Around the midpoint NR-717 usually asks for the analytic core of policy work: several genuine options for the problem you have mapped, weighed against criteria you declared before you weighed anything. The discipline is sequence. Criteria first, options second, scoring third, recommendation last. Written the other way around, with the preferred option chosen and the criteria assembled afterward to justify it, the paper is an advocacy piece wearing an analysis costume, and experienced readers see it immediately. Your section may print this as NR 717 or NR717; it is the same course. Chamberlain publishes no syllabi outside Canvas. The placement here is our teaching judgment from the course's catalog arc; your section's rubric decides what your week actually asks.
What NR-717 Week 5 asks for
The minutes of a county board of health meeting, requested as public record, ran to eleven pages on a single agenda item about a maternal health program. Reading them in order was instructive. Pages one through six were discussion of one option, presented by staff with a supporting cost estimate. Page seven introduced two alternatives in a single paragraph each, both described in terms that made them sound unworkable. Page eight recorded the vote. Page nine listed the criteria the board said it had applied: cost, feasibility, equity impact and sustainability. Those criteria appeared nowhere in the preceding eight pages. They had been written into the record after the decision, as a rationale, and the document showed the seam.
That is precisely the failure this stage teaches you to avoid on paper. Options analysis has a fixed logic, and the logic is only worth anything if it runs forward. You declare what a good solution would have to accomplish. You generate a real set of candidates, including the option of doing nothing, because doing nothing is always available and always has consequences that deserve to be counted. You then assess each candidate against each criterion using evidence rather than adjectives, and only then do you recommend.
The written product at this stage is usually a policy analysis containing an options comparison, frequently with a matrix. Some sections ask for a specified number of alternatives. Where yours does, take the number seriously and make each alternative genuinely different in mechanism rather than three versions of the same idea at different intensities. Three options that all involve hiring somebody are one option with a budget slider.
The practice-doctorate frame shapes what counts as a good criterion. You are translating existing evidence into a change somebody will have to run, so feasibility, workforce impact, implementation burden, and sustainability after the initial funding all belong beside effectiveness and equity. A recommendation that is well supported by evidence and impossible to staff has not solved the problem, and a doctoral reader will say so. This is also where you distinguish yourself from a research student: you are being assessed on judgment under real constraints, not on methodological purity.
The NR-717 Week 5 method, step by step
Six moves for an options analysis that holds up under a hostile read.
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Write the criteria before you name a single option
Four to six of them, each defined in a sentence that says how you will judge it and from what evidence. Effectiveness needs a stated outcome and a source of estimates. Equity impact needs to say impact on whom, measured how. Undefined criteria are decoration.
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Weight the criteria openly if you weight them at all
Equal weighting is defensible and should be stated. Unequal weighting is also defensible and must be justified against the values of the decision maker you are writing for, not your own. What is never defensible is applying weights silently, because the reader cannot then reconstruct how you got from the matrix to the recommendation.
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Include the status quo as a scored option
Do nothing is the default outcome of most policy processes and it carries costs: the events that will occur, the gap that will persist, the resources currently consumed by workarounds. Scoring it forces you to quantify what change is worth and gives the recommendation something to beat.
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Make the alternatives differ in mechanism
Aim for options that pull different levers: a regulatory change, a payment or contracting change, a service redesign, a partnership or referral arrangement. Different mechanisms have different failure modes, and comparing across mechanisms is what makes the analysis informative rather than procedural.
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Score each cell with evidence and say where evidence is thin
Every cell in the matrix should be traceable to something: a study, a published cost, a documented precedent elsewhere, or an explicitly labelled assumption. A matrix of high, medium and low with no support behind the letters is the most common weak submission in this territory.
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Recommend, then name what would change your mind
State the recommendation in one unambiguous sentence, summarize the two or three considerations that decided it, and add a short passage on the conditions under which a different option would win. That last passage is what makes the analysis credible rather than promotional.
A layout and word budget for a policy options analysis
Our frame for an options comparison, sized for roughly 1,600 to 2,000 words plus the matrix. It is our own outline rather than anything the university issues, and your week's rubric outranks it wherever the two disagree.
| Section | What belongs in it | Word target |
|---|---|---|
| Decision statement | What is being decided, by whom, and by when, written as the question the analysis answers. | 100 to 130 |
| Criteria, defined | Each criterion with its definition, its measurement approach and its weight if weights are used. | 280 to 340 |
| Options described | Status quo plus three alternatives, each with its mechanism, its operator and its resource footprint. | 400 to 480 |
| Assessment against criteria | Option by option or criterion by criterion, with the evidence behind each judgment named in the sentence. | 450 to 550 |
| Recommendation | The option chosen, the deciding considerations, and the tradeoff you knowingly accepted. | 200 to 250 |
| Conditions for reversal | What would have to be true for a different option to win, stated concretely. | 130 to 180 |
Evidence craft for options analysis
Cost estimates arrive with a boundary. Say what is inside your estimate and what is not: staff time, training, software, space, ongoing maintenance, opportunity cost of the people diverted. An estimate with no stated boundary is unfalsifiable, and readers who manage budgets discount it entirely. Where you have a real figure from a vendor quote, a published program cost or an internal salary band, name the source.
Effect estimates transfer with caveats attached. If an option's effectiveness rests on results from another setting, say how that setting differs from yours in ways that would raise or lower the expected effect: population risk, baseline rate, staffing model, health system structure. Transferring an effect size across contexts without comment is the most common overreach in this stage.
Precedent counts as evidence when it is documented. If another jurisdiction, hospital or system has already adopted the option, that is valuable and citable: what they adopted, when, what they reported afterward. Precedent addresses feasibility in a way that trials never do, and doctoral readers weight it appropriately when it is properly attributed.
Label assumptions as assumptions in the sentence. Every analysis rests on things you could not verify. Writing assuming current staffing holds and no additional space is required, this option costs is stronger than presenting the same figure bare. Assumptions declared are analysis; assumptions hidden are errors waiting for a grader.
Five mistakes that cost points in this week's territory
- Straw alternatives. Two options built to lose make the matrix decorative and the recommendation unearned.
- Criteria written after the options. If the criteria happen to be exactly the strengths of the favoured option, the reader can tell which came first.
- No status quo row. Without it there is no baseline, and the cost of doing nothing goes uncounted.
- Unsupported matrix cells. High, medium and low with nothing behind them converts an analysis into a preference table.
- A recommendation with no acknowledged cost. Every real choice gives something up. A paper that claims its option is best on every criterion has stopped analyzing.
Before you submit
- Criteria are defined and measurable before any option appears
- Weights, if used, are stated and justified against the decision maker's priorities
- The status quo is included and scored like any other option
- Each alternative pulls a genuinely different lever
- Every matrix judgment traces to a source or a labelled assumption
- Cost figures carry their boundary and their origin
- The recommendation names its tradeoff and the conditions that would reverse it
Working the options matrix for NR-717?
Send the rubric and your criteria out of Canvas. A premium original draft comes back in 24 to 48 hours with real alternatives, evidence behind every cell and a recommendation that names its tradeoff, and revisions run until the grade lands.