Recent meta-analyses of drug-court studies recognized the poor methodological quality of the evaluations, with only a few being randomized. This article critiques the design of the randomized studies from a statistical perspective. Learning points are identified for future drug-court studies and are applicable to evaluations both of other…

The determinants of sentencing are of much interest in criminal justice and legal research. Understanding the determinants of sentencing decisions is important for ensuring transparent, consistent, and justifiable sentencing practice that adheres to the goals of sentencing, such as the punishment, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation of…

Background: Surveys of community-based programs are difficult to conduct when there is virtually no information about the number or locations of the programs of interest. This article describes the methodology used by the Helping Young Smokers Quit (HYSQ) initiative to identify and profile community-based youth smoking cessation programs in the…

Evaluations that combine social science and law have tremendous potential to illuminate the effects of governmental policies and yield insights into how effectively policy makers' efforts achieve their aims. This potential is infrequently achieved, however, because such interdisciplinary research contains often overlooked substantive and…

Introduces the articles of this special issue focusing on randomized field trials in criminology. In spite of the overall lack of randomized field trials in criminology, some agencies and individuals are able to mount an impressive number of field trials, and these articles focus on their experiences. (SLD)

Discusses advantages of randomized experiments and key issues raised in this special issue. Focuses on growth and decrease in the use of randomized experiments by the California Youth Authority, the U.S. National Institute of Justice, and the British Home Office. Calls for increased recognition of the importance of randomized experiments. (SLD)

Describes the randomized field trials conducted by the California Youth Authority in the 1960s and 1970s and discusses why such rigorous tests were used and why they eventually came to be used less often. (SLD)

Discusses the contrast between the frequency of randomized clinical trials in the health sciences and the relative famine of such studies in criminology. Attributes this difference to the contexts in which research is done and the difference in the status of situational research in the two disciplines. (SLD)

Active parental consent policies have been blamed for low participation rates and selection bias (i.e., loss of "high-risk" youths) in school-based studies. In this article, the authors describe active consent procedures that produced an overall active consent rate of 79% in a sample of more than 4,500 middle school students attending 29…

Introduces an new approach for measuring the impact of whole school reforms. The approach, based on "short" interrupted time-series analysis, is explained, its statistical procedures are outlined, and how it was used in the evaluation of a major whole-school reform, Accelerated Schools is described (H. Bloom and others, 2001). (SLD)

Although some argue that randomization of treatments or interventions violates accepted norms of conduct of social science research, this article makes the case that there is a moral imperative for the conduct of randomized experiments in crime and justice studies. (SLD)

The authors demonstrate how exponential smoothing can play a role in the identification of the intervention component of an interrupted time-series design model that is analogous to the role that the sample autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions serve in the identification of the noise portion of such a model. (Author/BW)

Examined the production of crime and justice field experiments in the 1990s through data on criminological experiments funded by the National Institute of Justice from 1991 through 2000. Although funds increased in this period, the number of projects and amount of funds awarded to field experiments declines. Discusses reasons for this finding.…

A method is presented that allows multivariate comparability while making only minimal restrictions on randomization. This procedure is demonstrated in the context of assigning 63 aggregated units (schools) to 28 experimental and control conditions. Good comparability of groups for all primary main effects and interactions was verified for 15…

The choice between experimental research or process-oriented oriented research as the only valid paradigm of evaluation research is rejected. It is argued that there is a middle ground. Suggestions are made for mixing the two approaches to suit particular research settings. (Author/GK)