Evaluating Organizational Effectiveness: A New Strategy to Leverage Multisite Randomized Trials for Valid Assessment

Determining which organizations are more effective in implementing an intervention program is essential for theoretically and empirically characterizing exemplary practice and for intervening to enhance the capacity of ineffective ones. However, sites differ in their local ecological conditions including client composition, availability of alternative programs, and broader community context. Applying the causal inference framework, this study proposes a formal mathematical definition of an organization's local relative effectiveness attributable solely to malleable organizational practice. Capitalizing on multisite randomized trials, the identification leverages observed control group outcomes that capture some of the confounding impacts of otherwise unmeasured contextual variation. We propose a two-step mixed-effects modeling procedure that adjusts for pre-existing between-site variation. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate its superior performance compared to conventional methods. We apply the new strategy to an evaluation of Job Corps centers nationwide serving disadvantaged youths.