Determining "What Works" in Social Programs and Social Policies: Toward a More Inclusive Knowledge Base.

Abstract

Random assignment studies of social programs have become the “gold standard ” or sine qua non of researchers interested in determining what works to improve children’s prospects. In this paper, Lisbeth Schorr, a member of the Children’s Roundtable and Director of the Pathways Mapping Initiative of the Project on Effective Interventions at Harvard University, asserts that rigorous research on impacts is needed but is not sufficient. Too many programs are multidimensional, cannot or should not be standardized, evolve or adapt through time, require participants ’ active involvement, or are heavily dependent for success on good implementation, not just good design. Schorr argues for more flexible forms of evaluation or assessment that require experts and practitioners to hypothesize the linkages between actions and outcomes, prioritize actions, identify interim indicators of success, and pay more attention to the attributes of programs and the institutional contexts that are essential to success. While recognizing the inevitable trade-off between knowing a few things very well and more things with less certainty, Schorr argues for greater efforts to understand broad patterns that connect activities to results, even if this means compromising the search for absolute truths.

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