EVALUATING UNIVERSITY BASED PROGRAMS IN MENTAL RETARDATION: A NATIONAL APPROACH

Program evaluation should be designed to appraise a program's merit and to provide information about its goals, activities, outcomes, impact, and costs. (Fink and Kosecoff, 1978) Over the course of the past two decades, program evaluation in health and human services has been the focus of growing interest, reflecting recognized needs for efficiency in program management and methodological rigor in the assessment of specific program results. In addition to reviewing current views on the methodology of program evaluation, the authors describe a recently developed approach to evaluation of university-affiliated programs ? specifically those sponsored by the Administration on Developmental Disabilities of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). They also review preliminary results of these evaluations and identify organizational and other characteristics that significantly distinguished successful programs from those found to be deficient. Efforts to measure objectively the performance and impact of health care and human services depend in large part on the complexity of the service being evaluated ? the more complex the service, the less likely that its anticipated benefits can be readily described in objective terms for subsequent evaluation. This problem is compounded when evaluating a large program comprising a number of complex health or social services. Even