Solving Problems, Ensuring Relevance, and Facilitating Change: The Evolution of Needs Assessment Within Cooperative Extension

Abstract

Helping people solve the practical problems of everyday life while maintaining contemporary relevance describes the mission of Cooperative Extension. To achieve that mission, Extension professionals have increasingly relied on information gathered from stakeholders to identify relevant problems and potential educational solutions. The methods, efforts, and activities to understand people and their problems are collectively referred to as needs assessment. This article explores the history and evolution of needs assessment in Cooperative Extension, as well as in a broader educational context. While tracing needs assessment through the decades, this article examines the needs assessment opportunities and challenges faced by Cooperative Extension. Emerging trends and implications for the future of Extension needs assessment are also discussed.

Building trust, building futures: Knowledge co-production as relationship, design, and process in transdisciplinary science

“…An organized, consistent, and (ideally) representative group of stakeholders that can co-design and co-generate knowledge in a sustained manner, that is a stakeholder advisory group (SAG), has the potential to provide multi-method engagement in FEWS research resulting in co-produced knowledge and validated models. Stakeholder advisory groups, research advisory councils, and citizen advisory committees have been used since the 1940s in the Cooperative Extension Service (Kelsey and Hearne, 1949;Franz et al, 2015;Garst and McCawley, 2015), and from the 1970s to support planning studies (Ertet, 1979;Lafon et al, 2004), environmental policy development (Lynn and Busenberg, 1995), forest management (McGurk et al, 2006;Hunt and McFarlane, 2007;Robson and Rosenthal, 2014), phosphorus management (Iwaniec et al, 2016), coastal risk management (Creed et al, 2018), and more recently in FEWS research (Bielicki et al, 2019). The scope of advisory groups has typically been nominal engagement (e.g., (Ertet, 1979;Lynn and Busenberg, 1995;McGurk et al, 2006;Bielicki et al, 2019), or instrumental engagement (e.g., (Lafon et al, 2004;McGurk et al, 2006;Hunt and McFarlane, 2007;Robson and Rosenthal, 2014), with few advisory groups that are set up to provide representative engagement (McGurk et al, 2006;Creed et al, 2018) or transformative engagement (Iwaniec et al, 2016).…”

Improving Sustainable Food Access and Availability in Rural Communities: An Assessment of Needed Resources

“…As Extension aims to increase their impact on health promotion and food systems work more broadly, needs assessments using "client" personas with audience segmentation strategies can increase capacity to address needs using limited financial and human resources [4]. To achieve cost-efficient and sustainable programs, it is important to align program development with demonstrated needs to ensure programs address an actual gap identified among the audience [6]. Needs assessments are "tool[s] for making better decisions" [14]; combining needs assessment techniques with audience segmentation strategies ensures a greater likelihood of utilization by intended audiences [22,24].…”

“…However, achieving community-based health intervention outcomes depends on appropriately planned, cost-efficient, and high-quality needs assessment at the early stages of intervention [5]. Despite potentially high time and financial costs, conducting needs assessments prior to program implementation may save costs over the long term and create more effective and sustainable Extension programs [6].…”

Assessing produce safety rule knowledge, behavior change, compliance, and the development of resources of specialty crop produce growers in the US: North Central Region, Alabama, Georgia

“…The first step in developing an Extension program is to assess the needs of a target population (Franz et al, 2015;Garst & McCawley, 2015). Various assessment methods can be used in the planning and development of a tailored Extension program, including but not limited to surveys, interviews, group process, capacity assessment, and participatory research (Fraser et al, 2016;Garst & McCawley 2015, Rennekamp & Nall, 2000.…”

“…The first step in developing an Extension program is to assess the needs of a target population (Franz et al, 2015;Garst & McCawley, 2015). Various assessment methods can be used in the planning and development of a tailored Extension program, including but not limited to surveys, interviews, group process, capacity assessment, and participatory research (Fraser et al, 2016;Garst & McCawley 2015, Rennekamp & Nall, 2000. Focus groups and surveys are standard methods used to collect qualitative data by Extension professionals to assess target audience's attitudes, opinions, knowledge, demographics, behavior, perception, or relationships between chosen variables of a specific topic or intervention (Fraser et al, 2016;Patten et al, 2018;Radhakrishna & Doamekpor, 2008;Scheinberg, 2013).…”