OUTCOME MEASURES AND SOCIAL ACTION EXPERIMENTS: AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL FOR REDIRECTING RESEARCH EFFORTS.

This article focuses on outcome measures and social action experiments. Social change and social worth are variables defined by societal values, on which persons' hierarchical rankings are determined by normative properties. The sociological measures used as outcome variables in evaluation studies are not derived from a systematic sociological and ideological analysis of a community's values and goals. Rather, they reflect concerns made salient as part of a political process in which elected officials, entrepreneural academics, business and union leaders, and representatives of the religious sector exercise influence. Undesirable social conditions, deviant behavior, and personal dissatisfactions are the general categories of outcome measures employed in studies with a normative sociological orientation. The social systems approach to outcome measures holds that there is limited likelihood of developing useful outcome ratings across different locales, groups, and cultures. It holds, rather, that criteria measures should consist of the ranking of individuals within defined geo-cultural units. The impact of intervention programs is measured in terms of whether or not there is a redistribution of the rankings of persons or units in the target group compared with essentially little recording in parallel groups unexposed or treated with alternate means.