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Killerby, P. (2006) “Attributing outcomes to outputs: Intervention logic and contribution analysis”, unpublished paper, May 2006.

Abstract

Strategic planners in New Zealand are considering the challenge of managing for shared outcomes, including new provisions in the Local Government Act (LGA) 2002 obliging councils to identify, monitor and promote local community aspirations as a planning and resource allocation framework. This paper discusses issues relating to measuring the links between council performance and community outcomes. These issues are generic to most causal modeling problems and can be phrased as an attribution problem: To what extent can measured changes in a community outcome be attributed to a change in outputs? A theoretical solution is to define the intervention logic of the relationship, collect sufficient data on each variable of interest and estimate a structural equations model. The paper concludes that less statistical approaches would be better suited for translating community outcomes information into a basis for improved decision-making. It stresses the importance of defining intervention logic as a key first step and collecting robust information as the basis for telling the “performance story” (Mayne, 2001, cited in Ruffner, 2002).



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