Understanding Community Justice Partnerships; Testing a Conceptual Framework and Foundations for Measurement

摘要

Community justice partnerships are complex and fluid entities that vary across a wide range of aspects, such as partnership function and activities, agency and organizational involvement, community mobilization, and overall community context. The complexity of and variation across partnerships hampers systematic assessment and rigorous evaluation. This study seeks to explore and develop methods to better understand the functioning of community justice partnerships, and in turn, facilitate measurement and evaluation. The study examines the factors that facilitate and strengthen the ability of community organizations to participate in community justice partnerships, and explores how these factors at the organizational level relate to the ability ofpartnerships to achieve their stated mission and objectives. More specifically, the goals of the research were to: (1) collect data on effective partnerships across partnership types that can be used to develop a conceptual framework of partnership functioning and outcomes, (2) develop testable hypotheses to guide future investigations of community justice partnerships, and (3) convene a panel of experts to review the conceptual framework and hypotheses, and (4) identify performance measures and/or useful instruments for monitoring and evaluating partnership development, implementation, and outcomes. This report summarizes the findings fromthe study, presents a detailed conceptual framework for assessing and evaluating partnerships, and discusses techniques and tools for measurement of framework components. The framework can be used to guide outcomes so that they are realistically based on the resources at hand and scope of objectives. The framework enables articulation of process (i.e., immediate), intermediate, and end outcomes, as well as articulation of outcomes at multiple levels ofchange (i.e., individual, systems/partnership, community). The conceptual framework could move us closer to answering what works and more importantly, under what conditions.