Disability Policy Evaluation: Combining Logic Models and Systems Thinking.

Claudia and her team built a recipe for checking if disability policies work.

They mixed two tools: a logic model (boxes and arrows that show what goes in, what happens, and what should come out) and systems thinking (looking at how parts affect each other over time).

The paper gives step-by-step guidance; no new data were collected.

The authors show how to map a policy’s moving parts: money, staff training, family support, and long-term outcomes like jobs or quality of life.

They warn that counting only immediate outputs (how many people signed up) can hide bigger system gaps (why some regions still have no services).

Moss (2009) asked for economic math to set autism research budgets; Claudia et al. answer with a visual logic model any state can draw on a whiteboard.

Laugeson et al. (2014) found that autism insurance mandates cluster in richer states, widening gaps; the new framework would flag this loop early by adding an “equity” box to the model.

Perez et al. (2015) surveyed Massachusetts BCBAs and saw most skip functional analysis; plugging that finding into the logic model reveals a training bottleneck that policy money could fix.

You can lift the authors’ blank logic model and drop your own program into it. Add boxes for staff turnover, travel distance, and family network size from Kunze et al. (2025). Draw arrows that loop back—if high turnover cuts service quality, the model shows where to intervene. Take it to your next stakeholder meeting; when everyone sees the whole system on one page, funding requests get approved faster.