Difficulties of Developing and Using Social Indicators to Evaluate Government Programs: A critical review

Victoria University in conjunction with Crime Prevention Victoria (CPV) received an ARC grant to investigate the relationships between crime prevention and community governance. The first task of the project was to develop a framework, linking community needs, community capacity, wellbeing and CPV interventions, which guide selection of social indicators and then compile a database of data from various sources. Among the difficulties inherent in developing social indicators are: selecting a framework to guide the development and analysis of the indicators, the difficulty of obtaining a reliable across-government comprehensive data base that would be continuously up-dated, the different contexts, policy goals and programs that indicators could serve, the significance of different definitions and contexts, applying appropriate criteria to guide the selection of the indicators, and the diversity of views about how indicators how indicators should or could be used The purpose of this paper is to describe how these issues are addressed in this project, the theoretical model that guides the selection of data from the database and how some of these difficulties are addressed.