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Essay / Vocational Rehabilitation Evaluation - 1230
Stakeholders for this evaluation are VR (vocational rehabilitation) program consumers with disabilities, family members, staff, agency administrators, community group leaders Disability advocacy and case managers. .The goal of the program being evaluated is to provide as many opportunities as possible for customers with disabilities to fully enjoy the social and economic benefits of their lives. They want measures of effectiveness and qualitative indicators of important results. They formed two evaluation committees within the agency. This committee reviewed and approved the goals and objectives of the project. A second committee was formed to provide operational oversight of the project. The program being evaluated wants to ensure that clients reach their full potential and wants them to achieve the goals they set for themselves in their programs. They used a MAU model to address the ambitious goals and outcomes of VR services. It identifies the objective of the evaluation and its stakeholders. It identifies and organizes program criteria and attributes into a meaningful structure. It collects measurable data and assigns utility values to the measurable attributes. It calculates the weighted utility values, then aggregates the utility values and performs the MAU analysis. The MAU is used when the program serves multiple constituencies, with a program that has multiple objectives. Judgments are an integral part of the assessment and can be supported by numerical measurements. The MAU structures the decision-making process allowing stakeholders to evaluate the objectives and performance of a program over a given period. With the University of Minnesota doing this assessment, one would think that the cost...... middle of paper.... ..stakeholder priority weightings have been determined but for a group of 16 stakeholders. They assumed that a different stakeholder group would have formed similar priority weights, but they never tested this. So, in this case, the stakeholders may have different priorities for some of their objectives. Additionally, when surveying consumers, what would happen if some of them didn't completely understand the question but answered it anyway? They also distributed different surveys to people that could surface different data. They rarely used indicators and effectiveness measures to assess program value. Stakeholders may have different values than consumers themselves. Works Cited Lewis, Darrel, Johnson. David R, University of Minnesota, Psychjournal, 2003, Assessing the State's Vocational Rehabilitation Performance Serving People with Disabilities.