SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING THE FINAL SECTION OF YOUR LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL PAPER
An estimated budget for your proposal is no longer required. Most of the areas in which students are proposing their legislation are non-monetary, so budgets would not be that central to your ideas. If your topic does involve a funding aspect (e.g., making some services available to residents of a state), you can simply write a few sentences about how much money your program might cost -- but nothing too detailed.
As a result of dropping the budgeting requirement, there are now two elements needed for the final paper:
1. A completed Family Impact Checklist. You should write short answers (perhaps two or three sentences) for each of the six major Principles (e.g., Family Support, Family Stability, Vulnerable Families). If any principle does not appear relevant for your policy, you can write "Not Applicable." The form for the Family Impact Checklist is available here, whereas samples of completed checklists are available here.
2. A proposed research design for a Program Evaluation study of the effectiveness of your policy. In general, this would involve exposing half of your research participants (or half of the counties in your state) to your new policy, and the other half to the existing policy, and then checking back after a number of years to see if the people exposed to your new policy (the "experimental group") exhibit more favorable outcomes (e.g., lower divorce rates, better health) than the people not exposed to your policy (the "control group"). The experimental and control groups should be created at random, to ensure that there are no systematic differences between the groups (e.g., one has higher average income than the other) prior to the beginning of the study. These lecture notes on program evaluation from my Texas Tech research methodology course may be helpful.
The major links I've provided above are also available in the Policymaking and Analysis notes from my Texas Tech family policy page.
The deadline for receipt of your papers with no point penalty will be Tuesday night at 9:00 pm. This will give me some time to read your papers before we begin the presentations on Wednesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment