Preamble

Once you have established your alternatives, it is time to generate criteria. Based on your understanding of the values necessary to your client and your sense of the problem to be resolved, you propose explicit criteria by which to assess policy options. Hunches and vague waves of the hand here are not sufficient. Instead, be explicit and specific about objectives for making progress on this problem.

Establishing Goals

How do we develop criteria? The easiest way to approach this is thinking: What matters to you and your client when picking a solution? Is the cost relevant? Is equity relevant? Is the impact relevant? Another question is, why would you pick one over the other if you are choosing between two alternatives? The answer to that question is the formation of criteria.

What are examples of criteria? (a) effectiveness; (b) cost (both direct and indirect); (c) a combination of (a) and (b) such as cost-effectiveness or benefit-cost analysis; (d) equity; and (e) feasibility, whether political, administrative, or both. Maybe all of them are a great fit for your project, but none is a good fit. That’s up to you. The specifics can be tailored to your project. For example, you might need to consider whether the effect of a project is equitable across generations for one project. For another project, the main concern might be how equitable it is between two communities.

There are situations in which these criteria might not be used, but they are unusual, so you should be prepared to defend why you did not include a version of them. Conversely, your project may have one or two criteria unique to your problem. For example, depending on the project, you might also include liberty or security as a primary criterion. See the readings for this week for ideas and guidance.

Whatever criteria you decide on, you should describe them conceptually and detail exactly how you propose to measure each.

Similarly, for those criteria that will be more qualitative, such as the ability to implement the program, you should include the factors you will evaluate. For example, for ease of implementation, you might include (1) the degree of ownership displayed by the staff who will implement, (2) the complexity of the new program in terms of the number of rules and regulations that need to be promulgated; (3) the number of agencies that need to be involved and; (4) whether or not the program is so large that it needs to be phased in over time.

Operationalizing Criteria

Now that you have the client's goals mapped out, it is time to plan how you will operationalize them. It’s always a good idea to look at the literature to see what criteria others used and how they have measured (operationalized) them.

For a public health example, if the problem is high obesity rates, then a criterion might be effectiveness: do the alternatives reduce obesity rates? To measure this, you would need to discuss how obesity is measured (BMI, obesity ranges, weight in kilograms?), over which populations (children, adults?), and where the data will come from (survey data, medical records, sample on the street?). The same applies to the cost. This means defining all the costs you will include in the analysis. The more specific, the better, as you will need to estimate total costs when you do the analysis.

To use an environmental example, if the problem is the consumption of clean water, then you need to know if the water is cleaner and if people are actually drinking the clean water. Suppose the project is implemented by external partners that locals do not trust (e.g. national government or NGOs). In that case, people might not actually drink clean water, even if it’s available. Make sure your criteria capture the outcome of interest, in this case, consumption of a good, not just provision.

Task

In 1.5-2 single-spaced pages (acceptable if you need more pages), create specific and detailed criteria that will enable you to conduct a thorough analysis of the findings assignment. Have as many criteria as you can think of, then we will work on keeping the few relevant ones.

In this document, you will provide for each criteria.

• Name of criteria
• Description which includes:
• Motivation (i.e. why do we care about this criteria, or who cares, etc.)
• What it is
• What is the “weight” you will put to these criteria and why.
• Operationalization:
• How do you plan to measure things:
• If it's numbers or points, what do these mean?
• If it cost, what are you going to account for and how? Where will you get stats from

Notes

• The various criteria provide multiple, distinct, and logical criteria. The particular part is important; sometimes, one criterion has information about another. We don’t want to double-account.
• Sometimes, if one criterion is cost and the other is effectiveness ratio, it is better to have one criterion called cost-effectiveness.
• A succinct and readily explained connection between the criteria and problem.
• Criteria may change as you evaluate each alternative, and notice that you may need other criteria to differentiate alternatives. That's ok and normal. Don't think you are stuck with the current options.
• Measuring intangible things: The key is to start thinking, "What does progress in this criteria look like?" and how to measure that progress. For things like feasibility, think of creating a rubric where each alternative gets points based on complications. Creating rubrics is a helpful tool. Rubrics help you distinguish between a 1, a 1.5, a 3, etc.
• For thoughtful discussions of equity, effectiveness, liberty, and security as criteria, see Deborah Stone’s Policy Paradox.
• In the final APP you will end up with four to six criteria. However, for this exercise, having more is encouraged because we can choose among a set of options

Submission