are a variety of ways to visualize the data analytics lifecycle. Some models will have more steps than others… some will parse those steps in slightly different ways. That said, there is some commonality in terms of basic stages or steps. For our purposes, let’s work with the model SAS uses. The first stage of the data analytics lifecycle addresses understanding the problem. Some models will call this the discovery phase, others may talk about identification or understanding the problem. The important thing to remember is that this is the point where you are going to identify the business problem and ask the questions that will help you analyze the business problem. You might think of it as narrowing the gap between yourself as a data analyst and the business owner. The business owner may not be describing the problem in ways that make it clear what you’re trying to measure in your analysis, so a significant part of the first stage of the lifecycle may be identifying what data to look at. Later stages will center on acquiring the data, cleaning it, building models and so forth, but at this initial stage, the goal is to acquire as much clarity as possible in understanding the core business problem. OK! That's the lifecycle in a nutshell. Next, I'd like you to hit the ground running on understanding the problem. I'd like you to go talk to some of the internal stakeholders to help you get a well-rounded view of exactly what we're trying to do here. I've arranged for you to talk to Richard Agin, our CEO; Eduardo Alvarez, the director of our Homeless Teen program; and Heather Adams, one of our case managers in the program. That way, you should get a good diversity of perspectives and concerns that will help you really identify the questions being asked. The Analytics LifecycleInterviewsRiverbend City Community Action Center Offices Talk to some RCAC staffers to get their perspectives on what kind of questions you should be trying to answer with data. Richard AginCEO of Community Action Center Thank you for asking! I'm excited to see this question being taken seriously. I'll tell you one thing: more than anything else, I want to emphasize process. Since this program is essentially my little kingdom, I often find myself in direct contact with donors, granting agencies, and accrediting bodies. And I hate having to answer their questions about how things are going with vague, anecdotal evidence. I can see their eyes roll, and shudder when I think of what this is doing to our long-term relationships. So if you're here to bring some rigor to the question of evaluating how we're doing, you're making my life a lot easier no matter what you find. For my sake, I'm begging you: Please be thorough with everything, please be clear, and please document everything you do, so that I can leverage these results to convince people to give us more money for future activities. OK, that said, if you're looking for the things you need to be tracking, I'm happy to give you my perspective. As much as I like to focus on individual success stories, in my role as CEO I have to focus on big-picture elements. So: How much funding did we direct towards this program? How much of it was from dedicated grants and how much from unrestricted funds? What were our cost centers in executing the program? How much staff time and energy was devoted to this program, that could have been devoted to other things? Same question in terms of our non-staff resources—what did we allocate here? You get that stuff and you have one side of the ledger…then we have to figure out what our specific concerns are evaluating benefits. The number of teens that have been involved with the program seems like a good place to start. Maybe as a baseline, the overall number of teens in the region who'd be eligible to be helped by the program, so that we can see what percentage of the populace we're targeting. Also worth looking at cost and resource allocation per participant — how efficient are we being? We've been doing this for a while now, so it's good to look at year-to-year figures, see if we're getting better both in te