2007 · Studija · engleski

Degrees of freedom and degrees of certainty: A developmental model for the establishment of evidence-based youth care

Veerman, J. W., & van Yperen, T. A.

Veerman, J. W., & van Yperen, T. A. (2007). Degrees of freedom and degrees of certainty: A developmental model for the establishment of evidence-based youth care. Evaluation and Program Planning, 30(2), 212–221. doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2007.01.011

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Sažetak

Article in Evaluation and Program Planning proposing a developmental model for judging the effectiveness of youth care interventions. The starting point is a practical difficulty: the randomised controlled trial counts as the gold standard, yet it is rarely feasible in everyday youth care, partly for ethical reasons, partly because it would be applied to interventions that are not yet fully developed or not yet accepted in practice. Instead of splitting interventions into effective and ineffective, the authors distinguish four stages. At stage 1 an intervention is merely described in its core elements, that is objectives, target groups and activities. Stage 2 requires an explicit intervention theory setting out what works for whom and why, drawn from literature reviews and expert knowledge. Stage 3 requires preliminary evidence from practice, for example client satisfaction, goal attainment, pre-post, benchmark or quasi-experimental studies. Stage 4 requires clear evidence that the intervention caused the observed effects, which means randomised trials or well-designed repeated case studies. The higher the stage, the greater the certainty demanded and the narrower the choice of evaluation design. The paper is a classification proposal rather than an empirical test and reports no effectiveness findings of its own. The Dutch database of effective youth interventions and the rating scheme of the Grüne Liste Prävention both follow this model.