Improving Evaluation of Anticrime Programs (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-6
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Recent criticisms of evaluation research in criminal justice indicate a need for greater attention to the quality of evaluation design and the implementation of evaluation plans. In the context of concerns about evaluation methods and quality, the National Institute of Justice asked the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Research Council to conduct a workshop on improving the evaluation of criminal justice programs and to follow up with a report that extracts guidance for effective evaluation practices from those proceedings.
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· Agencies that sponsor and fund evaluations of criminal justice programs should assess and assign priorities to the evaluation opportunities within their scope. Resources should be directed mainly toward evaluations with the greatest potential for practical and policy significance from expected evaluation results and for which the program circumstances are amenable to productive research.
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When requesting an impact evaluation for a program of interest, the sponsoring agency should specify as completely as possible the evaluation questions to be answered, the program sites expected to participate, the relevant outcomes, and the preferred methods to be used. Agencies should devote sufficient resources during the RFP-development stage, including support for site visits, evaluability assessments, pilot studies, pipeline analyses, and other such preliminary investigations necessary to ensure the development of strong guidance to the field in RFPs.
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Proposals that pass this screen should then receive a scientific review from a panel of wellqualified researchers, focusing solely on the scientific merit and likelihood of successful implementation of the proposed research. · Given the state of criminal justice knowledge, randomized experimental designs should be favored in situations where it is likely that they can be implemented with integrity and will yield useful results.
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Agencies with a major investment in evaluation, such as the National Institute of Justice, should devote a portion of available funds to methodological development in areas such as the following: · Research aimed at adapting and improving impact evaluation designs for criminal justice applications; for example, development and validation of effective uses of alternative designs such as regressiondiscontinuity, selection bias models for nonrandomized comparisons, and techniques for modeling program effects with observational data. · Development and improvement of new and existing databases in ways that would better support impact evaluation of criminal justice programs.
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· The agency personnel responsible for developing and overseeing impact evaluation projects should include individuals with relevant research backgrounds who are assigned to evaluation functions and maintained in those positions in ways that ensure continuity of experience with the challenges of criminal justice evaluation, methodological developments, and the community of researchers available to conduct quality evaluations. · The unit and personnel responsible for developing and completing evaluation projects should be supported by review and advisory panels that provide expert consultation in developing RFPs, reviewing evaluation proposals and plans, monitoring the implementation of evaluation studies, and other such functions that must be performed well in order to facilitate high-quality evaluation research.
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