We reviewed 39 national government- and nongovernment-sponsored data sets related to substance addiction policy. These data sets describe patients with substance use disorders (SUDs), treatment providers and the services they offer, and/or expenditures on treatment. Findings indicate the availability of reliable data on the prevalence of SUD and the characteristics of specialty treatment facili…
This study is an exploratory examination of the projected sustainability of more than 100 projects funded by the Australian government. Using data collected by the body that evaluated the projects and data from a government database, it examines the predictors of various forms of sustainability. Findings show that some two thirds of the project leaders who expected their programs to continue af…
In a randomized test of mixed-mode data collection strategies, 386 participants in the Raising Healthy Children (RHC) Project were either (a) asked to complete a survey via the Internet and later offered the opportunity to complete the survey in person or (b) first offered an in-person survey, with the Web follow-up. The Web-first condition resulted in cost savings although the overall completi…
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 specialist courts and of court-based interventions more …
Growing interest in the institutionalization of evaluation in the public administration raises the question as to which institutional arrangement offers optimal conditions for the utilization of evaluations. Institutional arrangement denotes the formal organization of processes and competencies, together with procedural rules, that are applicable independently of individual evaluation projects.…
Most information on the prevalence of drug use comes from self-report surveys. The sensitivity of such information is cause for concern about the accuracy of self-report measures. In this study, self-reported drug use in the last 48 hr is compared to results from biological assays of saliva samples from 371 young adults entering clubs. The relationship between self-reports and drug presence in …
Findings from an evaluation of a model system for delivering mental health services to youth were reassessed to determine the robustness of key findings to the use of methodologies unavailable to the original analysts. These analyses address a key concern about earlier findings—that the quasi-experimental design involved the comparison of two noncomparable groups. The authors employed propensit…
Communities That Care (CTC) is a prevention system designed to reduce adolescent substance use and delinquency through the selection of effective preventive interventions tailored to a community's specific profile of risk and protection. A community-randomized trial of CTC, the Community Youth Development Study, is currently being conducted in 24 communities across the United States. This artic…
In experimental designs with nested structures, entire groups (such as schools) are often assigned to treatment conditions. Key aspects of the design in these cluster-randomized experiments involve knowledge of the intraclass correlation structure, the effect size, and the sample sizes necessary to achieve adequate power to detect the treatment effect. However, the units at each level of the hi…
This article reports results from a student survey fielded using an experimental design with 14 Kentucky school districts. Seven of the 14 districts were randomly assigned to implement the survey with active consent procedures; the other seven districts implemented the survey with passive consent procedures. We used our experimental design to investigate the impact of consent procedures on (a) …
Nonlethal strangulation of intimate partners has substantial direct health effects and is associated with an increased risk of later lethal violence by a partner or ex-intimate partner but can be difficult to prosecute under felony assault statutes. After review of state laws regarding assault, the authors identified 10 states with specific legislation related to strangulation as of March 2009 …
This study explores the possibility that any drug prevention program might be considered ``evidence-based'' given the use of data analysis procedures that optimize the chance of producing statistically significant results by reanalyzing data from a Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program evaluation. The analysis produced a number of statistically significant differences between the DARE …
Web-based surveys have become more prevalent in areas such as evaluation, research, and marketing research to name a few. The proliferation of these online surveys raises the question, how do response rates compare with traditional surveys and at what cost? This research explored response rates and costs for Web-based surveys, paper surveys, and mixed-mode surveys. The participants included eva…
In contrast to the prevailing image of monitoring systems as technical systems, it is proposed that they should rather be conceived of as social endeavors at exchanging information. Drawing on the monitoring and evaluation framework of Cornford, Doukidis, and Forster, the concept of information agreement is suggested as a way of assessing the quality of monitoring systems in context. Preliminar…
The consent process is an integral piece of research and evaluation studies, especially when conducted within a school setting. The challenge of reaching parents of students to obtain consent is an issue with which those conducting school-based studies grapple. The literature suggests that the success of the consent process can affect the representativeness of the sample. This study describes o…
This article reports results from a feasibility study of a community effort to reduce the availability of legal products that youth can use to get high. The study evaluated the potential of youth purchase attempts to detect actual changes in retail availability of harmful legal products. These results were triangulated with self-reports from retailers about their own policies and practices. Bef…
This study examines prevention practices and perceptions in U.S. schools since passage of federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, using survey data from state education agencies (SEA) and a population-based sample of school districts. Only one third of U.S. public school districts rely on evidence-based prevention curriculum in middle schools. Funding from other sources and large size …
In social policy evaluations, the multiple testing problem occurs due to the many hypothesis tests that are typically conducted across multiple outcomes and subgroups, which can lead to spurious impact findings. This article discusses a framework for addressing this problem that balances Types I and II errors. The framework involves specifying confirmatory and exploratory analyses in study prot…
Many Medicaid programs have either fully or partially carved out mental health services. The evaluation of carve-out plans requires a case-mix model that accounts for differing health status across Medicaid managed care plans. This article develops a diagnosis-based case-mix adjustment system specific to Medicaid behavioral health care. Several different model specifications are compared that u…
In response to the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) within five U.S. cities, the CSEC Community Intervention Project (CCIP) was created to enhance collaboration among nongovernmental organization (NGO) representatives, law enforcement officials and prosecutors in Chicago, Atlantic City, Denver, Washington, D.C., and San Diego. A total of 211 participants were surveyed during a …