商品簡介
Langbein (public administration and policy, American U.) outlines statistical skills needed by public affairs, political science, sociology, and economics graduate students and practitioners to evaluate the effectiveness of public policies, programs, or projects for decision-making purposes. Methods apply to government-authorized programs in the US and other countries (but are also applicable to the private sector) and focus on causal evaluation and improving the defensibility or validity of causal claims about program impact. She discusses the different types of validity that make evaluation conclusions defensible; the concept of internal validity; three basic research designs used to assess causal claims about program impact (the randomized experiment, the quasi experiment, and the nonexperiment), their variations, and statistical models that can be used to analyze their data; survey sampling and questionnaire construction; and meta-analysis. This edition has new examples and samples of successful program evaluations, updates to all methodologies, and a focus on alternative designs. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
