Alcohol use is highly prevalent among U.S. college students, and alcohol-related problems are often considered the most serious public health threat on American college campuses. Although empirical examinations of college drinking have relied primarily on self-report measures, several investigators have implemented field studies to obtain…

Compared data collected through paper survey forms to data collected with handheld computer-based forms in a field study of alcohol purchase attempts at 47 community festivals. Agreement between the two methods was greater than 95%. Findings show handheld computers to be a feasible alternative to paper forms for field data collection. (SLD)

Introduces the articles of this special issue focusing on randomized field trials in criminology. In spite of the overall lack of randomized field trials in criminology, some agencies and individuals are able to mount an impressive number of field trials, and these articles focus on their experiences. (SLD)

Discusses advantages of randomized experiments and key issues raised in this special issue. Focuses on growth and decrease in the use of randomized experiments by the California Youth Authority, the U.S. National Institute of Justice, and the British Home Office. Calls for increased recognition of the importance of randomized experiments. (SLD)

Describes the randomized field trials conducted by the California Youth Authority in the 1960s and 1970s and discusses why such rigorous tests were used and why they eventually came to be used less often. (SLD)

Discusses the contrast between the frequency of randomized clinical trials in the health sciences and the relative famine of such studies in criminology. Attributes this difference to the contexts in which research is done and the difference in the status of situational research in the two disciplines. (SLD)

Although some argue that randomization of treatments or interventions violates accepted norms of conduct of social science research, this article makes the case that there is a moral imperative for the conduct of randomized experiments in crime and justice studies. (SLD)

Factors that influence the sample size necessary for longitudinal evaluations include the nature of the evaluation questions, nature of available comparison groups, consistency of the treatment in different sites, effect size, attrition rate, significance level for statistical tests, and statistical power. (Author/GDC)

Examined the production of crime and justice field experiments in the 1990s through data on criminological experiments funded by the National Institute of Justice from 1991 through 2000. Although funds increased in this period, the number of projects and amount of funds awarded to field experiments declines. Discusses reasons for this finding.…

Field experiences with external (qualitative) evaluation audits based on the work of E. G. Guba and Y. S. Lincoln (1981, 1985) are detailed, including evaluation contexts and purposes, procedures, and findings. Such audits represent a viable meta-evaluative tool for assessing the quality of naturalistic evaluation results. (SLD)

Explores sequential assignment (SA) and treatment-as-usual (TAU) as two approaches to overcome many of the obstacles of random assignment in field studies of treatment efficacy. Substituting SA and TAU for the standard random assignment may introduce methodological impurities including certain limited biases. (SLD)

Describes the history of the random experiment in the Home Office in the United Kingdom and demonstrates that research and the conduct of research is not an altogether rational process and that fashion, personality, and politics play a role in research policy and methodology choice. (SLD)

The 11 programs and sites participating in the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) Intensive Supervision Demonstration Project are described. The demonstration was designed to assess the effects and costs of sentencing convicted felons to community-based programs. The evaluation by the Rand Corporation and data collection methods and random…

Evaluated the impact of a civil remedy program, Beat Health (Oakland, California), on drug and disorder problems under experimental field trial conditions. Findings show some improvement in the experimental residential areas, but possible displacement of drug problems in and around the commercial experimental and control sites. (SLD)

Six potential problems with the use of randomized experiments to evaluate programs in the field are addressed. Problems include treatment dilution, treatment contamination or confounding, inaccurate case flow and power estimates, violations of the random assignment processes, changes in the environmental context, and changes in the treatment…