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Social Policies : A Policy 's Success Or Failures

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There are different approaches and methods used to evaluate social policies. Social policies can be evaluated for many reasons including: tracking a policy’s progression or tracing a policy’s successes or failures. There is limited research concerning any significant differences in how social policies are evaluated in terms of method, compared to other policies such health or public policy. Yet the approach to designing of a particularly can subjective during an evaluation in terms of what exactly is being measure, the reason and what particular tools will be used.

Many authors indicate that common approach and essential step in evaluating policies is what will be measure when evaluating policies. Audrey Begum (1980) states that …show more content…

Impact Assessment includes” many of those evaluation activities with which we are most familiar: selection of objectives and criteria, specification of target populations, development of research design and data collection techniques and evaluation reports (Audrey Begun, Social Policy Evaluation: An Example from Drinking Age Legislation, 1980, p. 167). There are some weaknesses to these approaches. Begum (1980) notes that “policy evaluations efforts are subject to validity threats from political sources (as cited in Segall, 1976,). The impact of political realities on the policy evaluation effort can be attributed to a tendency described by Campbell wherein “specific reforms are advocated as though they were certain to be successful” (as cited in Segall, 1976, p.166). Begum (1980) explains the concerns the potential bias resulting from the fact that evaluators are often encouraged to demonstrate “surprising” findings and results (as cited in Mushkin, 1973, p.166). Begum (1980) explains that “much of the contrast and conflict among evaluation reports stem from a lack of consistency in how various evaluation personnel approached these level tasks (p. 167). Begum (1980) notes that “Because there are so many sources of value conflict among evaluation experts, as well as wide variety of unpredictable influences on evaluation efforts, it is not likely that any one system of

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