Research Methods (ONE of the questions below--A or B---will be asked on the Comp Exam in December. Students should prepare for both questions, since either may be asked.)
A. Controversy has swirled about single-sex schools. One major concern is whether girls are able to learn more in an environment in which only girls are present or in a co-ed environment. Assume that you have been asked to research this issue.
1. State your hypothesis
2. Identify the unit of analysis
3. Delineate your dependent and independent variables and some illustrative control
variables.
4. Conceptualize and operationalize your dependent, independent, and control variables.
4. Discuss your sampling approach.
5. Discuss your research method, i.e. whether you are going to use experimentation, survey research, field research, existing data, or a combination of these approaches. Tell why you have selected this method.
7. Discuss your data analysis techniques.
8. Identify ethical, political, or other problems you envision in implementing your research design.
B. The Corrections Department in a major Midwestern state has attempted to enhance efficiency and improve conditions in prisons, by involving private developers and facility managers in the prison operation. Private managers have been assigned prisons for low-risk prisoners with better records, and the private managers have been allowed to build new prisons with recently-developed advanced technology. The correction agency continues to operate older prisons for more difficult prisoners. If prisoners misbehave or create trouble, the private managers can transfer such prisoners back to state-operated facilities. Workers in the private prisons can receive bonuses and can be fired without civil service protections. Workers in state prisons do not receive bonuses but have better job protections.
The state legislature has conducted an evaluation of the privatization program, comparing, for the first year of operation, the performance of private prisons compared to publicly run prisons. The study compared operating costs and operational performance such as assaults, injuries, and program participation levels.
Identify any two of the following potential sources of invalidity of the evaluation:
selection bias or differential selection
history
maturation
experimental mortality.
In your answer, explain each validity problem and explain how the design gives rise to the problem.
Please design an evaluation of the program using an experimental or quasi-experimental design. In the evaluation:
provide a hypothesis or evaluation question
identify independent and dependent variables
define how measures will be operationalized
describe your research design
Also, describe how your design will overcome the two potential sources of invalidity described earlier in your essay.
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Policy Analysis (ONE of the questions below--A or B---will be asked on the Comp Exam in December. Students should prepare for both questions, since either may be asked.)
A. The evolution of policy-making and decision-making theory is frequently cyclical. Theories, models and theorists fall in and out of fashion. Discuss a foundation theory of public policy and decision-making and link that theory to a contemporary theory in the field. Make sure your essay discusses the important elements of each theory, identifies theorists associated with the older theory and with the contemporary
theory, and carefully analyzes the similarities and differences between the theories. Your analysis must consider the contexts (social, economic, ideological ) that helped make each theory popular in its time.
A. Select a current policy problem (e.g., welfare reform, health care, immigration reform, etc.). You must analyze the problem using at least two different models of policy analysis. For each model that you select, you must discuss how each question below would be answered by following that model, and how those answers would lead to different solutions to the policy problem.
What questions would be asked at the outset?
What actors and agencies would likely have a role in the shaping of the policy?
What factors would arise in the course of making the policy that could influence the outcome?
When a policy solution is arrived at, how would you most accurately describe the overall process that took place? Explain how you arrived at this description of the overall process?
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ALL STUDENTS TAKE NOTE: The first set of questions below "MPA Program Fiscal Policy" is for students in the MPA Program. The second set of italicized questions "Inspector General Accounting and Auditing" is for students in the Inspector General Program. A question from each set will be distributed at the Capstone Examination. MPA Program students will only receive and/or may only answer the Fiscal Policy question. Inspector General Program students will only receive and/or may only answer the Accounting and Auditing question.
MPA Program Fiscal Policy (ONE of the questions below--A or B---will be asked on the Comp Exam in December. Students should prepare for both questions, since either may be asked.)
A. During the past two fiscal years, two budget-related bills have been passed by Congress and signed by the President that could have a major impact on the federal budget process: The Balanced Budget Act and the Line Item Veto. As a result of the Balanced Budget Act, the federal budget is supposed to be in balance by 2002 if all anticipated spending reductions and revenue actions are made. The Act extended discretionary caps to 2002 and maintains pay-as-you-go requirements. The line item veto gives the President the right to delete specific expenditures from a signed appropriations bill.
Discuss the impact of these two bills on the executive-legislative relationship in the federal budget process. In your response show how these bills have changed (or not changed) the executive-legislative relationship which has evolved as a result of earlier budget acts including, but not necessarily limited to: The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921; the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974; the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 (Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act); and the 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA).
In your response, make sure to discuss how each of the budget acts named above have affected the executive-legislative relationship in the federal budget process.
B. On April 15, 1997, five U.S. Congressmen tossed the Internal Revenue Code into Boston Harbor in a reenactment of the famous 1773 Tea Party protest over unjust taxation. Representatives Dan Schaefer, Billy Tauzin, Ron Packard, Mike Crapo and Charlie Norwood used this event to publicize the introduction of H.R. 2001, which repeals the income tax and abolishes the IRS, replacing both with a National Retail Sales Tax. Discuss H.R. 2001 by comparing the existing progressive federal Income Tax and the proposed national Sales Tax with respect to the following criteria:
Equity (both vertical and horizontal)
Administrative Ease
Political Implications
Economic Impact
Revenue adequacy (including stability).
In your response, be sure to define each of the criteria and to make sure that you compare the two methods of taxation (income tax and sales tax) using each of the five criteria.
As a result of this comparison, which tax would you recommend? Why?
Inspector General Program Accounting and Auditing (ONE of the questions below--A or B---will be asked on the Comp Exam. Students should prepare for both questions, since either may be asked.)
A. Describe the respective roles of the Federal Inspectors General and the General Accounting Office. What scope of investigative authority does each have? What other units of government relate to the Inspectors General and how do they help determine the mix of investigations, operational analyses, and fiscal audits that any given Inspector General pursues? To what extent does the personality and leadership characteristics of individual Inspectors General help determine this activity mix? What other units of government relate to the General Accounting Office and how do they help determine the mix of investigations, operational analyses, and fiscal audits that any given Inspector General pursues? To what extent does the personality and leadership characteristics of an individual Comptroller General help determine this activity mix? Conclude your answer with a reasoned assessment comparing the effectiveness of General Accounting Office intervention and Inspectors General intervention in curbing fraud, waste and abuse in the Federal government.
B. Describe each of the following audit techniques: Examination, Inspection, Confirmation, Recomputation, Observation, Inquiry and Comparison. Then, with respect to ONE of the situations listed below, identify the three audit techniques you would consider most applicable. What is your rationale for choosing each of these three techniques? Why do you consider the others less applicable? How would you go about implementing the three techniques you have chosen in auditing this situation.
--A community development agency is charged by its former accountant with lax bookkeeping, unlimited petty cash and expense policies for executives, and giving lip service and very few dollars to projects for which the agency has been funded.
--A number of allegations have been made that a non-profit charitable group receiving city funds has established a number of activities--a community coffee house, a thrift shop, an on-going bingo game--that are, in fact, being run as profit making businesses benefiting certain of the charitable group's employees.
--An anonymous tipster has alleged that members of the 199th Precinct have an elaborate system of taking days off, coming in late and leaving early without charging the time to annual leave. According to the tipster, officers sign in for other officers, and overtime is fabricated creating bogus compensatory time that is then used for days off. The tipster alleges that the behavior pervades the precinct, concluding that "even the Captain has to have some idea that this is going on."