Beyond “Does It Work?”: Laura Peck on Policy, Evidence, and Impact

Journey to Public Policy

• 💡 Professor Laura Peck's career path began with undergraduate activism, leading her to pursue public administration and policy to apply her activist tendencies productively.
• 🚀 She transitioned from academia at Arizona State to over a decade in consulting with Abt Associates, where she valued the generous funding, policy-relevant questions, and methodological creativity in research for the federal government.
• 🎓 Her return to academia at Bloustein is driven by a desire to teach and train future policy analysts and public servants, combining applied research with student mentorship.

Evaluating Social Programs

• 🎯 Peck's core research focuses on not just "do social programs work?" but "how and for whom" they are effective.
• 🔬 She primarily uses experimental evaluation design, randomizing individuals into control and treatment groups to obtain causal estimates of program impact.
• ✅ Success is judged against program goals, acknowledging that federal funders might have longer-term objectives compared to the more proximal goals of on-the-ground administrators.

Insights from HPOG Evaluation

• 🏥 A significant evaluation highlighted was the Health Profession Opportunity Grant (HPOG) program, which funded career pathways training in the healthcare sector.
• 📈 The study, involving nearly 14,000 people across 42 programs, found that the holistic nature of HPOG led to increased education, credentials, and employment.
• ⚠️ A key finding was that for unemployed or underemployed individuals, an entry-level credential alone might not be sufficient for meaningful long-term labor market advancement, suggesting a need for successive training steps.

Bridging Research and Practice

• 🤝 Program administrators, despite initial reservations about random assignment, were engaged through strategies like 2:1 randomization and "wild cards", and benefited from data management systems.
• 📚 Peck aims to equip students in her evaluation class with both qualitative and quantitative approaches, including implementation research and impact studies.
• 🛠️ The goal is for students to learn how to ensure program investments are well-spent, identify successful programs for scaling, and retool those needing improvement.

Future Research Directions

• 🔭 Peck plans to continue researching the effectiveness of US social welfare programs and refining methodological approaches.
• 📊 A significant focus will be on subgroup analysis, understanding how program impacts vary across diverse populations and identifying more effective strategies for heterogeneous groups.