Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello! We are April Wall-Parker (Research Coordinator) and Kimberly Lohrfink (Senior Research Coordinator) with Pressley Ridge, a large multi-state, multi-service behavioral healthcare organization. Like most agencies, we rely on outcome measures to understand whether programs are working and communicate value to partners. Historically, our outcomes have focused on safety, permanency, and well-being. While these are important, one question kept coming up for us: Do these measures truly reflect what youth and families want to get out of services? We may be measuring what seems important, without knowing if it actually aligns with youth and family values, so we decided to listen more intentionally.
Research shows that when youth and families feel heard in defining their goals, outcomes improve. With that in mind, we began redesigning our organizational outcomes by going directly to youth and families. Instead of asking whether existing measures worked for them, we asked open-ended questions about what success looked like in their lives and what they hoped would be different when services ended.
We collected information using surveys, interviews, and focus groups and then analyzed what we heard across multiple programs. This was not simple. We serve youth and families in residential treatment, treatment foster care, alternative education, community-based programs, family preservation, outpatient mental health, and transitional-age youth programs, and no single outcome fits all those experiences. The challenge was identifying themes that were meaningful across services while still honoring important differences.
Nineteen total themes emerged. That was too many! Using thematic clustering, we were able to distill the common threads within these themes to four main categories: behavioral change, emotional regulation and growth, relational health, and general well-being.
After identifying themes, we shared the themes that emerged with youth, families, and staff to check whether we got it right. This not only strengthened the quality of the information but also reinforced that their voices mattered.
We used these four themes to identify measures (see Rad Resources) that could be incorporated into our organizational outcome metrics. We are now collecting data on hope, coping skills, relational health, and social determinants of health. We began using our new outcomes in July 2025. Early feedback is telling us that we are collecting the right information, and our outcome conversations have shifted from compliance exercises toward shared meaning.
This experience has challenged the way that we traditionally define success, and we now look at metrics from the viewpoint of our various interest holders. If there is one takeaway from this experience, it is this: outcome metrics should not be static or solely driven by executive stakeholders. Whether your organization is large or small, consider how youth and family voices can inform what success truly means. The answers may surprise you—and ultimately lead to outcomes that matter more.
Three of the measures that we used have versions that are freely available to access: The Children’s and Adult Hope Scales, The Brief Resilient Coping Scale and The Social Determinants of Health Checklist.
The relational health scale that we utilized was developed by Pressley Ridge, based on a participatory research study, We are in the process of completing a validation study.
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