Evaluation Standarts
Many organizations have endorsed a set of standards to guide evaluation efforts in intervention and prevention practice. The aim has been to determine the most appropriate criteria to conclude that an intervention is effective in improving the targeted outcomes.
The standards for the scientific evidence of effectiveness are roughly guided by 4 types of validities:
Internal Validity: establishing a cause-and-effect relationship
External Validity: whether the established causal treatment effect would hold across different populations, times, settings, and variables
Construct Validity: the use of valid and psychometrically sound measures of the targeted behavior
Statistical Conclusion Validity: the use of appropriate statistics to produce unbiased estimates of the treatment effect.
Meeting the standards enables us to scale-up and disseminate only the programs that are shown to be efficacious and effective, thus the efficient allocation of resources for development.
Standards of Evidence for Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Scale-up Research
The below guidelines prepared by task forces on evaluation provide the standards on how to achieve the above-mentioned validities and avoid the threats against them. They also describe ways of acquiring other forms of knowledge to judge the results of a program.