Community Readiness

Lesson 2: Preparing to Conduct a Community Readiness Assessment


Interview Tips

A Community Readiness assessment can only address a single, well-defined issue, so it is important to identify this issue before beginning the assessment process.
The table below displays examples of issues that may impact your local community.
Drug & Alcohol Use

Transportation

HIV/AIDS

Hepatitis C

Intimate Partner Violence

Child Abuse

Obesity/Nutrition

Head Injury

Environmental Protection

Suicide

Problem Gambling

Heart Health

The issues provide are quite vague and can be difficult to measure for readiness to change. To implement successful, sustainable, and measurable strategies, issues need to be clearly defined. Here are a few examples on how to define them more clearly:

VAGUE

SPECIFIC

Mental Health

Untreated depression among rural older adults (65+) living alone without access to reliable transportation

Alcohol Problem

Binge drinking among first-year college students living in dormitories

Problem Gambling

Online sports betting among high school students ages 14-17 using mobile devices

Activity

Using a piece of paper and pen, or a computer application, take 3-5 minutes to practice refining the issues that have been provided. You may choose to do one or two, or all of them. You may find that you are very familiar with one or two issues if you work in those areas; we challenge you to use select at least one issue that you are less familiar with, and to refine issues in several different ways.