Cost-Inclusive Evaluation for Health and Human Services: Toward delivering the best to the most for the least.
Session description:
Insights that cost-inclusive evaluation (CIE) generates for evaluators and researchers are illustrated with 50 years of work in health and human services, including child, parent, and adolescent interventions, computer-based drug abuse treatment, consumer-operated mental health services, randomized clinical trials for suicide prevention, and emergency assistance programs for human rights defenders. CIE attempts to understand relationships between program costs and monetary as well as nonmonetary outcomes. CIE works best if conducted using multiple interest group perspectives to collect and analyze data from individual participants for competing interventions and counterfactuals. Common forms of economic evaluation, including cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses, can be most helpful if they go beyond quantifying cost-outcome relationships to understanding resource → activity, activity → process, and process → outcome relationships. Accessible graphic methods of portraying these relationships may encourage engagement of participants, providers, and community members in evaluation and research.
Target audience:
This session is suited for program evaluators and students of program evaluation, as well as researchers and teachers in psychology, social work, sociology, psychiatry, counseling, and public policy.
Presenters:
Brian Yates has developed, conducted, and reported cost-inclusive evaluations of health and human service programs since he was a graduate student at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology at Stanford in 1976. Since then his full-time day job has been as a professor in the Department of Psychology at American University in Washington DC, but his professional work, writing, research, and evaluation has always focused on cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analyses to formative evaluation of health and human services, including as youth mentoring and parent training initiatives, prevention and treatment of substance abuse, computer-based cognitive-behavioral therapy for alcohol abuse, suicide prevention, and treatments for obesity, depression, and seasonal affective disorder. More recently, Dr. Yates has added to this work ongoing cost-inclusive evaluations of federal bipartisan and internationally funded emergency assistance programs for human rights and democracy defenders throughout the world, including LGBTQI+ and religious activists and organizations. Most of Dr. Yates’ 105 publications, including 6 books and a 124-page manual for cost-inclusive evaluation. More information, including a full list of publications, and CV are available at http://www.brianyates.net/
