Targeting Failure in Evaluation Research, Essay Example

The criminal justice field in any country is the battlefield of research and practice, since they often target different variables, and fail to act in a congruent, mutually complementary way. The reason for such imbalance is that some programs enjoy the public attention and popularity, and the practitioners thereof fail to recognize the real-life impact of their activities on the public they address by their interventions. It is sometimes surprising to find out how the activities initially addressed at bringing about an improvement to the lives of the target population accomplishes a totally contrary goal. It is understandable that many people practicing such programs simply refuse to acknowledge that their actions directed at bringing virtue actually give rise to the vice they are trying to combat. At times, such contrary effect cannot be explained, and this is the main reason for which it often cannot be accepted.

The present story is highly relevant to the DARE program discussed in the article of Berman and Fox (2009); the researchers at first provided the public attitude to DARE that has been considered an effective anti-drug use program used in the majority of American schools. This program has been accepted so widely and so trustfully that the “successful” experience of combating the drug use among teens has even been transferred to dozens of other countries. However, popularizing a program and stating that it is a success cannot make it successful in reality, as the research evidence suggests. Hence, a properly organized longitudinal study examining the real-life impact of DARE has repeatedly shown that the program is unsuccessful, and produces either no impact on the drug use rates, or even causes them to rise.

The present situation illustrates the dilemma of a failure in evaluation – before a program or an intervention (especially the one funded by the state or federal authorities, which is the realm of taxpayer dollars), a scientific trial thereof should be conducted to justify the expenditures. Otherwise, the practice is isolated from theory, which has been repeatedly proven to cause a failure of initiatives. Only evidence-based research and evaluation research can provide the valuable scientific proof of a program’s potential efficiency, and inform the political decision-making on whether taxpayer dollars should be allocated to its promotion and implementation or not. It seems that not all programs, even founded on the sound theoretical base, can be successful in reality – the nature of human behavior is probabilistic, and people always have a choice to choose the behavior alternative to the one predicted by scientists. For this reason, even the strongest and more logical interventions may be a failure, which has to be perceived as a normal occasion and a readily expected outcome by criminal justice researchers. Targeting a failure in an objective of utmost importance – it is not reasonable to drop a program on which time and effort, and sometimes money has been spent. The task of researchers in the cases of failures is to reconsider each stage of program design and implementation, and to find the stage at which the outcomes of the program have become incongruent with its objectives.

The concept of objectives seems to be the key to targeting a failure in evaluation research; the program is a success in case it meets the pre-estimated objectives, and it is not in case it does not meet them. Hence, the researchers and practitioners have to define the expected outcomes clearly before embarking on the project; this will help to make the evaluation in an unbiased way, not in the attempt to save the program that does not work adequately. A failure can be an effective tool in informing policy, showing the drawbacks of programs and allowing the decision-makers either to alter their objectives, or to alter the programs to meet the same objectives. As for the reasonable expectations, the researchers and policy-makers have to make unbiased needs assessment by correlating the program’s outcomes and expenditures it involves. In some types of crimes, even a 1% reduction is a good outcome, in case programs are not costly. However, some programs are costly, time-, and effort-involving; hence, a stronger motivation for embarking on such projects is needed, and only a minimum of 5-10% reduction may serve as an effective persuasion tool for making the decision-makers and politicians to approve such programs.

References

Berman, G., & Fox, A. (2009). Lessons from the Battle over D.A.R.E: The Complicated Relationship between Research and Practice. Bureau of Justice Assistance. U. S. Department of Justice, pp. 1-16.