By Virginia A. Walter, Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles
The YALSA National Research Agenda on Libraries, Teens, and Young Adults is an informative and inspirational document: informative because it succeeds in mapping the landscape of research in this broadly defined, expansive field; and inspirational because it teases any intellectually curious researcher with gaps in the research terrain that beg to be filled.
As an academic who has done research that could fit into all four priority areas identified in the research agenda, I found myself looking for ways that I might do some crossover work that integrated issues from one or more of these. Two approaches occurred to me, both with implications for methodology. First, feeling a little like the woman with a hammer for whom the whole world is a nail, I returned again and again to outcome evaluation as my preferred tool for tackling these questions. Second, I was reminded again of the value of involving young adults directly in the research process as participants and not just as subjects. I will discuss each of these issues briefly and then conclude by speculating about who might implement this research agenda most productively.
Outcome Evaluation
Outcome evaluation seeks to determine the change in skill, attitude, behavior, or status as a result on the participants as a result of a particular library program or service. We owe a big debt of gratitude to Eliza Dresang, Melissa Gross, and Leslie Edmonds Holt for their handbook, Dynamic Youth Services through Outcome-Based Planning and Evaluation, that explains so clearly how and why to use this tool in developing and assessing library services for young people.1
Let’s take a moment and look at each of the four priority areas from the research agenda and see how outcome evaluation might be applied.
The very title for Priority Area 1, “Impact of Libraries on Young Adults,” signals the need for better understanding of the outcomes of our work with teens. Research questions 2 and 4 in this priority area are particularly suitable for outcome evaluation. These questions ask us to identify and then document the ways that individual libraries and national initiatives such as YALSA’s Teen Read Week positively affect adolescent development, including literacy, work readiness, and twenty-first century learning skills.
