Clarifying program outcomes to reduce ‘talking past each other’ about program effectiveness September 27, 2007
Posted by Paul Duignan in : DoView, Outcomes models, Outcomes theory & the news , 1 comment so far
This morning when casually looking through old Washington Post articles which make reference to the General Accountability Office (GAO). (Hey: people have all sorts of hobbies and no one challenges them about it – beer tab collecting etc.). I came across an article about DARE – the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program. This is a program which puts law enforcement personnel into schools to talk to school children about drugs. The wisdom of funding DARE and other drug education in schools is the source of endless debate in evaluation and public health circles as important summaries of the evidence (such as the 2003 GAO report) referred to in the article fail to find evidence of the program having an effect on illicit drug use. (more…)
Typical media story about outcomes – crime stats increase September 24, 2007
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Outcomes theory & the news , add a commentThe issues dealt with by outcomes theory – which looks at the ways we think, discuss and argue about outcomes – are central to many of the political debates which we read about daily in the media. For instance today (24 September 2007) the Washington Post carries a story with the headline FBI Report: Violent Crime on the Rise. It’s fairly typical of the type of story we see. From an outcomes perspective what are the important elements of these types of stories? Firstly, there’s a claim by the media that there’s some ‘news’ in what they’re reporting – that something is changing. The media need this, basically what they sell is news of change – if nothing changes there’s nothing to tell us about, there’s no ‘news’. In this case the subtitle is: ‘First significant increase in homicides and robberies since 1993 continues.’ Outcome measures can go up and down due to statistical variation, is this change actually significant from a statistical point of view? There’s no way to tell from the story, I presume they’re not referring to statistical significance in the title. If they were they would need to make this clear in the article if we are to be able to have any basis for deciding whether we should regard this as an actual change or not. (more…)