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The paper describes the main characteristics of the Information System (SIS) of the cancer (breast, colorectal, cervical) screening programs (SP) in Italy. The SIS is organized in order to evaluate the quality and the effectiveness of the SP and is referred to different stakeholders and actors (national & local government, professionals, society) that can actually express different knowledge priorities. Different variables have been identified and annually collected by national surveys. The sources of data are the managing systems of the screening programs. The SIS produces several indicators, according to those identified by the European Guide Lines on quality assurance, which respond to the following evaluation and monitoring needs: * the SPis a path (disease management), not just performing a test; therefore we need to assess the quality of the whole path, and not only of the screening test performance; * the SPis directed to an asymptomatic population, hence it must take in account both the sensitivity and specificity * to evaluate the quality of the organization. The results of the evaluation are reported and/or summarized by different reporting system/tools in order to be used at different levels: service delivery, regional and national planning, governance assessment, generation of scientific evidence, accountability's purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribute describes the evaluation of the project "Genitori Più -- Campagna di promozione della salute nei primi anni di vita" (Parents Plus -- a health promotion campaign), developed during 2008-2009 in several Italian Regions. Genitori Più main objectives were to increase the knowledge and to change some behaviors in the health professionals working on birth path and in the parents, focusing on 7 determinants that have been proved important for the health of the babies. The evaluation followed the whole project with the constant implication of the project team using structured questionnaires. The evaluation surveys involved 5.961 health professionals and 5.819 parents, in particular mothers. In this paper we show how evaluation in health promotion can give to decision-makers several elements for re-thinking and adjusting the programs, using different evaluation strategy like longitudinal match over time or across different territories or across different strata of population. The evaluation showed how knowledge and behaviors are different in each territories involved in the project and between social classes, and showed much higher levels in the areas where the preventive intervention were more rooted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates an evaluative research process, committed by the Genoa Aquarium and developed by the Department of Anthropological Sciences, aimed at building an index of educational effectiveness of the visit, which allowed the company management to get a synthetic indication of effectiveness and to identify more easily the strengths and weaknesses of the path from the educational point of view. To do this, after a preliminary analysis of the bibliography of reference, the first step was the conceptual clarification of the evaluation object, sought through focus groups and interviews in which managers and operators of the structure were invited to more properly define the educational objectives of the visit. Then questionnaires were constructed and filled in by the visitors before the visit, to ensure that their educational expectations on the visit coincide with the objectives identified by company management, and after the visit, to evaluate its effectiveness. In the final phase the staff structure has been involved in the indicators weighting, allowing to re-evaluate the scores obtained on the different indicators with the administration of questionnaires and to calculate, on a 0-100 scale, an index of educational effectiveness that respects the priorities defined by managers and experts of Genoa Aquarium. The main index strength, thus calculated, is that it reflects the priorities assigned by company management, and on this basis gives a synthetic feedback on the educational effectiveness of the visit. Its intrinsic limit, is that one can not assume the overlap between the priorities assigned to the objectives by managers and operators, on one hand, and the relative priority of user expectations on the other, and this is an important element of uncertainty for the definition of corporate strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation has always bee a particularly significant aspect of university life. University is the place where research evaluation is produced as well as evaluation of the eligibility of scientists to teaching and research activities supported and oriented by social institutions. Evaluating activities are therefore essential to life and continuity of higher education system and research training.At present, traditional mechanisms of evaluation, based on self-autonomy and academic self-government, are at a critical point. New tools are actually used to ensure higher levels of objectivity and more opportunities for research comparison and legitimacy of researchers devoted to it. In this paper I offer a comment on the possibility of introducing quantitative evaluation methods or qualitative, individual and responsive methods for the formulation of reviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a quantification of the short and long-run impacts of the recent credit guarantee scheme agreed by the regional policy maker in Sardinia (Italy) in support of local SME's. Specifically, taking the expected value of several hypothesized economic scenarios, we first calculate the credit additionality to be ascribed to the implementation of the policy. Then, by exploiting previous findings referring to the specific Italian case (Zecchini and Ventura, 2006), we are also able to calculate the expected reduction in the cost of capital provision enjoyed by the targeted firms. Finally, starting on these two direct effects, the "economic additionality", in terms of higher Investments, Value Added and Labour Units, is also calculated. Simulations concern both annual and cumulated values till the 2020 and refer to a suitable ATECO sectorialization of the regional economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, beside the traditional passive labour market policies, a broad range of measures and actions related to active labour market policies have gained increasing importance. On the one hand, this evolution opens up interesting perspectives in terms of processes of empowerment of citizens. On the other, it also raises important issues about the effectiveness of employment services. Indeed, the shift of the axis of the policies from the macro dimension of huge public interventions to the micro dimension of specifically population targeted actions represents a challenge both for employment services and, to some extent, also for policy evaluation. The latter, in particular profiting from a critical use of the conceptual tools developed among the realist perspective, can empirically test the validity of the activation rhetoric. In order to offer some thoughts in this direction, this paper presents the results of the evaluation of an active labour market programme, which has been operating in recent years in a particularly low inclusive labour market area: Southern Italy. The assessment focuses on the processes produced by the programme, the mechanisms characterizing its implementation, their interaction with the local contexts and the unexpected results generated by the actions carried out. It aims at providing a useful analytical framework to identify advantages and weaknesses of active labour market policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Correct assessment of critical variables influencing public investment final outcome is often a crucial procedure, especially in cases where the dynamics of such variables cannot be controlled by public agents, because they mainly depend on choices and behaviors of other operators. This is a typical situation occurring in development project assessment, characterized by a high uncertainty degree and by a scarce availability of information in relation to the behaviour of aleatory variables influencing investment final outcome. In such cases, risk analysis by directly using Montecarlo method could be misleading: on the contrary, we think that such an evaluation should be preceded by uncertainty analysis, allowing to generate new useful information for subsequent risk assessment. In this context, the paper presents one possible evaluative pattern, especially suited for development projects assessment, allowing first to understand the leeways of uncertainty between which investment decision must be taken and, then, to estimate investment risk and to generate useful information to help Decision Maker defining the most suitable economic tools to mitigate it. The proposed evaluative pattern is composed by four steps, based on different techniques and sequentially articulated, so that each step generates new useful information for developing the following one. Such a scheme allows both to deepen the information produced by the evaluative process, and to guarantee more decisional transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the ongoing methodological debate concerning whose preferences should be taken into account in the health care priority setting based on QALYs. Moreover, by means of an empirical study involving 100 patients, evidence is offered of how the experience of illness may produce contrasting effects on the evaluation of health states, showing that adaptation effects may coexist with effects of opposite sign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper provides an overview of the multi-criteria approach within a programme of Career centres development (i.e. University placement offices in Italy), focused on three new elements of interest: i) the analysis process has been designed and managed together with the Evalution staff and the Project team, in a combined/joined way that has allowed the Project team to learn more about the evaluation process other than the only method itself; ii) because of the Project team involvement the multi-criteria approach has been used in a bottom-up way, that has solved problems related to the understanding of the project and its different parts; iii) analysis has been conducted in two different dimensions, that have been developed in two distinctive evaluation matrixes. The use of two analysis dimensions has given the Evaluation team the opportunity to observe the different and specific elements of the Career centres structures and the activities of technical support delivered to Career Centres operators from two point of views. It also helped to design a bi-dimensional map of the services the Career centres deliver on both dimensions we considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and innovation policies have been increasingly ascribed to regions as a con- sequence of devolving power and resources from the national level to the local level. Local administrators have been empowered with new and challenging responsibilities but often lack the necessary instruments and knowledge to adequately evaluate the under- taken initiatives and to operate consistently with the European and national dimensions. In this respect impact assessment brings in a new metrics that is neither exclusively related to the scientific and/or economic value of the innovation results nor to a support function to other policies. Experts and/or ad hoc organisations are often appointed by local administrations with the task of describing the dimensions of such impact - qualifying (and quantifying) its descriptive parameters and identifying interested parties. So far this approach has not produced robust results as for the causality links generated, the additionality issue and the role of the local dimension, while the available tool-box is quite poor. This paper is intended to illustrate the results of a pilot experience carried out in the last few years in Trentino. The analysis takes into account the relations among policy makers, available tools, resources, and the role of the public administration and of professional evaluators. Conceptual and interpretative approaches and tools need further development, but the mayor weakness seems to come from the relationship between customer-and evaluators. A new market based on new rules, professional roles and shared behaviours is needed in order to address a correct evaluation pathway and to analyse policies and activities within a common frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper consists of two parts. The first is more general: it introduces to university ranking, shows the leading international ranking, discusses the uses people make of rankings. The second focuses on Italian ranking Censis-la Repubblica developing two dif- ferent kinds of analyses: after considering indicators validity and reliability, principal components analysis and cluster analysis are applied to a partial replication of Censis-la Repubblica data. A list of points to pay attention comes out of these analyses: it can be useful when defining rankings of complex institutions such as universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests some considerations regarding the relationship between evaluation and making decision processes, through the description of an evaluation experience of some formative projects orientated towards unemployed young people living in Apulia Region. After the definition of evaluation question, made together with Educational Local Authority, we have preferred a qualitative research approach. Sharing a participative approach, we have chosen a multistakeholder research design as instrument to catch the representations of actors involved regarding the evolution of projects, the weak and strong aspects, through to focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews respectively administered to actuators and beneficiaries of these projects. Interviews have been analyzed first trough content analysis of relevance and in a second moment trough associations analysis between words, by the use of T-Lab software. Highlighting stakeholders' suggestions and recommendations and giving back them to the decision maker confirms the utility of evaluation as instrument to supporting making decision processes, with the aim of improving policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper highlights the process of social and institutional change within which evaluation practices are embedded in Italy. To recall the main institutional and normative framework through which the Italian public administration has read its own change can explain the reason why evaluation is necessarily a part of collective decision processes and of their institutionalization. The role participation procedures to public decision processes play in this change reveal the main social and cultural issues which are at stake: the due process and the separation of powers - the one no more considered, as it once was, as a criterion and a boundary for administrative action; the other no more assumed as a democratic criterion to distinguish public decisions as either political or administrative ones. Administrative action and political decisions can be no more conclusively identified within the legal framework. They are constituted by the procedural enactment of administrative planning processes; they are also the focus of what we define as civil evaluation: the kind of evaluation processes which are strategic in the re-definition of both citizenship and administration as well as in the institutionalization of their mutual relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper suggests some methodological considerations which, on the basis of a recent research on a medium enterprise in Italy, point out the reflexive and evaluative potential of the ethnographic approach to organizational analysis. The experience of reflexivity is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It represents the intentional effect of the debate among the actors about the report produced by the researcher. Thus it's possible to stimulate the reflexivity of actors also through more or less structured ways of debating a research in which they're implied. From this point of view driven reflexivity is, de facto, a practice of (self) evaluation in so far as the expositive modalities of the results of research - which have to get strong narrative and descriptive features - are able to involve actors and foster their interest and commitment to reflect and learn starting from the discussion of the interpretations (proposed by the researcher) of their practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]