Quasi-experimental designs are often used when conducting program evaluations on nonprofit organizations. Examples of such organizations are police stations, fire departments, emergency rooms, and community health clinics. It is not possible to randomly assign people to go to a specific emergency room or community health clinic, as this is dependent on where someone is when an emergency occurs or where someone lives — which cannot be randomly assigned. Therefore, a single factor experimental design is not possible. Quasi-experiments allow researchers to collect data without random assignment. Information gained from quasi-experiments as part of program evaluation can help to improve patient care, cost efficiency, patient satisfaction, timeliness of services, job satisfaction, and so on.
Pretend you have a grant to create a quasi-experiment to do a program evaluation on a nonprofit. Choose one of the five types of program evaluation that you would use (needs assessment, program theory and design assessment, process evaluation, outcome evaluation, or efficiency assessment) and respond to the following. Consider responding to peers who chose a different type of program evaluation than you did.
- What nonprofit(s) would you focus on? Why?
- What would be your research question?
- What type of program evaluation did you choose? Why?
- What data would you gather? Why?
- Would you want to use an employee or external consultant to collect the data? Why?
- How might the results of this program evaluation be useful?
Remember to offer suggestions to your classmates about their study ideas.
In order to earn credit for your peer responses, please be sure that your posts are both substantial and relevant to the topic of research methods.
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