Improving Evaluation of Anticrime Programs (2005) / Chapter Skim
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7 Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations: Priorities and Focus
7 Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations: Priorities and Focus
Pages 61-67
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From page 61... ...
This observation leads to the following recommendations: · Agencies that sponsor and fund evaluations of criminal justice programs should routinely assess and prioritize the evaluation opportunities within their scope. Resources should mainly be directed toward programs for which there is (a)
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From page 62... ...
Moreover, once the program to be evaluated has been identified, certain key information about its nature and circumstances is necessary to develop an evaluation design that is feasible to implement. It follows that a sponsoring agency cannot launch an impact evaluation with reasonable prospects for success unless the specific program to be evaluated has been identified and background information gathered about the feasibility of evaluation and what considerations must be incorporated into the design.
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From page 63... ...
and the review of proposals for conducting it should involve expert panels of evaluation researchers with diverse methodological backgrounds and sufficient opportunity for them to explore and discuss the trade-offs and potential associated with different approaches. The members of these panels should be selected to represent evaluators whose own work represents high methodological standards to avoid perpetuating the weaker strands of evaluation practice in criminal justice.
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From page 64... ...
Meeting the assumptions that are required to produce results with high internal validity in such studies is difficult and requires statistical models that are poorly understood by laypeople and, indeed, many evaluation researchers. · Research designs for assessing program effects should also address such related matters as the generalizability of those effects, the causal mechanisms that produce them, and the variables that moderate them when feasible.
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From page 65... ...
The review panels at this second stage focus solely on the scientific merit and likelihood of successful implementation of the proposed research. · The likelihood of a successful evaluation is greatly diminished when it is imposed on programs that have not agreed voluntarily or as a condition of funding to participate.
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From page 66... ...
Agencies such as NIJ with a major investment in evaluation 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 applications 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 and measurement studies that expand the repertoire of relevant outcome variables and knowledge about their characteristics and relationships for purposes of impact evaluation (e.g., self-report delinquency and criminality, official records of arrests, convictions, and the like, measures of critical mediators)
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From page 67... ...
To be effective, such a unit will need a dedicated budget, a certain amount of authority over the evaluation research budgets and project selection, and independence from undue program and political influence on the nature and implementation of the evaluation projects undertaken. · 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.
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