Social programs, including interventions helping disadvantaged youth, offer implicit models regarding what behavioral changes will cause various social and economic outcomes. Responding, in part, to the work of evaluators, federal and state youth policies advance different intervention models....

Evaluators could more clearly contrast the bureaucratic structures typifying many inter ventions against the indigenous social rules that pattern local action by staffs or clients. Methodological critiques have thoroughly contested strict experimental designs that ignore political complexities...