Participation as a measure of program success

The formal evaluation of social welfare programs has imposed stringent demands upon research methodologies in economics and other social sciences. Often the validity of the performance criteria must be reassessed. We now know, for instance, that simply counting numbers served or dollars spent provides insufficient information. The Institute was closely associated with the development of target effectiveness as a rule-of-thumb measure. More recently, Institute researchers, among others, have promoted another criterion: the level of program participation. In the article that follows, Jennifer Warlick, Research Associate at the Institute, assesses the advantages and pitfalls of this measure.