Drawing on social judgment theory for its theoretical underpinnings, this article presents a method for combining several descriptive indicators to yield an aggregated single summative index of the overall quality of the services received by clients in a service delivery system or program. The method described is based on the judgments of an evaluative panel and can be applied to a wide variety of populations and types of services. The delivery service index itself can be used as a dependent variable in analyses of variance or employed in correlational studies. GL ike description, judgment is a fundamental cognitive component of evaluation (Stake, 1967). Accordingly, one would expect to fmd a corresponding refinement of ways of representing the judgment process embedded in the general evaluative process; however, despite the use of elegant techniques for describing a program, the evaluator's primary model for providing quantitative indices of the impact of the program continues to focus on goal attainment (Schulberg and Baker, 1968).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.