Assessing Options to Evaluate Long-Term Outcomes (LTO) Using Administrative Data: Identifying Targets of Opportunity

2017 - 2021

Linking administrative data sets to program evaluation records is a promising and potentially low-cost means of tracking long-term impacts of social interventions. For the purposes of this project, long-term is defined as greater than five years. This project has done an initial assessment of  the feasibility of making such data linkages for 25 major employment-related and child/youth development evaluations current and past. Information has been collected to assess the practical and legal feasibility of accomplishing the linkages (e.g. existence of necessary personally identifiable information, IRB and consent form allowances or restrictions), assess potential costs, determine data ownership, identify prior history of linkage, past findings, and current availability of relevant data and metadata. The methodology includes the collection and careful review of existing documents, and interviews with evaluators and data owners. The resulting internal report summarizes findings and identifies the most promising targets of opportunity to link existing evaluations to administrative data providing long-term outcomes.

In follow-up work, the contractor is examining in greater detail both the feasibility and level of effort required to produce long-term outcome analyses for the most promising evaluations.

MDRC is the contractor for this work.

Point(s) of contact: The point of contact is Brett Brown.