Government and private funders increasingly require social service providers to adopt program models deemed "evidence based," particularly as defined by evidence-based program registries, such as What Works Clearinghouse and National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices. These registries summarize the evidence about programs’ effectiveness, giving near-exclusive priority to evidence from experimental-design evaluations. The registries’ goal is to aid decision making about program replication, but critics suspect the emphasis on evidence from experimental-design evaluations, while ensuring strong internal validity, may inadvertently undermine that goal, which requires strong external validity as well.

The objective of this study is to determine the extent to which the registries’ reports provide information about context-specific program implementation factors that affect program outcomes and would thus support decision making about program replication and adaptation.

A research-derived rubric was used to rate the extent of context-specific reporting in the population of seven major registries’ evidence summaries (N = 55) for youth development programs.

Nearly all (91%) of the reports provide context-specific information about program participants, but far fewer provide context-specific information about implementation fidelity and other variations in program implementation (55%), the program’s environment (37%), costs (27%), quality assurance measures (22%), implementing agencies (19%), or staff (15%).

Evidence-based program registries provide insufficient information to guide context-sensitive decision making about program replication and adaptation. Registries should supplement their evidence base with nonexperimental evaluations and revise their methodological screens and synthesis-writing protocols to prioritize reporting—by both evaluators and the registries themselves—of context-specific implementation factors that affect program outcomes.