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Guide to Program Evaluation
Assessing Program Performance: Experimental (Control Group) Design (Randomized Controlled Trial)
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Assessing Program Performance
Establishing the "Activities-Outcomes" Connection: Evaluation Experiments
Experimental (Control Group) Design (Randomized Controlled Trial)
As in the quasi-experiment, a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involves comparing program participants and non-participants. In order to ensure equivalence, the RCT involves randomly assigning participants to groups. This means that which offenders receive program services and which do not is decided not by a judge or other criminal justice administrator, but by the evaluator. This random assignment procedure is the best way of ensuring that there are no differences between program participants and non-participants except for the program services provided to the former group.
This design, however, cannot always be employed to assess criminal justice initiatives. For some initiatives, like community-wide efforts and multijurisdictional law enforcement drug task forces, assigning cases randomly is not feasible. In other cases, judges and other criminal justice administrators may refuse to surrender their discretion in the interests of sound evaluation practice.
Learn More...
Random Assignment (National Institute of Justice, pp. 4.3-4.4)
The True Experiment (General Accounting Office)
Use of Random Assignment (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention)
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