Kathryn E Newcomer
Biographic Data
| ID | 2095795 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kathryn E Newcomer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kathryn E |
| FAMILY NAME | Newcomer |
| SIGNATURE | NEWCOMER K E |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Washington University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1431-6634 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 216 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Building an evidence engine to promote more responsive government
Public agencies require timely and reliable evidence to adapt operations and strategies quickly to effectively tackle unanticipated challenges in service to the American people. Federal agencies are generally not well equipped to take full advantage of the resources they own to effectively align with evidence needs. Guidance has been issued to fill this gap, yet federal agencies have not fully adopted the use of evidence, especially performance d…
Beyond social equity: Talking social justice in public administration
From noise to knowledge: Improving evidentiary standards for program efficacy to better inform public policy and management decisions
Current approaches employed by U.S.‐based clearinghouses to rate the efficacy of interventions to address social problems typically do not result in sufficient information to help practitioners. Current standards of evidence employed across the United States apply a positivist notion of validity with quantitative research criteria that discourage answering importanthowandwhyquestions, explicitly privilege quantitative/RCT evidence, offer few cont…
How qualitative research methods can be leveraged to strengthen mixed methods research in public policy and public administration
Recently, there have been a variety of arguments voiced to encourage that more attention be given to the role qualitative methods can play in mixed methods research in public policy and public administration. This article discusses these claims and describes the benefits of qualitative approaches, and how qualitative research methods can be leveraged to strengthen mixed methods research in public administration. We also provide a guide for improv…
Reckoning With Race and Gender in Public Administration and Public Policy: A Substantive Social Equity Turn
Promoting race‐aware and gender‐aware scholarship is essential for giving substance to social equity research. This review and introduction provides an account of one such initiative to promote race and gender scholarship through collaboration between Public Administration Review (PAR), and the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES), and introduces the PAR Race and Gender Symposium. CORGES is an informal group of scholars motivated by th…
Advancing Evaluation Practice With Serious Games
Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in current evaluation practice: inclusion of stakeholders, understanding of causal mechanisms, and utilizati…
Leading and Learning through Dynamic Performance Management in Government
Performance management in government is at a crossroads. The advent of big data and advances in technological and analytical tools have provided opportunities to measure and track a wider variety of internal and external indicators on a more timely basis. Public leaders require new vision and capacity to design and manage knowledge‐building systems. This article provides two tools: (1) a more comprehensive open systems performance management fram…
Supporting the AEA Mission of Improving Evaluation Practice, Methods, and Use: The Timely Value of a National Academy of Evaluation
The growing emphasis on using evidence to inform decisions in public sector policy making has created both opportunities for and demands on the American Evaluation Association (AEA) in pursuing its mission “to improve evaluation practices and methods, increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession, and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action.” This article explores…
Handbook of Practical Program Evaluation
Forging a Strategic and Comprehensive Approach to Evaluation Within Public and Nonprofit Organizations: Integrating Measurement and Analytics Within Evaluation
The “performance movement” has been a subject of enthusiasm and frustration for evaluators. Performance measurement, data analytics, and program evaluation have been treated as different tasks, and those addressing them speak their own languages in their own circles. We suggest that situating performance measurement and data analytics within the broader field of evaluation would be theoretically parsimonious and fruitful. Scholars and practitione…
Federalist No. 23: Can the Leviathan Be Managed
Federalist No. 23 offers a strong case for national power and the need to grant “means proportional to the end” to the new government. This essay argues that the founders could not have anticipated the breadth of today's national agenda and offers a framework for designing a more strategic and effective public enterprise
Public–Private Partnerships and the Public Accountability Question
Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are growing in popularity as a governing model for delivery of public goods and services. PPPs have existed since the Roman Empire, but their expansion into traditional public projects today raises serious questions about public accountability. This article examines public accountability and its application to government and private firms involved in PPPs. An analytical framework is proposed for assessing the ex…
How Might We Strengthen Evaluation Capacity to Manage Evaluation Contracts
The laudatory goal of evaluation capacity building is quite timely, given the spotlight on the potential use of program evaluation in the current environment which emphasizes performance reporting and evidence-based policy. A question that quickly comes to mind is: Where do you start? A seemingly reasonable starting point is to assess organizational culture and ways of working to tailor a strategy for building both evaluation capacity and a susta…
Federal Offices of the Inspector General: Thriving on Chaos
Rapid change in responsibilities, requirements, and human resource demands has been the constant for federal Offices of the Inspector General over the past decade. They have been drawn into work on the management challenges facing their agencies, new requirements levied by the Chief Financial Officers Act and the Government Performance and Results Act, and crisis management efforts imposed by recent homeland security threats. This study replicate…
Tracking and Probing Program Performance: Fruitful Path or Blind Alley for Evaluation Professionals
Tracking and probing program performance: Fruitful path or blind alley for evaluation professionals
The Changing Nature of Accountability: The Role of the Inspector General in Federal Agencies
Federal managers are currently changing the way they business in response to a variety of initiatives from both the executive and legislative branches. Signals from the White House contained in the National Performance Review (1993) and from the Congress in the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 call for managers to focus on programmatic results rather than procedural guidelines as they steer their programs. With the relatively new em…
Opportunities and Incentives for Improving Program Quality: Auditing and Evaluating
The evolution of the Office of Inspector General (OIG) in the federal agencies has attracted much attention during the last ten years. Recent observers have pointed to the increased use of performance audits by IG offices, and the highly visible use of inspections by the OIG at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as signals that the programmatic focus of the auditing community is merging with that of the program evaluation community…
A Useful Antidote
Evaluating Public Sector Information Systems: More Than Meets the Eye
mation systems. T he proliferation of personal computers, networked terminals, and powerful workstations throughout the public sector makes information systems and their information products readily accessible to most government workers. In many cases, the use of information systems seems indispensable for public program success in service delivery, oversight, policy formulation, and accountability functions. The knowledge and skills for effectiv…
A Hands‐on Approach to Teaching Program Evaluation
This article examines the changing nature of program evaluation and the way in which program evaluation is taught to MPA students. Drawing on her experience at George Washington University, the authors explains an approach to teaching program evaluation that has received a great deal of positive feedback. The approach has its foundation, real‐world, hands‐on evaluation by the students, which gives them invaluable experience. Furthermore, because …
The Presidential Management Internship Program: Looking Backward and Moving Forward
Attracting and retaining competent public servants is an issue which has drawn increased public attention in the aftermath of the bureaucrat bashing of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most studies on retention of competent public employees have examined attrition at executive levels-investigating why senior executives and political appointees have left federal service (U.S. GAO, 1987; Levine, 1986; Congressional Budget Office, 1986
The Administrative Hearing Experience: Women and Men Unemployment Insurance Claimants
Differential treatment of men and women by employers has recieved much attention in recent years. At the extreme, disparity in the treatment of women in the military, federal employment, institutions of higher learning and private employment has been identified, and remedial actions initiated through legal means instituted under various federal laws. Researchers have also investigated disparity in the treatment of men and women within the legal s…
The administrative hearing experience: Women and men unemployment insurance claimants
The Impact of General Revenue Sharing on Spending in Fifty Cities
This study examines the net effect of General Revenue Sharing (GRS) funds on city expenditures in the areas of public safety/public works and social welfare. Using a linear trend analysis, spending patterns over a 15-year period (1963-1977) are examined for such city services as police, fire, sewage, health, and housing. Political characteristics of the cities are identified to explain variations in the use of revenue sharing for social welfare f…
Public–Private Partnerships and the Public Accountability Question
Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are growing in popularity as a governing model for delivery of public goods and services. PPPs have existed since the Roman Empire, but their expansion into traditional public projects today raises serious questions about public accountability. This article examines public accountability and its application to government and private firms involved in PPPs. An analytical framework is proposed for assessing the ex…
Reckoning With Race and Gender in Public Administration and Public Policy: A Substantive Social Equity Turn
Promoting race‐aware and gender‐aware scholarship is essential for giving substance to social equity research. This review and introduction provides an account of one such initiative to promote race and gender scholarship through collaboration between Public Administration Review (PAR), and the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES), and introduces the PAR Race and Gender Symposium. CORGES is an informal group of scholars motivated by th…
How qualitative research methods can be leveraged to strengthen mixed methods research in public policy and public administration
Recently, there have been a variety of arguments voiced to encourage that more attention be given to the role qualitative methods can play in mixed methods research in public policy and public administration. This article discusses these claims and describes the benefits of qualitative approaches, and how qualitative research methods can be leveraged to strengthen mixed methods research in public administration. We also provide a guide for improv…
World military and social expenditures
Beyond social equity: Talking social justice in public administration
Forging a Strategic and Comprehensive Approach to Evaluation Within Public and Nonprofit Organizations: Integrating Measurement and Analytics Within Evaluation
The “performance movement” has been a subject of enthusiasm and frustration for evaluators. Performance measurement, data analytics, and program evaluation have been treated as different tasks, and those addressing them speak their own languages in their own circles. We suggest that situating performance measurement and data analytics within the broader field of evaluation would be theoretically parsimonious and fruitful. Scholars and practitione…
Federal Offices of the Inspector General: Thriving on Chaos
Rapid change in responsibilities, requirements, and human resource demands has been the constant for federal Offices of the Inspector General over the past decade. They have been drawn into work on the management challenges facing their agencies, new requirements levied by the Chief Financial Officers Act and the Government Performance and Results Act, and crisis management efforts imposed by recent homeland security threats. This study replicate…
Analyzing Policy Impact: Selection of a Linear Trend Model
Policy analysts, as well as politicians, have shown great interest in assessing both short‐term and long‐term consequences of public policies in recent years. Recent time‐trend studies have attempted to depict the time dimension of policy consequences through extensions of regression techniques. This study examines three linear trend models which have been used to depict policy impact through time‐series analyses, and identifies the relative adva…
Leading and Learning through Dynamic Performance Management in Government
Performance management in government is at a crossroads. The advent of big data and advances in technological and analytical tools have provided opportunities to measure and track a wider variety of internal and external indicators on a more timely basis. Public leaders require new vision and capacity to design and manage knowledge‐building systems. This article provides two tools: (1) a more comprehensive open systems performance management fram…
The Impact of Reapportionment on Policy Expenditures: A Quasi‐Experimental Time‐Series Analysis
While there is little question that court‐ordered reapportionment has changed the composition of state legislative personnel, it is still unclear whether reapportionment has had any significant impact on public policies. Evidence to date has been both contradictory and methodologically suspect. Using time‐series regression in a quasi‐experimental design, we examine the effects of reapportionment on expenditures in three policy areas within eight …
Advancing Evaluation Practice With Serious Games
Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in current evaluation practice: inclusion of stakeholders, understanding of causal mechanisms, and utilizati…
Tracking and Probing Program Performance: Fruitful Path or Blind Alley for Evaluation Professionals
How Might We Strengthen Evaluation Capacity to Manage Evaluation Contracts
The laudatory goal of evaluation capacity building is quite timely, given the spotlight on the potential use of program evaluation in the current environment which emphasizes performance reporting and evidence-based policy. A question that quickly comes to mind is: Where do you start? A seemingly reasonable starting point is to assess organizational culture and ways of working to tailor a strategy for building both evaluation capacity and a susta…
Tracking and probing program performance: Fruitful path or blind alley for evaluation professionals
Analyzing Policy Impact: Selection of a Linear Trend Model
Policy analysts, as well as politicians, have shown great interest in assessing both short‐term and long‐term consequences of public policies in recent years. Recent time‐trend studies have attempted to depict the time dimension of policy consequences through extensions of regression techniques. This study examines three linear trend models which have been used to depict policy impact through time‐series analyses, and identifies the relative adva…
The Impact of Reapportionment on Policy Expenditures: A Quasi‐Experimental Time‐Series Analysis
While there is little question that court‐ordered reapportionment has changed the composition of state legislative personnel, it is still unclear whether reapportionment has had any significant impact on public policies. Evidence to date has been both contradictory and methodologically suspect. Using time‐series regression in a quasi‐experimental design, we examine the effects of reapportionment on expenditures in three policy areas within eight …
The Impact of General Revenue Sharing on Spending in Fifty Cities
This study examines the net effect of General Revenue Sharing (GRS) funds on city expenditures in the areas of public safety/public works and social welfare. Using a linear trend analysis, spending patterns over a 15-year period (1963-1977) are examined for such city services as police, fire, sewage, health, and housing. Political characteristics of the cities are identified to explain variations in the use of revenue sharing for social welfare f…
World military and social expenditures
The Administrative Hearing Experience: Women and Men Unemployment Insurance Claimants
Differential treatment of men and women by employers has recieved much attention in recent years. At the extreme, disparity in the treatment of women in the military, federal employment, institutions of higher learning and private employment has been identified, and remedial actions initiated through legal means instituted under various federal laws. Researchers have also investigated disparity in the treatment of men and women within the legal s…
The administrative hearing experience: Women and men unemployment insurance claimants
A Hands‐on Approach to Teaching Program Evaluation
This article examines the changing nature of program evaluation and the way in which program evaluation is taught to MPA students. Drawing on her experience at George Washington University, the authors explains an approach to teaching program evaluation that has received a great deal of positive feedback. The approach has its foundation, real‐world, hands‐on evaluation by the students, which gives them invaluable experience. Furthermore, because …
The Presidential Management Internship Program: Looking Backward and Moving Forward
Attracting and retaining competent public servants is an issue which has drawn increased public attention in the aftermath of the bureaucrat bashing of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most studies on retention of competent public employees have examined attrition at executive levels-investigating why senior executives and political appointees have left federal service (U.S. GAO, 1987; Levine, 1986; Congressional Budget Office, 1986
A Useful Antidote
Evaluating Public Sector Information Systems: More Than Meets the Eye
mation systems. T he proliferation of personal computers, networked terminals, and powerful workstations throughout the public sector makes information systems and their information products readily accessible to most government workers. In many cases, the use of information systems seems indispensable for public program success in service delivery, oversight, policy formulation, and accountability functions. The knowledge and skills for effectiv…
Opportunities and Incentives for Improving Program Quality: Auditing and Evaluating
The evolution of the Office of Inspector General (OIG) in the federal agencies has attracted much attention during the last ten years. Recent observers have pointed to the increased use of performance audits by IG offices, and the highly visible use of inspections by the OIG at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as signals that the programmatic focus of the auditing community is merging with that of the program evaluation community…
The Changing Nature of Accountability: The Role of the Inspector General in Federal Agencies
Federal managers are currently changing the way they business in response to a variety of initiatives from both the executive and legislative branches. Signals from the White House contained in the National Performance Review (1993) and from the Congress in the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 call for managers to focus on programmatic results rather than procedural guidelines as they steer their programs. With the relatively new em…
Tracking and Probing Program Performance: Fruitful Path or Blind Alley for Evaluation Professionals
Tracking and probing program performance: Fruitful path or blind alley for evaluation professionals
How Might We Strengthen Evaluation Capacity to Manage Evaluation Contracts
The laudatory goal of evaluation capacity building is quite timely, given the spotlight on the potential use of program evaluation in the current environment which emphasizes performance reporting and evidence-based policy. A question that quickly comes to mind is: Where do you start? A seemingly reasonable starting point is to assess organizational culture and ways of working to tailor a strategy for building both evaluation capacity and a susta…
Federal Offices of the Inspector General: Thriving on Chaos
Rapid change in responsibilities, requirements, and human resource demands has been the constant for federal Offices of the Inspector General over the past decade. They have been drawn into work on the management challenges facing their agencies, new requirements levied by the Chief Financial Officers Act and the Government Performance and Results Act, and crisis management efforts imposed by recent homeland security threats. This study replicate…
Public–Private Partnerships and the Public Accountability Question
Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are growing in popularity as a governing model for delivery of public goods and services. PPPs have existed since the Roman Empire, but their expansion into traditional public projects today raises serious questions about public accountability. This article examines public accountability and its application to government and private firms involved in PPPs. An analytical framework is proposed for assessing the ex…
Federalist No. 23: Can the Leviathan Be Managed
Federalist No. 23 offers a strong case for national power and the need to grant “means proportional to the end” to the new government. This essay argues that the founders could not have anticipated the breadth of today's national agenda and offers a framework for designing a more strategic and effective public enterprise
Handbook of Practical Program Evaluation
Forging a Strategic and Comprehensive Approach to Evaluation Within Public and Nonprofit Organizations: Integrating Measurement and Analytics Within Evaluation
The “performance movement” has been a subject of enthusiasm and frustration for evaluators. Performance measurement, data analytics, and program evaluation have been treated as different tasks, and those addressing them speak their own languages in their own circles. We suggest that situating performance measurement and data analytics within the broader field of evaluation would be theoretically parsimonious and fruitful. Scholars and practitione…
Supporting the AEA Mission of Improving Evaluation Practice, Methods, and Use: The Timely Value of a National Academy of Evaluation
The growing emphasis on using evidence to inform decisions in public sector policy making has created both opportunities for and demands on the American Evaluation Association (AEA) in pursuing its mission “to improve evaluation practices and methods, increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession, and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action.” This article explores…
Leading and Learning through Dynamic Performance Management in Government
Performance management in government is at a crossroads. The advent of big data and advances in technological and analytical tools have provided opportunities to measure and track a wider variety of internal and external indicators on a more timely basis. Public leaders require new vision and capacity to design and manage knowledge‐building systems. This article provides two tools: (1) a more comprehensive open systems performance management fram…
Advancing Evaluation Practice With Serious Games
Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in current evaluation practice: inclusion of stakeholders, understanding of causal mechanisms, and utilizati…
How qualitative research methods can be leveraged to strengthen mixed methods research in public policy and public administration
Recently, there have been a variety of arguments voiced to encourage that more attention be given to the role qualitative methods can play in mixed methods research in public policy and public administration. This article discusses these claims and describes the benefits of qualitative approaches, and how qualitative research methods can be leveraged to strengthen mixed methods research in public administration. We also provide a guide for improv…
Reckoning With Race and Gender in Public Administration and Public Policy: A Substantive Social Equity Turn
Promoting race‐aware and gender‐aware scholarship is essential for giving substance to social equity research. This review and introduction provides an account of one such initiative to promote race and gender scholarship through collaboration between Public Administration Review (PAR), and the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES), and introduces the PAR Race and Gender Symposium. CORGES is an informal group of scholars motivated by th…
Political science (20 works) · Business (13 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Evaluation and Performance Assessment (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · Public Administration (11 works) · Public Administration (11 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (10 works)