Are Participants Good Evaluators?

Managers of workforce training programs are often unable to afford costly, full-fledged experimental or nonexperimental evaluations to determine the effectiveness of their programs. Therefore, many rely on the survey responses of participants to gauge program impacts. How successful this approach is and whether it can be improved are addressed in this book. Jeffrey Smith, Alexander Whalley, and Nathaniel Wilcox are the first to attempt to assess such measures, despite their already widespread use in program evaluations. They develop a multidisciplinary framework and apply it to three case studies: the National Job Training Partnership Act Study, the U.S. National Supported Work Demonstration, and the Connecticut Jobs First Program. These studies were subjected to experimental evaluations that included a survey-based participant evaluation measure. The authors apply econometric methods specifically developed to obtain estimates of program impacts among individuals in the studies and then compare these estimates with survey-based participant evaluation measures to obtain an assessment of the surveys’ efficacy. They also include techniques which, say the authors, will improve the accuracy of participant evaluation measures.