Abstract

JANNUZZI, PAULO DE MARTINO. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS IN PUBLIC POLICY EVALUATION: USES AND ABUSES. Est. Aval. Educ. [online]. 2023, vol.34, e09956.  Epub Sep 14, 2023. ISSN 1984-932X.  https://doi.org/10.18222/eae.v34.9956.

The present essay discusses the strengths and, above all, the limits of using experimental and quasi-experimental methods in evaluating public programs. It begins with a brief presentation of classical experimental design, its requirements and related concepts such as internal, external, and counterfactual validity. Next, it addresses the modalities of quasi-experimental evaluation design, which relax the requirements of the classical experiment. Two critical sections point out the ethical, political, and operational limitations of experimental and quasi-experimental designs in program evaluation and, subsequently, the political-institutional motivations for the resilience of this approach in spite of well-known and recurrent robustness problems.

Keywords : EVALUATION; PUBLIC POLICY; EXPERIMENTS; QUASI-EXPERIMENTS.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in English | Portuguese     · English ( pdf ) | Portuguese ( pdf )