Timing and Duration of Exposure in Evaluations of Social Programs

By E. King, Jere r. Behrman. 2008

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Impact evaluations aim to measure the outcomes that can be attributed to a specific policy or intervention. Although there have been excellent reviews of the different methods that an evaluator can choose in order to estimate impact, there has not been sufficient attention given to questions related to timing: How long after a program has begun should one wait before evaluating it? How long should treatment groups be exposed to a program before they can be expected to benefit from it? Are there important time patterns in a program's impact? Many impact evaluations assume that interventions occur at specified launch dates and produce equal and constant changes in conditions among eligible beneficiary groups; but there are many reasons why this generally is not the case. This paper examines the evaluation issues related to timing and discusses the sources of variation in the duration of exposure within programs and their implications for impact estimates. It reviews the evidence from careful evaluations of programs (with a focus on developing countries) on the ways that duration affects impacts.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d695a865578f2dbd43840c596e642e0ef757a5c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

What Really Works to Improve Learning in Developing Countries? An Analysis of Divergent Findings in Systematic Reviews (2015, background): “On the other hand, impacts may take longer to manifest in some cases, as with interventions in which teachers or schools receive continued support (such as annual grants or regular training) but where it takes time to see the return on those investments in terms of learning (King and Behrman 2009).”
What are We Learning from Business Training and Entrepreneurship Evaluations Around the Developing World? (2012, background): “The short- and long-term impacts of many policies may differ substantially, so a key challenge for impact evaluation is determining when to measure outcomes (King and Behrman 2009).”