This information about policy outcomes may then be transformed into new information about policy performance which tells us the extent to which a given policy has achieved its goals.
Information about reported increases in crime, when combined with additional information about policies implemented in the same period-for example, information about the passage of new and more aggressive crime control legislation, or about increases in the unemployment rate-may also be used to structure policy problems.
Thus, increased crime may be defined as a problem stemming from the ineffective enforcement of existing legislation or as an economic problem that cannot be resolved without also alleviating problems of unemployment through problem structuring which occurs continually in the process of policy analysis the analyst may generate new types of information.