Recent Advances in Evaluation Methods (From Handbook of Criminal Justice Evaluation, P 53-62, 1980, Malcolm W Klein and Katherine S Teilmann, ed. - See NCJ-73970)

• NCJ Number: 73971
• Author(s): G Silberman
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 10 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications, Inc
• Publication Type: Best Practice/State-of-the-Art Review
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

New evaluative research projects being conducted by the Office of Research and Evaluation Methods (OREM) are described, and implications of these efforts on the future of criminal justice evaluation are noted.

Abstract

The essay is intended for funders of evaluation programs, policymakers in the legislatures and excutive offices of the American political structure, practitioners of criminal justice, academic and nonacademic evaluators, and students of evaluation research. It examines some of the problems which evaluators encounter in specific areas of criminal justice. For example, the ultimate objective of many criminal justice programs is the reduction of crime, so that crime rates are a key variable in a large number of evaluations. Yet, measuring crime rates is only meaningful within the parameter of opportunities for crime (i.e., the population at risk). The University of Ohio is currently working on a project to construct appropriate population-at-risk measures for Part I crimes to provide evaluators with more realistic measures of the true rates of any particular crime. The two basic problems that continue to plague survey researchers are validity and comparability. The extent to which short term, unaccounted-for events bias survey results is illustrated by a research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which tested citizens' levels of satisfaction with police services. To overcome the problem of comparability, an attempt has been made to standarize the measures employed by the evaluation community. A research team at the University of Illinois is working on a project to develop a standard measure of recidivism, and another team is investigating the possibility of developing a scale with which researchers can measure the environment in prisons. Other projects exploring new evaluation methods are described including a research effort using, randomized response technique to elicit sensitive information in a valid manner. Trends for evaluative research manifest in these projects include increased statistical sophistication, additional variables viewed as legitimate for inclusion in evaluations, and standardization. Eleven references are supplied.