Formulating therapeutic objectives as a prelude to program evaluation

The author emphasizes the need for more precise formulation of goals for mental health treatment programs. He describes the Veterans Administration's five-year effort at goal formulation using ideas borrowed from operations research and education. With goals from various VA programs as examples, he illustrates how goal statements can be written with more specificity. He also describes how matching rating-scale items can be developed to measure the degree to which each goal is being met.