Research synthesis of evaluation findings is a multistep process. An investigator identifies a research question, acquires the relevant literature, codes findings from that literature, and analyzes the coded data to estimate the average treatment effect and its distribution in a population of interest. The process of estimating the average…

Recent meta-analyses of drug-court studies recognized the poor methodological quality of the evaluations, with only a few being randomized. This article critiques the design of the randomized studies from a statistical perspective. Learning points are identified for future drug-court studies and are applicable to evaluations both of other…

Background: Surveys of community-based programs are difficult to conduct when there is virtually no information about the number or locations of the programs of interest. This article describes the methodology used by the Helping Young Smokers Quit (HYSQ) initiative to identify and profile community-based youth smoking cessation programs in the…

Evaluations that combine social science and law have tremendous potential to illuminate the effects of governmental policies and yield insights into how effectively policy makers' efforts achieve their aims. This potential is infrequently achieved, however, because such interdisciplinary research contains often overlooked substantive and…

Six potential problems with the use of randomized experiments to evaluate programs in the field are addressed. Problems include treatment dilution, treatment contamination or confounding, inaccurate case flow and power estimates, violations of the random assignment processes, changes in the environmental context, and changes in the treatment…

Correction for guessing does not fulfill its intended function when test takers who have nothing to gain from scoring will respond randomly when they could have answered correctly had they tried. Raw scores underestimate abilities. If random guessing is more prevalent in the control group, correction for guessing inflates treatment effects.…

Although experiments are viewed as the gold standard for evaluation, some of their benefits may be lost when, as is common, outcomes are not defined for some sample members. In evaluations of marriage interventions, for example, a key outcome--relationship quality--is undefined when a couple splits up. This article shows how treatment-control…

This article addresses the issue of falling response rates in telephone surveys. To better understand and maintain respondent goodwill, concepts of psychological contract and respondent expectations are introduced and explored. Results of the qualitative study show that respondent expectations are not only socially contingent but also…

This article explores the statistical methodologies used in demonstration and effectiveness studies when the treatments are applied across multiple settings. The importance of evaluating and how to evaluate these types of studies are discussed. As an alternative to standard methodology, the authors of this article offer an empirical binomial…

Cross-cultural adaptation of study instruments is a difficult, time-consuming, but arguably cost-effective process. If conducted properly, it has the advantage that the translated study instruments are accurate, easy to understand, accessible, and culturally appropriate to the target audience and produce reliable and valid data. This article…

Risks of life on the street caused by inclement weather, harassment, and assault threaten the unsheltered homeless population. We address some challenges of enumerating the street homeless population by testing a novel capture-recapture (CR) estimation approach that models individuals' intermittent daytime visibility. We tested walking and…

Administered a survey to 606 National Science Foundation-funded principal investigators and their institutions' representatives (n=91) to study responses to unethical research behavior. Scientists appear to perceive that they uphold their responsibility to respond through disclosures in the research community; administrators propose to report such…

Active parental consent policies have been blamed for low participation rates and selection bias (i.e., loss of "high-risk" youths) in school-based studies. In this article, the authors describe active consent procedures that produced an overall active consent rate of 79% in a sample of more than 4,500 middle school students attending 29…

The normative implications of applying significance tests in evaluation research are examined. The authors conclude that evaluators often make normative decisions, based on the traditional .05 significance level in studies with small samples. Additional reporting of the magnitude of impact, the significance level, and the power of the test is…

Selectivity problems are discussed in terms of a general model that is estimated by the maximum likelihood method. Both single-group and multiple-group analyses are considered. An extension of the general model to latent variable models is discussed. (Author/PN)