Evaluation Methods Commonly Used to Assess Effectiveness of Community Coalitions in Public Health: Results From a Scoping Review

Abstract Community coalitions are well established as an important strategy for addressing public health problems through the lens of health equity, social determinants of health, and/or a social ecologic perspective. After almost three decades of practice and research on community‐based collaborative approaches, a large number of evaluations have been conducted to examine the processes of coalition formation, approaches to creating community change, and whether intermediate and longer‐term outcomes have been achieved. This chapter reports the results of a scoping review of the methods commonly used to evaluate community coalitions. English‐language articles were identified through a search of keywords, including community coalitions and evaluation published in the PubMed database between 2000 and 2018. Only outcome evaluations were included for a total of fifty‐five eligible papers. Two coders abstracted the following domains: public health topic, number of coalitions, framework or theory, study design, data collection methods, temporality, and types of outcomes (i.e., behavioral or health, community change, community capacity). Strategies for attributing observed outcomes to coalitions also were assessed. Findings suggest that the same challenges which limited the field a decade ago remain. Community changes were documented most often, with no behavioral or health outcomes. Studies that evaluated behavioral or health outcomes most commonly evaluated a single program, with limited or no examination of how the coalition(s) influenced program effectiveness. Current methods are adequate for assessing community changes and community capacity outcomes and evaluating specific intervention strategies. The two real stumbling blocks are documenting whether complex and synergistic multi‐sectoral community change leads to population‐level behavioral and health outcomes and, then, parceling out the added value of a coalition approach over other approaches to creating community change.