Date of Award

January 2021

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

Department

School of Public Health

First Advisor

Ashley Hagaman

Second Advisor

Teresa Chahine

Abstract

Mental health concerns are highly prevalent within the college student population. While there are various campus mental health resources available for students to seek help, many choose not to due to their lack of knowledge around navigating resources and the pervasive stigma around mental illnesses. A solution to this problem is The Bandana Project (BP), an innovative mental health awareness and suicide prevention program aimed at changing social norms on college campuses. The initiative’s goals are to combat the stigma around mental illness and seeking care all while boosting the social support between students and their campus peers.

After five years since its inception, The Bandana Project executive team and stakeholders are interested in investigating whether the BP programming is positively impacting campus climates through its goals and objectives. Through this interest, a program evaluation plan was created. This evaluation plan focuses on whether the BP programming had an effect on self-stigma around mental illness and seeking help, peer-to peer support, and engagement with campus mental health resources. The evaluation plan provides individual campus evaluators with the tools to implement an evaluation at their school with the use of recommended survey scales and administrative record collection. The plan also offers a recommended timeline and suggestions for dissemination of the evaluation results. The evaluation plan was created through the review of evaluation literature as well as the examination of the BP program’s work flow and logic model.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

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