Learning More from Social Experiments
Evolving Analytic Approaches
Publication Year: 2006
Published by: Russell Sage Foundation
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This book is founded on a commitment to promote evidence-based policy-making in human affairs by developing and refining the research tools available to social scientists. Specifically, the book seeks to advance the science of evaluation research by presenting innovative ways to address the following high-stakes...
Chapter 1 Precedents and Prospects for Randomized Experiments
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When families move to low-poverty neighborhoods, their teenage children are less likely to commit crimes (Ludwig, Hirschfield, and Duncan 2001). Couples therapy and family therapy are equally effective at improving marital relationships (Shadish et al. 1995). Increasing welfare benefit amounts by 10 percent...
Chapter 2 Modeling Cross-Site Experimental Differences to Find Out Why Program Effectiveness Varies
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Charged with planning a new social program, senior administrators in a state human services agency pore over stacks of evaluation research, seeking knowledge and insights that can help them design the new initiative. The evaluations provide them with lots of information about the effects of particular programs on particular people in particular settings. And having used random assignment to measure program effects, or impacts, the studies...
Chapter 3 Constructing Instrumental Variables from Experimental Data to Explore How Treatments Produce Effects
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A random-assignment study can provide the most compelling evidence possible about how an intervention‒be it social, economic, legal, or medical‒affects the people to whom it is targeted. Randomization entails using a lottery-like process to assign each eligible sample member either to a group that is offered the...
Chapter 4 Randomizing Groups to Evaluate Place-Based Programs
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Social interventions such as community improvement programs, school reforms, and employer-based efforts to retain workers, whose aim is to change whole communities or organizations, are often called place-based initiatives. Because such programs are designed to affect the behavior of groups of interrelated people rather...
Chapter 5 Using Experiments to Assess Nonexperimental Comparison- Group Methods for Measuring Program Effects
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The past three decades have seen an explosion in the number of social program evaluations funded by government and nonprofit organizations. These evaluations span a wide range of policy areas, including education, employment, welfare, health, criminal justice, housing, transportation, and the environment. Properly evaluating...
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Page Count: 264
Publication Year: 2006