Publisher's Synopsis
The front edge of the philanthropic sector has spent the last decade experimenting with innovative grantmaking in the hopes of triggering significant and sustainable change. But the sector's approach to evaluation is not keeping pace with these innovations. In many cases, traditional evaluation approaches fail to meet the fast-paced information needs of philanthropic decision makers and innovators in the midst of complex social change efforts. Program evaluation is important not only because it informs decision makers about whether the program is successful, but also because it is a major tool for learning. Evaluation can identify ways to improve the quality of the program, structure it more effectively, and make it more responsive to the needs of its users. As such, it can also be a catalyst for program innovation. However, by focusing mostly on measuring program outcomes, standard models of evaluation limit evaluation's contribution to organizational learning and program change. Protecting the rights and respecting the dignity of everyone involved, especially through confidentiality, is essential to establishing and maintaining trust. In an evaluation, there are often multiple stakeholders with multiple objectives. The views and interests of all stakeholders should be articulated, understood, and taken into account. In response to both external and internal pressures, programs are always changing. Evaluators should understand these changes and incorporate them into the evaluation. In evaluating the effects of a social program, there may be many questions of interest, such as the benefits accruing to participants, spillover effects on nonparticipants, and program costs, which may include tax receipts used to finance the program. For example, consider the effects of a school subsidy program that provides incentive payments to parents to send their children to school. If the subsidies are sufficiently large, we would expect such a program to have direct effects on the families participating in it. This volume considers studies and methods for evaluating the impact of social programs in the presence of nonrandom program placement or program selection. Programs in the real world change rapidly and continually. In the course of the evaluation, the evaluators are likely to encounter important developments that impact its operation. These may include changes in the population being served, alterations in the service delivery process, elimination or addition of service components, and changes in policies that affect funding, participant eligibility, or outcome measures. This book also explores the sociopolitical nature of language in evaluation and illustrates the role evaluators can play as the translator and interpreter in assessing the outcomes of social programs. The book also considers methods for exante evaluation, which can be used to assess the effects of programs prior to their implementation, for example, in trying to design a program that achieves some desired outcomes for a given cost. Throughout the book, numerous examples from the development literature illustrate applications of the different estimation methods and highlight factors affecting estimator performance. The purpose of this volume is to fill this gap in the literature and to provide detention administrators and staff with empirical data about the effectiveness of a social problem-solving and social programs intervention for decreasing depression.
