1. When Value is Created but There is No Record: An Eyewitness Account of Public Value Creation in a Student Resource Officer Program.
- Author
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Dole, Gregory, Duxbury, Linda, and Bennell, Craig
- Subjects
PUBLIC value ,SCHOOL police ,VALUE creation ,POLICE services ,EYEWITNESS accounts - Abstract
Conceptualizing and measuring public value presents many challenges for researchers, particularly in those cases where the program being evaluated has visible expenses and hard to quantify outputs or outcomes. Program stakeholders might not even recognize the public value (PV) they are creating. PV theory lacks empirical research and faces the possibility of theoretical stagnation. Efforts at measuring PV have not yielded consensus. This study employs ethnography to investigate how an external observer sees the PV being created by the school resource officer (SRO) program. This paper reports the key findings from a case study into the value delivered by a controversial public program, a co-operative initiative between a regional police service and the region's educational system. This evaluation comprised ten ride alongs with SRO program officers over a five-month period. Forty-one stories of PV being created were observed, which were then grouped into six themes/focused codes. In addition to the program's desired outcome of building safer schools, this paper identifies five other types of PV creation. These outcomes represent important contributions to the public and allow for the potential comparison of how tax dollars are spent, informing future allocation of funds and potentially saving good programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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