Suchergebnisse

The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole and reformed sentencing for all felony of-fenders committed on or after January 1, 1995. We examine the impact of this legislationon reported crime rates using different time series approaches. In particular, structuraltime series models are considered as an alternative to the Box-Jenkins ARIMA modelsthat form the standard time series approach to intervention analysis. Limited supportfor the deterrent impact of parole abolition and sentence reform is obtained using uni-variate modelling devices, even after including unemployment as an explanatory variabIe.Finally, the flexibility of structural time series models is illustrated by presenting a mul-tivariate analysis that provides some additional evidence of the deterrent impact of thenew legislation.

AbstractIn 2009 the national government of China launched massive health reforms, together with other social and economic reforms. For the first time, evaluation was included in the draft national plan of health reforms and development—the so‐called "12th Five‐Year National Plan for Health Development (2011–2015)." The Chinese and Canadian researchers, with the support of the International Development Research Centre, Canada, helped to facilitate a deliberative process by various actors by conceptualizing an indicators system and mapping out key questions to be addressed by evaluating implementation of the national health plan. The conceptual indicators system serves as a platform for users and implementers of evaluation program to understand needs for evaluation better and sharpen focus on more prominent dimensions such as equity and contextual analysis.

AbstractIn 2014 the authors of this paper, evaluators from China and Canada, jointly interviewed 12 policymakers in China at the national and provincial levels. This paper describes the needs of policymakers and how they view the evaluation capacity‐building needs of the health system. The learnings from the policymaker dialogues informed the evaluation capacity‐building efforts at three pilot sites in China. This paper focuses on the evaluation capacities needed by policymakers and implementers specifically to address inequities in the health sector, unlike most publications that focus on evaluation capacities of researchers.

AbstractThis paper discusses the development and implementation of structured guidelines that contained a fixed set of questions as part of a project in building evaluation capacity for addressing health inequities in the health sector in China. The ambition of the guidelines was to test whether a structured process of questions could aid teams that did not have a strong background in evaluation to complete equity‐focused evaluations and also help raise the salience of health equity as an important goal of health systems reform among the participants of the project. The guidelines were informed by multiple perspectives that included the literature on social determinants of health, realist evaluation, and utilization/influence perspectives. One noteworthy aspect of this project was that the participants in this capacity‐building project were local and national policymakers, practitioners, and university researchers. Our original goal was to test these guidelines in equity‐focused policy interventions in three separate provinces of China. One key insight from this project was that there is a need to move away from a testing perspective to a developmental approach in formulating evaluation guidelines that can work across multiple organizational and country contexts and also closely reflect the needs of practitioners and policymakers in evaluation capacity‐building efforts.

Background: There is a need to rethink evaluator competencies given the harsh and paralyzing realities of COVID. The pandemic was a time where there was a need to balance diverse perspectives given the limited scientific evidence that existed when faced with a genuinely unprecedented time. In the Fall of 2021 (September to October), the Evaluation Centre for Complex Health Interventions in partnership with the Asia Pacific Evaluation Association organized a three-part webinar series in response to the multiple issues that surfaced during COVID-19, and specifically, the implications of the pandemic for rethinking evaluator competencies and evaluator training. The presenters were from multiple countries including India, Canada, USA, UK, and South Africa.
Purpose: The presenters pushed for more responsive evaluation approaches to address inequities and sustainability and for a decolonized approach to knowledge building. The webinar raised a number of themes that have potential implications for future discussions on evaluator competencies including: enhancing evaluation contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the need to rethink evaluation criteria, the need to embrace and address varieties of uncertainties, focus on diversity and heterogeneity; understanding the role of contexts in complex programs and policies; the need to reconceptualize sustainability; being more explicit about inequities and vulnerabilities; and the need to pay attention to systems and system dynamics.
Setting: The webinars were organized by the Evaluation Centre and the Asia Pacific Evaluation Association on a Zoom platform.
Intervention: Not applicable.
Research Design: Not applicable.
Data Collection and Analysis: Not applicable.
Findings: Not applicable.

AbstractThis paper describes an evaluation experiment conducted in China between 2013 and 2016 to use evaluative thinking and evaluation approaches to help build the salience of health equity as a performance measure for health systems. This project was informed by a realist evaluation approach that sought to understand the context, mechanisms, and outcomes underlying health inequities. This chapter describes a theory of change that includes descriptions of the key actors involved in the project, the mechanisms of impact, and short‐ and long‐term outcomes. Key questions that could help assess the impact of this project are also discussed. This paper contributes to the literature on building evaluation capacity for health inequities.