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Much of our research and
evaluation work measures the change in the ability of systems—schools,
universities, the workplace, community agencies, clinics, hospitals,
and public health agencies—to deliver health promotion and
prevention programs. Our work also measures the impact of prevention
and intervention strategies on health outcomes and quality of life
indicators.
About a third of our 100-person staff are involved in research
and evaluation activities. These professionals have a wide range
of experience using both qualitative and quantitative methods in
randomized clinical trials, multi-site and longitudinal studies,
and intervention protocols. They also conduct large-scale surveys
(through mail and online) and focus groups (in person and online),
do ethnographic research, and develop case studies.
HHD staff publish their research findings in professional and peer-reviewed
journals, in documents that inform legislators and policy makers,
and in newsletters and monographs for community-based agencies and
the public.
Examples of our research and evaluation work:
Program evaluation
- Moving
Kids to the Back—A Community-Based Intervention Trial, is
a three-year program evaluation conducted by HHD in collaboration
with the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). The project’s
goal is to decrease the number of motor vehicle injuries
and fatalities
in children under 12 by promoting rear seating, especially in
communities with low-income Latino populations. HHD is working
with HSPH
to
develop, implement, and evaluate the program.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury
Prevention
Funder: Harvard School of Public Health
- Through
its Evaluation of Violence Prevention Programs for
High-Risk Youth: The BostonCares Injured Youth Evaluation,
HHD’s
data suggest that a hospital-based youth violence program—including
community referrals and follow-up—reduces violence among
adolescents, who are treated for injuries resulting from non-domestic
violence.
HHD is working with local partners to develop and evaluate a
dispatcher model to link youth who are discharged from Boston
hospitals to
community-based agencies and organizations to receive mental
health and other services.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funder: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- HHD
is co-conducting a major evaluation of a national demonstration
project
examining how communities can better respond to the needs of battered
women and children through improved collaboration between the
social
and criminal justice systems. The project, Collaborations
to Address Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment: A Public-Private
Initiative, is testing, in six communities, nearly 70
recommendations published by the National Council of Juvenile
and Family Court Judges.
The project’s goals are to enhance collaboration among courts,
battered women’s services, and child welfare agencies; prevent
further abuse of battered women and their children; hold batterers
legally accountable; and expand community resources.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funder: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice
- As part
of the Evaluation of the Harvard University School
of Public Health Minority Student Development Program,
HHD is working with Harvard to evaluate an ongoing program
to promote
the interests of students of color in public health, particularly
biostatistics; to increase their application and enrollment
in these
fields; and to provide opportunities for them to earn a doctorate
at Harvard.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funders: Harvard University School of Public
Health; National Institutes of Health
- The Middle
School Drug Prevention and School Safety Coordinators/Online
Education
Evaluation found that participants’ satisfaction
with three online education events were positive six months following
the events. Seventy-five percent of participants in the first event,
74 percent in the second, and 80 percent in the third indicated
that they were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat
satisfied” with online learning events. For each of the
events, 83 percent, 79 percent, and 85 percent, respectively,
of the coordinators
were able to provide an example of how they applied information
from online events to their work.
- Delinquency
Prevention through Media Literacy: Evaluation of the Flashpoint
Curriculum is examining the effects of a media
literacy program on the patterns of thought and action of juvenile
offenders
and high school students. Media literacy aims to build critical
thinking skills among young people so they can better evaluate
media
messages and improve decision-making skills, particularly about
violence and substance use. The evaluation, conducted in partnership
with the District Attorney for the Eastern District in Massachusetts,
will help determine whether media literacy programs prevent high-risk
behaviors.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funder: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
- Working
in partnership with the Golden Key National Honor Society and
32
college campuses nationwide, The Social Norms Marketing
Research Project is evaluating the effectiveness
of “Just the Facts,” a social norms marketing campaign
developed and pilot-tested by Golden Key. The campus-based media
campaign is designed to change student perceptions of drinking
norms, an approach that is believed to lead to a decrease in high-risk
alcohol consumption. This is the first multi-site study of its
kind to rigorously evaluate how social marketing campaigns affect
students’ perceptions and actions surrounding alcohol use.
Center: Center for College Health and
Safety
Funder: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse
and Alcoholism; U.S. Department of Education
Intervention research
- HHD’s Reach for Health Project (RFH) seeks
to identify protective factors that keep middle school students
from engaging in high-risk behaviors. One component, the Reach
for Health High School Follow-Up Study, builds on the ongoing
RFH project
in Brooklyn, New York, and is assessing the long-term benefits
of school health and community service programs in reducing
high-risk
behaviors among young people. Since 1994, HHD has followed more
than 1,800 African-American and Hispanic youth who participated
in the RFH middle school project. By re-surveying youth in 10th
and 11th grades, the project is evaluating whether classroom
health
instruction, coupled with community youth service programs, have
sustained benefits in reducing early and unprotected sex, substance
use, and violence among urban adolescents. So far, the evaluation
has found that when middle-school students’ community
service work was combined with health instruction, both violent
behavior
and high-risk sexual activity dropped significantly.
Center: Center for Research on High Risk Behaviors
Funder: National Institutes of Health, National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development
- HHD’s VOICES/VOCES
Program has
shown the cost-effectiveness of using brief video-based HIV/STD
prevention films in clinics and
community agencies, with group counseling, to promote behavior
change and reduce the incidence of new infections. VOICES/VOCES,
which
targets African-American and Latino adult men and women at high
risk of developing HIV and other STDs, is grounded in the theory
of “reasoned action.” This theory provides a model
for understanding how people’s behaviors are guided by
their attitudes, beliefs, and past experiences, as well as by
the social
and cultural
norms of their community. The program is based on extensive research
exploring the culture-and gender-based reasons for why people engage
in unsafe sexual practices and what encourages behavior change.
Evaluation data have shown that clients who participated in the
program have a more realistic assessment of their risk for contracting
sexually transmitted diseases; they report changes in their behavior;
and they have fewer repeat STD infections.
Center: Center for Research on High Risk Behaviors
Funder: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
National Center for HIV Prevention
- The
Women’s HIV Prevention Collaborative is testing
a 2.5 hour single session workshop to develop partner negotiation
skills to promote condom usage in women. The research looks at
whether
women who attend report greater condom use and test positive
for sexually transmitted diseases less frequently.
Center: Center for Research on High Risk Behaviors
Funder: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration
Survey research
- The Reach for Health Longitudinal Study of Partner
and Sexual Violence is looking at the victimization
and perpetration of intimate partner and sexual violence among urban
minority young adults who have participated in the Reach for Health
study, for which they have been completing and submitting surveys
on their life events and health behaviors since middle school. The
project is examining the relationship between intimate partner and
sexual violence and prior involvement in or exposure to violence.
The results will inform the development of intervention and prevention
strategies.
Center: Center for Research on High Risk Behaviors
Funder: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- HHD conducted
the Global Survey of Skills-based Health Education
to discover if and how skills-based health education, including
life skills programs, are being used in schools around the world.
The survey was sent to 160 people involved in national or regional
school health efforts. Fifty respondents, representing all major
geographic regions of the world indicated that life skills education
has become more widespread over the last several years. Some programs
are already well developed and show encouraging results in influencing
secondary school aged youth health behaviors, while others are at
the beginning stages. The survey highlighted a need for teacher
training and evaluation. The study was conducted for the World Health
Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Center: HHD Global Programs
Funder: World Health Organization
- HHD conducted
a survey of administrators of all two- and four- year institutions
of higher education in Vermont to assess current tobacco policies,
prevention efforts and cessation services. The survey had
a response
rate of 100 % and found a high level of concern about student
tobacco use, although few institutions devoted staff time
or funding to
tobacco control.
Center: Center for College Health
and Safety
Funder: Vermont Department of Health
Policy analysis
- The
Campus Sexual Assault Policy Study assessed campus
policies and procedures in their efforts to comply with the Clery
Act, which requires all federally funded institutions of higher
education to disclose information about sex crimes on and around
their campuses. The project analyzed published procedures, surveyed
campus administrators, analyzed existing state and federal statutes,
and conducted field research at 8 schools that demonstrate emerging
promising practices.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funder: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice
Programs, National Institute of Justice
Qualitative research
- HHD’s
work frequently combines both qualitative and quantitative
methods.
Many of the studies already mentioned use qualitative techniques.
These include The Boston Cares project, Collaborations
to Address
Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment, Campus Sexual Assault
Policy Study, and the Evaluation of the Harvard Minority
Student
Development program
- Bystanders
play a critical role in reducing school violence but are largely
ignored in violence prevention interventions and research. To inform
the development of Multilevel Bystander Strategies
to Prevent Youth Violence, HHD staff are examining
what middle school staff, students, and parents think young
bystanders
would and should do when they witness school violence or have information
indicating that violence may occur.
Center: Center for High Risk Behavior
Funder: Center for Disease Control and Prevention
- Condom
Skills Intervention for Clinic Waiting Rooms is
a multi-site, collaborative research project funded by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention to develop and evaluate a
brief,
single session, video-based intervention focused on condom skills-building
for STD clinic clients. The video intervention, which will be
shown in clinic waiting rooms, centers on increasing patients’ knowledge
and skills around condom use and selection, and initiating and
negotiating
condom use with partners. EDC is working with the New York City
Department of Health to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention
in reducing risk behavior among clinic patients at a New York City
STD clinic.
Center: Center for High Risk Behavior
Funder: Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Assessment for planning and action
- In the
1990s, on behalf of WHO, HHD developed the Rapid Assessment
and Action Planning Process for School Health (RAAPP),
a package of tools—research instruments, training strategies,
data analysis, and action planning techniques—to assess and
strengthen a country’s capacity to deliver school health
programs. The RAAPP has been pilot-tested extensively in Indonesia.
HHD is
assisting the ministries of health and education in Nigeria and
India to implement the three phases of RAAPP (planning, data
collection, and analysis/action planning) to establish a plan
for increasing
national capacity to support the implementation of effective
school health programs.
Center: HHD Global Programs
Funder: World Health Organization
- The STAT
Readiness Tool Development Project builds on HHD’s
expertise in creating guides and manuals for practitioners conducting
site visits and assessments. The STAT tool will enable state injury
prevention practitioners to assess their readiness to request and
receive state health department injury prevention technical assessment
visits. The tool is being pilot-tested in five states.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funder: U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, Maternal and Child Health Bureau
- Through Developing Indicators for the National Strategy for
Suicide Prevention, HHD is establishing indicators
for the National Strategy’s 38 objectives to measure their
success. The Strategy was released by the U.S. Surgeon General
in
May 2001, with the goal of reducing suicide rates, the eighth-leading
cause of death in the U.S. HHD is drafting direct or proxy indicators
for each objective, identifying sources for each indicator, evaluating
the quality of each indicator, and reporting the data to the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funder: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration
Research synthesis
- Working
with experts in Latin America and the Caribbean, HHD synthesized
and analyzed the existing research on the “life skills” approach
to child and adolescent development. Life skills include cognitive
problem-solving, negotiation, assertiveness, and stress
management skills, all of which have been shown to prevent high-risk
behaviors such as the use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs,
unsafe sex, and violence. The paper, A Life Skills Approach
to Healthy Child and Adolescent Development, is designed
to inform and motivate policymakers and program developers to advocate
for, develop, and implement life skills programs.
Center: HHD Global Programs
Funder: Pan-American Health Organization
- On behalf
of the World Health Organization, HHD developed Family
Life, Reproductive Health, and Population Education: Key Elements
of a Health-Promoting School, a document for policy
makers, non-governmental agencies, community leaders, and educators.
The document discusses how family life, reproductive health,
and
population issues can be integrated into school curricula, with
the ultimate goal of improving the health, education, and development
of children, families, and community members. It is based on
an
amalgam of published research, statistics, and program information
on the benefits of addressing family life and reproductive health
issues in schools.
Center: HHD Global Programs
Funder: World Health Organization
- Through
its Injury Control Support for Region 1, HHD is assisting select
New England cities in examining their traffic injury data, bringing
together professionals and community groups, and developing traffic
safety programs that will serve as models to other communities.
A series of case studies describing successful programs has been
disseminated to community groups.
Center: Center for Violence and Injury Prevention
Funder: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
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