Evaluators often use qualitative research methods, yet there is little evidence on the comparative cost-effectiveness of the two most commonly employed qualitative methods--in-depth interviews (IDIs) and focus groups (FGs). We performed an inductive thematic analysis of data from 40 IDIs and 40 FGs on the health-seeking behaviors of African…

Early childhood education programs play an important role in child family-to-school transition. In 1998, California voters passed Proposition 10, the California Children and Families Act, which levied a 50-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes and other tobacco products to finance programs for children ages 0-5. In less than two decades, First 5…

This study used data from 1994 to 1999 from one large county in Pennsylvania to estimate the Medicaid expenditures of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and to compare these expenditures with those of other Medicaid-eligible children. On average, children diagnosed with ASD had expenditures 10 times those of other children.…

This handbook is intended to help government, university, private sector, and other users become better acquainted with the concepts and data underlying the Department of Agriculture's statistical series. The introduction reviews what various pieces of federal legislation say about the computation of agricultural production costs by the U.S.…

In this study we test the performance of some nonexperimental estimators of impacts applied to an educational intervention--reduction in class size--where achievement test scores were the outcome. We compare the nonexperimental estimates of the impacts to "true impact" estimates provided by a random-assignment design used to assess the…

Of all the areas within public elementary and secondary education that are experiencing rapid change, none is experiencing more turmoil than school finance. This publication contains papers commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to address the twin concerns of what additional school-finance information NCES should…