Notice2021-24493
Updated Evaluation Policy; Cooperative Research or Demonstration Projects
Primary source
Metadata and text below are from the Federal Register, a public-domain U.S. government work. Always verify the official published version before relying on it for any legal matter.
Published
November 9, 2021
Issuing agencies
Health and Human Services DepartmentChildren and Families Administration
Abstract
The Administration for Children and Families is announcing updates to its evaluation policy for research or demonstration projects.
Full Text
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<title>Federal Register, Volume 86 Issue 214 (Tuesday, November 9, 2021)</title>
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[Federal Register Volume 86, Number 214 (Tuesday, November 9, 2021)]
[Notices]
[Pages 62175-62177]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [<a href="http://www.gpo.gov">www.gpo.gov</a>]
[FR Doc No: 2021-24493]
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DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Administration for Children and Families
Updated Evaluation Policy; Cooperative Research or Demonstration
Projects
AGENCY: Administration for Children and Families, HHS.
SUMMARY: The Administration for Children and Families is announcing
updates to its evaluation policy for research or demonstration
projects.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: This evaluation policy builds on the
Administration for Children and Families' (ACF) strong history of
evaluation by outlining key principles to govern our planning, conduct,
and use of evaluation. This policy reconfirms our commitment to
conducting rigorous, relevant evaluations and to using evidence from
evaluations to inform policy and practice. ACF seeks to promote rigor,
relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics in the conduct of
evaluations. This policy addresses each of these principles.
The mission of ACF is to foster health and well-being by providing
federal leadership, partnership, and resources for the compassionate
and effective delivery of human services. Our vision is children,
youth, families, individuals and communities who are resilient, safe,
healthy, and economically secure. The importance of these goals demands
that we continually innovate and improve, and that we evaluate our
activities and those of our partners. Through evaluation, ACF and our
partners can learn systematically so that we can make our services as
effective, efficient, and equitable as possible.
Evaluation produces one type of evidence. A learning organization
with a culture of continuous improvement requires many types of
evidence, including not only evaluation but also descriptive research
studies, performance measures, financial and cost data, survey
statistics, program administrative data, and feedback from service
providers, participants, and other stakeholders. Further, continuous
improvement requires systematic approaches to using information, such
as regular data-driven reviews of performance and progress. Although
this policy focuses on evaluation, the principles and many of the
specifics
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apply to the development and use of other types of evidence as well.
This policy applies to all ACF-sponsored evaluations. While much of
ACF's evaluation activity is overseen by the Office of Planning,
Research, and Evaluation (OPRE), ACF program offices also sponsor
evaluations through dedicated contracts or as part of their grant-
making. In order to promote quality, coordination and usefulness in
ACF's evaluation activities, ACF program offices will consult with OPRE
in developing evaluation activities. Program offices will discuss
evaluation projects with OPRE in early stages to clarify evaluation
questions and methodological options for addressing them, and as
activities progress OPRE will review designs, plans, and reports.
Program offices may also ask OPRE to design and oversee evaluation
projects on their behalf or in collaboration with program office staff.
Rigor: ACF is committed to using the most rigorous methods that are
appropriate to both the evaluation questions and the populations,
circumstances, and settings that are the focus of study; and that are
feasible within budget and other constraints. Rigor is not restricted
to impact evaluations, but is also necessary in implementation or
process evaluations, descriptive studies, outcome evaluations, and
formative evaluations; and in both qualitative and quantitative
approaches. Rigor requires ensuring that inferences about cause and
effect are well founded (internal validity); requires clarity about the
populations, settings, or circumstances to which results can be
generalized (external validity); and requires the use of measures that
accurately capture the intended information (measurement reliability
and validity).
In assessing the effects of programs or services, ACF evaluations
will use methods that isolate to the greatest extent possible the
impacts of the programs or services from other influences such as
trends over time, geographic variation, or pre-existing differences
between participants and non-participants. For such causal questions,
experimental approaches are preferred. When experimental approaches are
not feasible, high-quality quasi-experiments offer an alternative. ACF
will develop and use methods that are appropriate for understanding
diverse populations, taking into account historical, contextual, and
cultural factors. Where possible, evaluations will design data
collections to allow disaggregation of data and analyses of sub-groups
to support understanding of equity.
ACF will recruit and maintain an evaluation workforce with the
knowledge, training, and experience appropriate for planning and
overseeing a rigorous evaluation portfolio. To accomplish this, ACF
will recruit staff with advanced degrees and experience in a range of
relevant disciplines such as program evaluation, policy analysis,
economics, sociology, child development, etc. ACF will recruit staff
with a range of backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives and
with expertise in approaches appropriate for studying diverse
populations. ACF will provide professional development opportunities so
that staff can keep their skills current.
ACF will ensure that contractors and grant recipients conducting
evaluations have appropriate expertise through emphasizing the capacity
for rigor in requests for proposal and funding opportunity
announcements. This emphasis entails specifying expectations in
criteria for the selection of grant recipients and contractors, and
engaging reviewers with evaluation expertise. It also requires
allocating sufficient resources for evaluation activities. ACF will
generally require evaluation contractors to consult with external
advisors who are leaders in relevant fields and who represent diverse
backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives through the formation
of technical work groups or other means; and to meaningfully engage
stakeholders from programs and communities being studied throughout the
evaluation lifecycle.
Relevance: Evaluation priorities should take into account
legislative requirements and Congressional interests and should reflect
the interests and needs of ACF, HHS, and Administration leadership; ACF
program office staff and leadership; ACF partners such as states,
territories, tribes, and local grant recipients; service providers; the
populations served; researchers; and other stakeholders. Stakeholders
should have the opportunity to influence evaluation priorities to meet
their interests and needs. Evaluations should be designed to examine
questions relevant to the diverse populations that ACF programs serve,
such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons,
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color;
members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live
in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent
poverty or inequality. ACF will encourage diversity among those
carrying out the work, through building awareness of opportunities and
building evaluation capacity among under-represented groups. ACF will
use inclusive and participatory practices in each phase of evaluation
planning, execution, and dissemination, as appropriate and feasible.
There must be strong partnerships among evaluation staff, program
staff, policy-makers and service providers. Further, for new
initiatives and demonstrations in particular, evaluations will be more
feasible and useful when planned in concert with the planning of the
initiative or demonstration, rather than as an afterthought. Given
federal requirements related to procurement and information collection,
it can take many months to award a grant or contract and begin
collecting data. Thus, it is critical that planning for research and
evaluation be integrated with planning for new initiatives.
It is important for evaluators to disseminate findings in ways that
are accessible and useful to policy-makers, service providers, the
communities that ACF serves, and other stakeholders. OPRE and program
offices will work in partnership to disseminate information about our
research and evaluation activities and findings in a manner that is
clear, accessible, and useful to our diverse range of audiences; this
includes using plain language, using inclusive language, adhering to
principles of clear communication, and developing products accessible
to people with disabilities. ACF will require contractors to
meaningfully engage stakeholders from the programs and communities
involved in studies to improve clarity of presentations, accuracy of
interpretations, and effectiveness of dissemination activities.
It is ACF's policy to integrate both use of existing evidence and
opportunities for further learning into all of our activities. Where an
evidence base is lacking, we will build evidence through strong
evaluations. Where evidence exists, we will use it. Discretionary
funding opportunity announcements will require that successful
applicants cooperate with any federal evaluations if selected to
participate. As legally allowed, programs with waiver authorities
should require rigorous evaluations as a condition of waivers. As
appropriate, ACF will encourage, incentivize or require grant
recipients to use existing evidence of effective strategies in
designing or selecting service approaches. The emphasis on evidence is
meant to support, not
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inhibit, innovation, improvement, equity, and learning.
Transparency: ACF will make information about planned and ongoing
evaluations easily accessible, typically through posting on the web
information about the contractor or grant recipient conducting the work
and descriptions of the evaluation questions, methods to be used, and
expected timeline for reporting results. ACF will present information
about study designs, implementation, and findings at professional
conferences.
Study plans will be published in advance. ACF will release
evaluation results regardless of the findings. Evaluation reports will
describe the methods used, including strengths and weaknesses, and
discuss the generalizability of the findings. Evaluation reports will
present comprehensive results, including favorable, unfavorable, and
null findings. ACF will release evaluation results timely--usually
within two months of a report's completion.
As appropriate and feasible, ACF will archive evaluation data for
secondary use by interested researchers, typically through building
requirements into contracts to prepare data sets for secondary use.
Independence: Independence and objectivity are core principles of
evaluation. Agency and program leadership, program staff, service
providers, populations and communities studied, and others should
participate actively in setting evaluation priorities, identifying
evaluation questions, and assessing the implications of findings.
However, it is important to insulate evaluation functions from undue
influence and from both the appearance and the reality of bias. To
promote objectivity, ACF protects independence in the design,
execution, analysis, and reporting of evaluations. To this end:
<bullet> ACF will conduct evaluations through the competitive award
of grants and contracts to external experts who are free from conflicts
of interest.
<bullet> The Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning, Research, and
Evaluation reports directly to the Assistant Secretary for Children and
Families; serves as ACF's Chief Evaluation Officer; has authority to
approve the design of evaluation projects and analysis plans; and has
authority to approve, release and disseminate evaluation reports.
Ethics: ACF-sponsored evaluations will be conducted in an ethical
and equitable manner and safeguard the dignity, rights, safety and
privacy of participants. ACF-sponsored evaluations will comply with
both the spirit and the letter of relevant requirements such as
regulations governing research involving human subjects. ACF will
expect contractors to meaningfully engage stakeholders from the
programs and communities involved in studies to ensure programmatic,
cultural, linguistic and historical nuances are accurately and
respectfully addressed from the initial study design, through
execution, analyses and reporting.
Authority: 42 U.S.C. 1310.
JooYeun Chang,
Acting Assistant Secretary.
[FR Doc. 2021-24493 Filed 11-8-21; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4184-79-P
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