The successful change from teenagers to productive young adults of the NYC youth has a positive impact on the overall performance of the city and to the SYEP participants. The socio-economic impacts of the intervention include an increase in the GDP, reduced crime rates, increased security, and good governance. Unfortunately, some of the challenges facing many of the youth in the city include poverty, financial illiteracy, substance abuse, poor academic performance, and crime; these reduce the chances of the youths’ successful transition into being productive adults. Despite the city’s youth interest in making the most out of their lives, lack of support and guidance may cause a low transition rate. SYEP intervention is expected to promote a successful transition from youth to adulthood in NYC. The intervention achieves its goal by offering real-world employment experience accompanied by essential life skills training. The intervention also exposes the youth to making money, gain financial knowledge, network, mingle with mentors, and better understand their career interests. Evaluation is the process of examining research, projects, or programs (Saunders, 2015). The process involves collecting and analyzing data from a project’s activities and outcomes with the aim of making conclusions about the project’s effectiveness as well as providing feedback and recommendations that may be helpful in the future. The purpose of the NYC SYEP is to use qualitative and quantitative methods of research to measure the effectiveness, benefits, capacity building, values, and barriers of the SYEP 2020. This process will help separate what works from what does not work for the project; it will also help determine why some strategies work and the influence and reach of the youth empowerment program in New York. The evaluation will be used in providing recommendations for SYEP 2021. According to Madey (2012), incorporating both quantitative and qualitative designs of research in the evaluation process of a project may improve the overall results obtained; this is because the limitations of the qualitative method may be balanced by the strengths of the quantitative method, and vice versa. Therefore, the NYC SYEP evaluation process will utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. Quantitative methods will be in the form of surveys and records obtained from the program, while qualitative data collection will take the form of focus groups and interviews. The data collected will focus on the supervisors' and participants' experiences, characteristics, successes, and hardships. The evaluation sample will include youth participants of the program, employer participants of 2020 SYEP, and involved none participants like parents and interested residents of New York. The youth survey will use data collected from the baseline survey participants complete at the beginning and end of the six-week-long program. The 2020 SYEP youth survey includes the career preferences of the youth, academic performances, demographics, work orientation, and satisfaction with the program. Youth participants will receive an internet-based questionnaire via multiple recruitment efforts including SYEP reminders, social media sites, and emails. The survey may be completed within 20 minutes. All data will then be analyzed using Statistical Analysis Software (SAS); this procedure has been used in previous evaluations of SYEP programs (NYC Government, 2019). Within three weeks following the completion of the 2020 SYEP intervention, a supervisor’s survey will be completed to collect data on the satisfaction of the intervention, increase in work-related skills of the participants, and the youths’ performance. This will be completed through email. Results from the supervisors’ survey will be valid if the response will be at least 10% of the more than 200 supervisor participants. SYEP staff is to review the validity of the results from the survey. Records to be used in the quantitative data collection include the number of enrolled participants, organizations hosting the youth, youth attendance throughout the project, and interventions offered in the program. Information like the age of participants, gender, ward residence, and hours worked will be helpful in the evaluation process of the 2020 NYC youth empowerment program. Focus groups and in-depth interviews with participants, non-participants, and the supervisors of the program will be conducted to gather the information that may not have been recorded in the previous methods of data collection. Like in the previous years, audio from the interviews and focus groups are recorded and then transcribed for the purpose of data collection and storage for future use. Individuals to participate in the focus groups were chosen randomly; email invitations will be sent to the supervisor agencies to avail their staff to take part in the focus groups. Topics discussed in the groups include; challenges in the program, benefits of the program, payroll, and any other relevant matter that the participants may like. It is important to conduct interviews with the supervisors at the end of the program to be able to address their satisfaction, the program’s progress, the intervention’s achievements, and challenges experienced during the implementation of SYEP. The interviews will be in form of open-ended questions. The interviews should target at least 25% of the supervisor participants. The interviews can happen through the phone or in person. The consensus of ethical considerations in research is that no harm of any form should reach the participants; socially, financially, and psychologically (Polonsky & Waller, 2011). It is the responsibility of the project facilitator to uphold ethical standards. Outcomes and findings of the evaluation process will be obtained from the data collected in the focus groups, interviews, surveys, and SYEP data. Characteristics of the youth participants will be used to describe what youth population the intervention is impacting the most. The following are some of the aspects to be considered in the characteristics of the participants; age, gender, ward residence, race, and previous participation in the program. This information may then be represented in tables and graphs to display the visual representations of participants’ demographics (Wilson & Mertens, 2018). The job placement of the youth participants will be useful in determining the success of the intervention. The percent of participants who acquired a job and their satisfaction in the employment may be collected through the interviews and surveys. Information on how many supervisors identified youth they were interested in hiring will be used to determine the overall success of the 2020 SYEP. It is also important to note the improvement as well as the decrease in the identification of talent by the supervisors from previous years. Characteristics of supervisors inferred from data collected may be used to predict the supervisors’ impact on the youth participants of SYEP. Supervisors returning to participate in 2020’s SYEP from previous summers are an indication of a positive impact of the intervention from previous years. Overall youth and employer satisfaction will be used to evaluate the outcome of the intervention; the more the youth and supervisors are satisfied with the experience, the more effective the intervention. According to the 2019 SYEP Report, more than 66% of the adolescent expressed that they were exceptionally satisfied, with 29% saying they were to some degree fulfilled. Just 2% of youth expressed that they were not pleased by the intervention. Most of the youth participants expressed they would take an interest in next year's SYEP. Of these, more than half revealed that they would need to remain in a similar activity. Just eight youth expressed that they would not take part in the intervention due to unpleasant experiences (NBER, 2020). Moreover, 68% of supervisors expressed being incredibly fulfilled, with 28% expressing some degree of satisfaction, and just 4% expressing no satisfaction at all. Practically the entirety of the host agencies said they would take an interest in future SYEP interventions. Furthermore, a majority of the supervisors revealed that they would recommend other host agencies to participate in the following summer (NBER, 2020). Work skills and job readiness obtained by the beneficiaries of the program may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. Information on this may be gathered from the communication improvement of the participants witnessed during the process, reporting to work on time, and skills developed by the youth. This information may also be inferred from the interviews with the supervisors. SYEP is expected to be a success if the beneficiaries report a gain in understanding of their career interest, work preparedness, work ethic, and overall skills. An increase in financial knowledge is also expected from the youth if the SYEP intervention is to achieve its goal of economically empowering the NYC youth; information on this matter may be collected from the interviews with the supervisors and the focus groups with the participants. A significant barrier in the data collection of the evaluation process is that young people may not respond to delicate inquiries genuinely and rather may misrepresent or limit association in specific topics. Be that as it may, because of the enormous sample size, the techniques used to gather the information best fit this project. To limit reaction inclination, members will be informed that their responses in the process will remain anonymous and that their contributions will not affect their employment. To decrease nervousness about anonymity in the research participation, just the primary letter of their first and last names will be used (Fowler, 2014). The use of both qualitative and quantitative methods will be helpful in the validation of the results obtained in the evaluation process. Elements from the findings of this evaluation may be used as a resource for the long-term study of the NYC Summer Youth Employment Program. Strengths discovered from the evaluation indicate the importance of the program to the beneficiaries and the community at large. The benefits include an increase in the GDP, reduced crime rates, increased security, and good governance. Challenges discovered from the evaluation process may be used to create recommendations and request appropriate changes to be implemented in next year’s program.
References
Fowler, F. (2014). Survey research methods. Sage Publication.
Madey, D. (2012). Some Benefits of Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Program Evaluation, with Illustrations, 4 (2). https://www.jstor.org/stable/1164015?seq=1.
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Mertens, D., & Wilson, A. (2018). Program Evaluation Theory and Practice. Guilford Publications.
NBER. (2020). Effects of a Summer Youth Employment Program in NYC. Nber.org. Retrieved from https://www.nber.org/digest/apr15/w20810.html.
NYC Government. (2019). Www1.nyc.gov. Retrieved from https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dycd/downloads/pdf/2018NYC_SYEP_Annual%20Summary.pdf.
Polonsky, F., & Waller, D. (2011). Ethical Considerations in Research. World Scientific.
Saunders, R. (2015). Implementation Monitoring and Process Evaluation (1st ed.). SAGE Publications.
Siṃha, S. (2015). Youth empowerment. ALP Books.
