Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

What do you do when grantees insist on having input into site assignments to treatment and control conditions? What if you also need to make sure sites recruited in the third year of your delayed treatment design evaluation are comparable to sites recruited in the first year? When faced with this situation to gain grantee’s buy-in and participation in the evaluation while maintaining the rigor of the evaluation, the evaluation team adapted the planned matching process. The process developed for the evaluation provided grantees with the ability to recruit and assign sites to treatment or control conditions during the first year of this three-year, delayed treatment design evaluation. The process established pools of similar sites for subsequent rounds of recruitment. This poster will discuss the process developed and the results of group equivalency testing for years one and two of the evaluation. We will also discuss implications and lessons learned.