This study tested a 'wise' intervention (quick prompt of a specific psychological mec) in acute care hospital units to improve nurses' hand hygiene compliance (HHC). A multiple baseline design in two medical-surgical teaching hospitals in the United States. Hand hygiene data was collected using an electronic compliance monitoring system with…

As evidence-based interventions are scaled, fidelity of implementation, and thus effectiveness, often wanes. Validated fidelity measures can improve researchers' ability to attribute outcomes to the intervention and help practitioners feel more confident in implementing the intervention as intended. We aim to provide a model for the validation of…

This paper presents the process of conducting a community-wide needs assessment that initially focused on soliciting information about childcare needs of families with school-aged children. The researchers were interested in understanding whether the method designed to conduct the needs assessment helped to foster collaboration, trust, and…

Background: Recent reviews suggest that many plausible programs are found to have at best small impacts not commensurate with their cost, and often have no detectable positive impacts at all. Even programs with initial rigorous impact evaluation (RIE) that show them to be effective often fail a second test with an expanded population or at…

Background: Annually, American colleges and universities provide developmental education (DE) to millions of underprepared students; however, evaluation estimates of DE benefits have been mixed. Objectives: Using a prototypic exemplar of DE, our primary objective was to investigate the utility of a replicative evaluative framework for assessing…

Background: In an ongoing effort to improve teacher quality, most states require continuing education or professional development for their in-service teachers. Studies evaluating the effectiveness of various professional development programs have assumed a normal distribution of quality of teachers participating in the programs. Because…

The study dealt with a research environment in which the treatment effect is heterogeneous, and in which individuals use their assessments of the treatment effect to decide whether or not to enroll in an intervention program. In this article, a new methodology is proposed for examining the validity of the specified research environment in a given…

National Heritage Areas (NHAs) are an alternative and increasingly popular form of protected area management in the United States. NHAs seek to integrate environmental objectives with community and economic objectives at regional or landscape scales. NHA designations have increased rapidly in the last 20 years, generating a substantial need for…

Sustained mass media campaigns have been recommended to stem the tobacco epidemic in the United States. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to estimate the effect of awareness of a national smoking cessation media campaign (EX[R]) on quit attempts and cessation-related cognition. Participants were 4,067 smokers and recent quitters aged 18-49…

Objective: In this article, we estimate the effect of a multidisciplinary collaboration program on the length of sickness absence. The intention with the program was to avoid long-term sickness absence by providing an early and holistic evaluation of the sick-listed individuals' conditions. The target group was individuals who were at risk of…

There has recently been discussion of whether independent contract evaluation is possible. This article acknowledges the inherent tension in contract evaluation and in response suggests a range of constructive approaches to improving the independence of contract evaluation. In particular, a clear separation between the official evaluation report…

Findings from an evaluation of a model system for delivering mental health services to youth were reassessed to determine the robustness of key findings to the use of methodologies unavailable to the original analysts. These analyses address a key concern about earlier findings--that the quasi-experimental design involved the comparison of two…

Poisson and negative binomial regression methods are used to analyze the monthly time series data to determine the effects of introducing an integrated security management system including closed-circuit television (CCTV), door alarm monitoring, proximity card access, and emergency call boxes to a large privately-owned complex of apartment…

The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of a pilot study that promoted productive and capacity-building activities among deprived rural women of Mexico. The evaluation design is observational; 1,278 women are interviewed, and the comparison group is estimated by propensity score matching. The results show a positive impact on the…

This study is an exploratory examination of the projected sustainability of more than 100 projects funded by the Australian government. Using data collected by the body that evaluated the projects and data from a government database, it examines the predictors of various forms of sustainability. Findings show that some two thirds of the project…