Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
American Journal of Evaluation
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Marson, S. M.
Right arrow Articles by Wasserman, D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

A Reliability Analysis of Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) Weights

Stephen M. Marson

University of North Carolina at Pembroke, smarson{at}nc.rr.com

Guo Wei

University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Deborah Wasserman

The Ohio State University Center for Family Research

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) has been considered to be one of the most versatile and appealing evaluation protocols available for human services. Aspects of the protocol that make the method so appealing to practitioners—that is, collaboratively working with individual clients to identify and assign weights to goals they will work to achieve—have produced critical psychometric challenges that have threatened the method's acceptance by funders and researchers. This interrater reliability study of weighted goals contributes to their psychometric validation and therefore to the continued use of a methodology so attractive to practitioners. The subjective clinical impressions of 43 students trained in using GAS has statistically significant scorer reliability. These findings suggest that use of GAS composite scores (weight times the problem level) is a reliable tool and therefore not a reason to discourage the use of GAS as a means for monitoring a client's progress over time.

Key Words: Goal attainment scaling (GAS) • program evaluation • interrater reliability • clinical impressions

American Journal of Evaluation, Vol. 30, No. 2, 203-216 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1098214009334676
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?