What Are the Overall Issues Associated with Defining the Problem and the Intervention?

With any evaluation there are three fundamental questions that must be addressed:

What is the problem? How is it defined and what is the scope of the problem?

What are we doing to address the problem?

How effective are the interventions and how might we be able to improve them in the future?

Although the questions are very straightforward, and it may seem that the answers are obvious, the questions can be difficult to answer precisely given the complexity of the issues related to uninsured children in each State.

Before attempting to answer the fundamental evaluation questions, States will need to take into account the context in which the questions will be addressed and consider the following critical issues:

Defining the target population. Exactly who is the target of the program—uninsured low-income children or children in low-income families who are at risk for being uninsured?

Deciding what evaluation questions should be addressed at the State level and which questions are better evaluated at a national level. Since evaluation resources are limited in many States, it may be necessary to focus primarily on those evaluation questions that are critical for State policy.

Designing data collection systems and evaluations to produce information that will meet the Federal reporting requirements.

Assessing what data and methods are available at the State level, what funding is available to support evaluation efforts, and what Federal technical assistance will be available.