Abstract
Administrators are faced daily with questions from various constituents regarding how well their program is doing and whether it has really had an effect on the participants. Answering these questions requires clearly defined and measured outcomes. In many programs, the time hasn’t been taken to implement the necessary steps to have relevant outcome measures on participants, despite their importance. Part of the reason is the focus on process analysis; part is due to ignorance of the literature regarding currently accepted outcome measures; and part of the reason is simply lack of time to get the data on outcomes or to develop the techniques to capture outcome measures. Our general feeling is that administrators can operationalize outcome measures, but they simply haven’t, due to financial, time, or “perpetual crisis” restraints. Thus, our attempt in this chapter is to provide you with a “broad brush” approach to selecting and measuring appropriate outcome measures that can be used for a number of purposes, including reporting, program evaluation, and as the basis for impact and benefit-cost analyses.
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© 1988 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Schalock, R.L., Thornton, C.V.D. (1988). Measuring Program Outcomes. In: Program Evaluation. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3508-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3508-3_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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