Using a qualitative approach to develop an evaluation data set for community-based health promotion programs...

Racial and ethnic disparities in health have increasingly become a central focus of health promotion efforts. At the community level, however, collecting data and evaluating these programs has been a challenge because of the diversity of populations, community contexts, and health issues as well as a range of capacities for conducting evaluation. This article outlines a qualitative research process used to develop a Web-based standard program performance data reporting system for programs funded by the U.S. Office of Minority Health (OMH), but generally applicable to community-based health promotion programs addressing health disparities. The "core-and-module" data set, known as the Uniform Data Set (UDS), is a Web-based system and is used as the programwide reporting system for OMH. The process for developing the UDS can be used by any agency, locality, or organization to develop a tailored data collection system allowing comparison across projects via an activity-based typology around which data reporting is structured. The UDS model enables the collection of grounded data reflecting community-level steps necessary to address disparities as well as a reporting structure that can guide data collection based on broader frameworks now emerging that specify criteria for measuring progress toward the elimination of health disparities.