The Central Mothers Program is a parenting program for young, unmarried mothers.  The program seeks to provide young, unmarried mothers with the necessary knowledge to effectively and successfully parent (interact, communicate, discipline) their children.  The program focuses on teaching the young women about child development, appropriate parenting styles and parenting skills, and assists the women with access to community resources and support.  Currently, there are 300 women participating in the program between the ages of 18 24. The women participate in weekly group sessions with a licensed counselor.  Each group consists of 15 women. During the group sessions, the women work on building their knowledge of parenting styles, child development, and developing appropriate parenting skills, by apply the information to various real life scenarios. The women also discuss issues like budgeting, housekeeping, and childcare. Several different groups meet during the week. One of the counselors at Central has approached the director about adding another component to the program. The counselor would like to add individual counseling sessions with some of the women (not all) to work on developing stress management techniques for single mothers. The counselor plans to select 25 women to participate in the weekly individual counseling sessions over 16 weeks.  The counselor believes this will facilitate the attainment of the goals and objectives of the program.

For this project, students will develop a plan to evaluate both the group and individual program components of the Central Mothers Program. Students should develop a mission statement for the program and identify the goals and objectives of the program.  Students should select the most feasible research design to evaluate the effectiveness of the group sessions and the individual sessions being added to the program. There should be an identification and discussion of how client success/progress will be measured and how the information from an outcome evaluation could be used to inform program administrators and program director.  Students should identify and discuss the ethical concerns for the evaluations and identify and discuss two threats to validity.  Use of the NOHS Code of Ethics as well as the relationship to Saint Leos core values of Integrity and Community are required.

The project should be typed, doubled spaced, use APA formatted references to support the information presented (in-text citations and fully formatted reference page). Use of the text and 3 outside scholarly resources is required.