Decision Makers' Judgments

Abstract

Evaluators often assume that outcome studies assessing agency effectiveness should pro vide the most relevant data for decision makers who must form judgments about treat ment in order to make policy, program, and clinical decisions. Yet evaluators have found that decision makers often fail to use results of evaluation studies. To shed light on the utilization problem, the research reported here was undertaken to learn about the criteria, information sources, and beliefs decision makers in the environment of nine drug treat ment agencies used to form judgments about treatment programs before evaluative data concerning outcomes became available. The results showed that decision makers in different occupations tended to use similar information sources (primarily informal verbal exchanges) yet used different evaluative criteria to judge treatment programs. The impli clations of these results for the design of evaluation studies and utilization of evaluation results are discussed.