NCJ Number
175870
Date Published
1995
Length
451 pages
Annotation
This set of three documents on the evaluation of drug treatment programs includes an overview of the evaluation process and a hypothetical case study, a guide with detailed steps for conducting an evaluation, and a resource manual of tools and guidelines for performing an evaluation.
Abstract
The first publication in the set provides an overview of an evaluation process for drug abuse treatment programs that is consistent with standards of the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations; it further provides a hypothetical program's evaluation from start to finish. In the hypothetical case study, the proposed evaluation uses a nonequivalent comparison group design to determine the effectiveness of a standard treatment (in this case, counseling) versus the standard treatment plus a new component (in this case, relapse prevention). Two process measures and two simple outcome measures are analyzed. The second publication in the set is the core guide for evaluation, which has been developed to help drug abuse treatment program administrators and staff who have no previous experience or formal training in evaluation with planning and conducting evaluations of their programs. The steps detailed are a description of the program; the framing of evaluation questions; refining the evaluation questions and selecting measures; choosing an evaluation design; selecting adapting, and developing data collection instruments and procedures; completing evaluation procedures and implementing data collection; analyzing evaluation data; and reporting and using the findings. The resource manual includes steps in a team approach to evaluation, guidelines for computing program costs, sample data collection forms, standard statistical tables, and additional resources. For the individual publications in the set, see NCJ-175871-73.