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US 2006/0218008 A1Published application
Comprehensive social program data analysis
OwnerDarlene Coleinventor
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method for administering, monitoring and evaluating a social program to determine whether or not it has been effective for its intended design by allowing the users to easily compare the effectiveness of the proposed outcome indicators being measured with regard to the activities being tracked.
Claims10
A method, in a data processing system, for administering and evaluating the usefulness of a social program, said method comprising:
- a) obtaining pre-program information concerning indicators relating to program outcomes and goals for a population of program service, activity or training recipients;
- b) obtaining information concerning similar indicators for a control population;
- c) storing the control and pre-participation indicator information by an electronic means so that it can be analyzed using inferential statistical analysis methods;
- d) implementing the social program;
- e) obtaining ongoing, intermediate, and post program information concerning the proposed outcome indicators for the same populations of recipients of the social program;
- f) obtaining similar information concerning outcome indicators for a control population not served by the social program;
- g) comparing the pre-program and post-program data of the social program recipients and the control group according to an inferential statistics method which calculates statistical significance of the differences between the social program recipients and the control group as appropriate;
- h) selecting displayable lists, tables, graphs and results summaries that have been calculated by the statistical inference method for values, resulting outcomes, covariance of treatment differences and outcome differences;
- i) making a decision based upon the results of the inferential statistics method as to whether or not the social program or social program element has been effective for its intended use based on the displayed statistical findings;
- j) implementing any changes to the implementation of the social program shown to be desirable based upon the comparisons of the control group and the pre-and post-participant outcome indicators;
7 more elements
A data processing system for administering and evaluating the usefulness of a social program comprising:
- a) a computer processor means comprising a personal computer including a CPU, or a network server, for processing data;
- b) storage means comprising a computer hard drive or a network server for storing data on a storage medium;
- c) an electronic storage means to obtain and store control group indicator information;
- d) an electronic storage means to obtain and store pre-participation indicator information for social program participants;
- e) first means comprising an arithmetic circuit configured to prepare the computer hard drive or a network server to store selected data for initializing the storage medium;
- f) second means comprising an arithmetic logic circuit configured to retrieve information from a specific file, calculate incremental increases or decreases based on specific outcome score, allocate the results on a percentage or unit increase or decrease basis and as retrievable data value points, and store the output in a separate file for processing data regarding whether or not there has been a statistically significant improvement in social program effectiveness and related outcome data during the time period measured for that file.
- g) third means comprising an arithmetic logic circuit configured to retrieve information from a specific number of files, calculate using inferential statistics analysis whether or not there has been an improvement in the outcome indicators for the population of specified files during the time period measured for those files.
4 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.