Your browser does not support the NLM PubReader view.

Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
Korean Journal of Policy Studies
Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University

Korean J. Policy Stud. 2016; 31(1):89-112

pISSN: 1225-5017, eISSN: 2765-2807

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52372/kjps31104

Article

Looking Inside the Black Box: The Importance of Causal Mechanism and Treatment Effect Heterogeneity in Experimentally Evaluated Criminal Justice Interventions*

Chongmin Na1
1Chongmin Na is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. E-mail: cna@jjay.cuny.edu.

© Copyright 2016 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Feb 10, 2016; Revised: Mar 01, 2016; Revised: Mar 25, 2016; Accepted: Mar 25, 2016

Published Online: Apr 30, 2016

Abstract

This paper discusses limitations of the “black-box” experimental archetype by highlighting the narrowness of outcome-focused approaches. For a more complete understanding of the nuanced implications of policies and programs, this study calls for an investigation of causal mechanism and treatment effect heterogeneity in experimentally evaluated interventions. This study draws on two distinct but closely related empirical studies, one undertaken by Na and Paternoster (2012) and the other by Na, Loughran, and Paternoster (2015), that go beyond the estimation of a population average treatment effect by adopting more recent methodological advancements that are still underappreciated and underutilized in evaluation research.

Keywords: Causal Mechanism; Treatment Effect Heterogeneity