Exam 12: Evaluation and Policy Analysis

A local community hires a team of researchers to implement and evaluate a drug prevention program. After determining the needs of the community, the researchers suggest four successful drug prevention programs. The community selects one to implement. In their evaluations, the researchers critique the community for only selecting one drug prevention program rather than all four. The researchers further demonstrate that rates of drug use will only be affected if the community makes a more concerted effort in preventing use. The researchers' final conclusion is that the community's efforts to reduce drug use were not successful. These researchers conducted an evaluation of ______.

Compared with true experimental designs, nonexperimental designs ______.

Identify several questions that evaluation projects typically focus on.

What type of assessment is appropriate to determine if a change should be made in program operations?

Describe a research project using a one-shot design.

In a black box evaluation, a researcher addresses the process of the program.

Define and describe the three criteria for establishing a causal relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable.

Evaluation research is ______.

All the following are accurate statements about evaluability assessment EXCEPT which of the following?

The goal of evaluation research is to ______.

Efficiency evaluations indicate that therapeutic communities are ineffective as the costs to operate them exceed the benefits.

Evaluation research was not conducted prior to the 1950s.

A needs assessment could determine if the program is not clearly distinct from other services delivered from the agency and so cannot be evaluated by itself.

Assessing program coverage consists of measuring the degree of congruence between the plan for providing services and treatments and the ways they are actually provided.

The strongest research design for assessing the impacts and outcomes of programs and other interventions is the ______.