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 …
With a view to improving public sector efficiency many governments now make public sector bodies competitively bid for funding. We model the bidding process as a game of spatial competition. Using Monte Carlo simulations we show that in efficient equilibria many bidding groups will not be under competitive pressure. The model suggests that this is because their ideal projects are inherently v…
Effort is a crucial element of the legislative process — writing bills, forming coalitions, crafting strategies, and debating. We develop a model in which legislative decisions are the product of competitive effort by two teams, one trying to pass new legislation, and the other to block it. Teams choose effort levels based on preferences over the policy outcome, political rewards for ef…
We show that the median legislator in the US House is unambiguously closer to the majority party median than to the minority party median. An important implication of this finding is that the median legislator is predisposed to support the majority party's policy agenda. Thus, in the event that the majority party organization exerts no influence over the legislative process, and in the ev…
Committees are often made up of representatives, each of them acting on behalf of a group of individuals or constituency of different size, who make decisions by means of a voting rule which specifies what vote configurations in the committee can pass a decision. This raises the question of the choice of an `adequate' (in a sense to be specified) voting rule, given the different sizes of …
Assuming strict two-party competition, policy balancing models of the US senate imply that senators from the same state will often be from opposite parties and have great ideological divergence. We analyze the effect of independent candidates on these implications. Our theoretical model implies the two state senators will generally not be from opposite parties and will be closer in ideological …
How does generalized social trust — a Trustor's willingness to allow anonymous Trustees to make decisions affecting the Trustor's own welfare without an enforceable contract or guarantee, despite the Trustees' incentives to exploit or defraud — come to predominate in a community? This article is organized around a theoretical argument about the dynamics of generalized trust. This argu…
Polarization hallmarks contemporary Washington's political landscape. While an increasing literature examines the factors propelling this schism, theoretical work investigating its consequences has just begun. Building from a simple bargaining model in which an exogenous actor (e.g. the president) strategically allocates scarce `political capital' to induce changes in legislators' prefere…
In this article I clarify the often muddled distinctions between uncertainty, difficulty, and complexity and show that all three can enhance our understanding of institutional performance and design. To cope with uncertainty, institutions align incentives for information revelation; to handle difficult problems, institutions create incentives for diverse problem-solving approaches; and to…
Many years ago Robert Dahl (1957) argued that the courts are rarely out of alignment with the dominant national political coalition and more recent scholarship has built on this argument. However, despite this, it is still a prevalent belief that courts protect the minority against the power of the majority. This article analyzes these views by examining the influence of the national coal…