Title: Viewing Crime and Justice From a Collaborative Perspective:
Plenary Papers of the 1998 Conference on Criminal Justice Research and
Evaluation.
Series: Research Forum
Author(s): NIJ
Published: National Institute of Justice, July 1999
Subject(s): Crime prevention and community policing
76 pages
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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531
Janet Reno
Attorney General
Raymond C. Fisher
Associate Attorney General
Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General
Noel Brennan
Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice
Department of Justice Response Center
800-421-6770
Office of Justice Programs
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov
National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij
Viewing Crime and Justice From a Collaborative Perspective: Plenary
Papers of the 1998 Conference on Criminal Justice Research and
Evaluation
By David Kennedy, J. Phillip Thompson, Lisbeth B. Schorr, and Jeffrey
L. Edleson and Andrea L. Bible
Cosponsored by the Office of Justice Programs,
the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance,
and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
July 1999
NCJ 176979
NIJ
Jeremy Travis
Director
John Thomas
Program Monitor
The Professional Conference Series of the National Institute of Justice
supports a variety of live researcher-practitioner exchanges, such as
conferences, workshops, and planning and development meetings, and
provides similar support to the criminal justice field. Foremost among
these forums is the Annual Conference on Criminal Justice Research and
Evaluation. The Research Forum publication series was designed to share
information from this and other forums with a larger audience.
Opinions or points of view expressed in this document are those of the
author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of
the U.S. Department of Justice.
-------------------------------
The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.
-------------------------------
Foreword
For those of us who attend the annual Conference on Criminal Justice
Research and Evaluation on a regular basis, the theme for 1998 may have
seemed unorthodox. We are more accustomed to conference topics that
reflect research in either some aspect of the criminal justice system or a
specific subject in criminal justice research. "Viewing Crime and Justice
from a Collaborative Perspective" departed from that tradition, offering a
perspective that cuts across all justice system components and all subject
areas.
Whether it is called collaborative research, research partnerships, action
research, participatory research, or cooperative inquiry or goes by another
name, in disciplines outside criminology the approach has been used for
some time. In criminal justice research, however, it is a new way of doing
business, whose major feature is practitioners working on an equal footing
with researchers in a collaborative manner. For the police chiefs or
prosecutors or other agency heads who enter into these partnerships, the
appeal is the opportunity to work on a problem they themselves have
identified and the access they get to research-based knowledge they can
then put to solving the problem. For researchers, the appeal is the
opportunity to apply their knowledge in a real-world setting, where it can
make a difference--maybe even an immediate difference. Each side of the
partnership equation brings distinctive strengths and each lends new
legitimacy to the other.
In choosing the conference theme, our intent was to explore the
complexity of the approach as reflected in the way researchers and
practitioners are relating to one another in communities throughout the
Nation. The plenary session addresses reproduced here attest to both the
challenges and the opportunities that partnerships entail. David Kennedy,
who was involved in the Boston Gun Project--perhaps the most acclaimed
partnership project to date--documented practitioners' increasing
receptivity to designing and implementing these knowledge-based
interventions. J. Phillip Thompson elaborated on communities as a key
component of partnerships, reminding us of the need to understand their
structure, interactions, histories, and dynamics as a prelude to investing in
a collaborative project. Lisbeth Schorr cautioned that the critical attributes
of effective partnerships involve much heavy lifting and go a long way to
explain why it is hard to sustain and spread good programs. Jeffrey
Edleson and Andrea Bible detailed the demands placed on researchers and
practitioners and then, drawing on what they learned from several
successful collaborations on domestic violence issues, presented ways to
overcome the challenges.
The need to balance different perspectives, the varied expectations, the
time commitment necessary to build trust, the imperative of defining
common objectives--all these (and many more) attributes of collaborative
research also are coming to light as a result of the investment in
researcher-practitioner partnerships being made by the National Institute
of Justice. We cut the ribbon in 1995 with locally initiated research
partnerships for problem solving in policing and have since used the
template in other areas, among them sentencing and corrections and
domestic violence. Our intent was not only to provide the means for
solving specific, practitioner-defined research problems, but also to lay the
groundwork for ongoing collaborations--partnerships that would outlast
the initial project.
We recognize that partnerships are not yet a mainstay in the arsenals of
researchers or practitioners; much remains to be done for that to happen.
Yet as David Kennedy noted, the demand for them is real and will
increase. The conference offered convincing proof that rapid strides are
being made toward meeting that demand.
Those who would like to read more can find the abstracts of the
conference sessions on the Web at http://www.ilj.org.
Jeremy Travis
Director
National Institute of Justice
-------------------------------
Contents
Foreword
Research for Problem Solving and the New Collaborations
David Kennedy
The Changing Role of the Researcher in Working With Communities
J. Phillip Thompson
Summary of Response by Henry L. Gardner
Summary of Response by Margaret Hamburg
Replicating Complex Community Partnerships
Lisbeth B. Schorr
Forced Bonding or Community Collaboration? Partnerships Between
Science and Practice in Research on Woman Battering
Jeffrey L. Edleson and Andrea L. Bible
Summary of Response by Howard Black
Summary of Response by Alana Bowman
Summary of Response by Barbara J. Hart
Summary of Response by Lawrence Hauser
-------------------------------
Research for Problem Solving and the New Collaborations
David Kennedy, Ph.D., Harvard University
These are interesting times in criminal justice. Not long ago, I heard a
U.S. Attorney discussing her intent to address a major crime problem in a
large city in her jurisdiction. She explained the problem, why she was so
concerned about it, and why it was important to the life of this city to do
something about it. When asked what kind of help she needed, her answer
was, "Data. We need the data, and we need a researcher to tell us what
they mean."
This is a remarkable response: not more police officers or more
prosecutors or tougher judges or stricter legislation or more prison space,
but a researcher. It is more remarkable because others have said the same
thing. There is a growing sense among practitioners (many of whom not
long ago doubted that researchers were good for anything) that social
scientists can play quite important roles. In cities across the country, teams
of practitioners and researchers are working together to understand,
prescribe solutions to, and evaluate interventions for serious public safety
problems. The researchers in these collaborations work in close,
day-to-day, problem-solving relationships with the practitioner partners.
The demand for these collaborations will increase because there is a belief
that these kinds of collaborations have helped deliver some signal
successes, in such places as New York and Boston. Jurisdictions across the
country want their own partnerships and their own victories. We will see
how genuine their promise really is, and we will continue to sort out just
how genuine the victories are. But the demand for the partnerships, at
least, is real.
It is these new collaborations, and the role researchers might play in them,
that this presentation addresses. Whatever form these collaborations may
take, they exist because of, and remain firmly rooted in, the existing social
science research tradition. The willingness of practitioners to engage in
these problem-solving exercises is due in part to decades of research going
back to the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment of the early 1970s--
research that slowly and painstakingly built the case that policing and
some other approaches in criminal justice were simply not working as
well as we wished.[1] This view is widely accepted today. Along with that
acceptance comes another long line of research suggesting we can do
better: that hot spots can be policed,[2] disorder can be managed,[3] drug
markets can be disrupted,[4] civil authority can be mobilized in the
service of crime prevention,[5] cycles of neighborhood decline can be
interrupted and reversed,[6] and fear can be reduced.[7]
Still another line of policy and management analysis has given us key
community and problem-solving strategic frameworks for implementing
and institutionalizing new approaches to crime control.[8] Rigorous social
science evaluations have suggested that some community and
problem-solving interventions have been effective and supported the
larger idea that pursuing these strategic frameworks is a worthwhile
endeavor.[9] As researchers and practitioners attempt to apply those
strategic frameworks to particular crime problems, a wide variety of
criminological findings and concepts are available to inform their
thinking. These include criminal careers,[10] repeat victimization,[11]
deterrence theory,[12] place and hot spot analysis,[13] gang research,[14]
routine activity theory,[15] and situational crime prevention.[16] So
although there is something new about the new collaborations, they
remain a branch, or perhaps still a twig, on a fine old tree.
Basis in problem solving
Of all this, it appears that the basic idea of problem solving is most
responsible for the new possibilities emerging for research and
researchers. Practitioners are increasingly open to the idea of designing
and implementing innovative, situation-specific, and knowledge-driven
interventions to crime, fear, and public safety problems. With this
openness has come a fresh receptivity to researching these problems and
to the operational implications of such research. If research and theory can
in fact shed light on these problems, the new atmosphere of
knowledge-driven interagency collaborations holds the prospect that very
innovative, and sometimes very complex, interventions can be designed.
Two years ago, at this conference, David Weisburd observed that social
science had, for some time, been investing enormous amounts of time and
energy rigorously evaluating interventions that initially were not very
promising. Thus, one of the implications of the new collaborations is that
they can bring researchers into the design of interventions as fully as they
have been traditionally involved in the evaluation of interventions. Larry
Sherman correctly pointed out in his work on mandatory arrest for
domestic violence that this approach was worth examining because it was
something police could, and hopefully would, do.[17] The range of
strategies that police, prosecutors, probation officers, judges, and
community groups are willing to use, and the sophistication of these
strategies, is growing by leaps and bounds. With that comes the possibility
of implementing far more original and intricate interventions and, again, a
growing role for researchers in making the intellectual investments
necessary to shape those interventions.
The new collaborations are, for the most part, simply problem-solving
partnerships: groups of practitioners and researchers convened to "unpack"
particular problems; craft solutions to them; and implement, adapt, and
evaluate those solutions. This description raises more questions than it
answers: What, exactly, is a problem? Who should sit at the table in such
partnerships? How should the analytic unpacking proceed? How are
solutions to be found and framed? What evaluation techniques are
appropriate and in what contexts and circumstances? And what is it that
researchers can and cannot, and should and should not, do in such
partnerships?
It is clear that researchers can be extremely helpful in these exercises.
Both quantitative and qualitative research can be of enormous practical
value when applied to questions of central policy and operational
importance. There are two secrets that lie behind this good news. One is
the very small investment practitioners have generally made in
understanding the problems that are their responsibility. This has often
been noted, and is one of the planks on which problem solving is built.
The other, less-noted (but equally shocking) secret is the lack of
investment academics themselves have made. Academics typically are
responsible not for problems but for inquiries of various kinds. It is still
remarkable that 15 years into the crack cocaine epidemic we do not have a
single thorough analysis of, for example, the structure and functioning of
crack markets on a national, city, or neighborhood basis.[18] It is equally
remarkable, 40 years after the late Marvin Wolfgang's pioneering Patterns
in Criminal Homicide,[19] how few have followed his lead and performed
city studies on issues such as sexual assault, domestic violence, or child
abuse.[20] Over and over again, when consulting the literature to address
particular problems, one realizes that the most basic questions about these
problems have not been answered in a way that is very useful for
informing policy and shaping practice.
Understanding the problem, applying theory
The resulting vacuum is a real impediment to progress. It is a vacuum that
often is easily and quickly filled, and at a relatively modest cost. The
payoff can be considerable. For example, Mark Moore has commented
that the methods used in the Boston Gun Project (a problem-solving
project focused on serious youth violence) were no more complicated than
long division. But in an environment in which there had been no real
understanding across agencies about what was causing the city's youth
violence--and with the candidate explanations ranging from drugs to rap
music to welfare--it was important to sort out that the violence was a
problem concentrated among chronic offenders acting out gang conflict.
Likewise, in an examination of illicit gun markets, the conventional
wisdom was that guns were from out of State and/or stolen. It was
important to discover that many guns came from within Massachusetts
and/or had been trafficked. The core research took approximately 6
months and was central to the intervention that emerged.[21] These two
examples demonstrate a key point about the new collaborations:
Researchers with a strong sense of what is important to know in a
particular problem-solving exercise often will be able to make valuable
contributions in relatively short order.
Researchers also will be able to make real contributions by applying
existing academic theory and analytic frameworks to thinking about both
problems and interventions. Because researchers have not been in the
business of designing interventions, much of what they know as a matter
of course has not been employed in doing so. Thus, there is an enormous
amount of off-the-shelf work available for immediate application. For
example, an attempt to disrupt street drug markets might benefit
considerably from thinking about them in terms of the economic factors of
production,[22] what enhances and prevents market failure, how
information moves along peer networks, and the displacement effects
observed in crackdowns on drug hot spots.[23] The Operation Ceasefire
intervention in Boston was shaped by research in the areas of fear as a
driver of youth gun acquisition,[24] gang cohesion and the effects of gang
enforcement,[25] deterrence,[26] announcement effects,[27] homicide and
concentration of offending,[28] and network theory.[29] Such research
and theory (and not just from criminology) is an enormous resource in this
new context of customized responses to particular problems.
Tapping practitioners' knowledge
This is not a one-way street. Researchers have just as much to gain as
practitioners in these partnerships. Practitioners, particularly those on the
front line, can be invaluable sources of information and insight. These
close working relationships between researchers and practitioners are
fertile ground for generating hypotheses and new directions for research.
Egon Bittner observed that, in effect, nobody knows a city as well as a
good beat officer.[30] The same is true of good probation officers, social
service workers, line prosecutors, and others whose day-to-day work
brings them into close contact with substantive problems. During the first
meeting with front-line practitioners involved in the Boston Gun Project,
they told the researchers that youth homicide in the city was driven by a
small core of chronic, gang-involved offenders who mostly hurt one
another. This was not at all what most people in Boston or most students
of youth violence thought. None of the Boston practitioners had read
Marvin Wolfgang; rather, they lived Marvin Wolfgang, and they knew
what they were talking about. Our subsequent research both refined and
amended this view, adding specificity and depth and pointing out some
important ways in which it was sometimes inadequate. The guidance
offered by the Boston practitioners set the direction for much of our
research agenda and for the project as a whole.
I want to make a special plea for a powerful approach that deserves wider
application: structured qualitative research using practitioners. I often say,
"Practitioners know things, and we should pay attention," and because that
is interpreted in various ways, I want to be clear about what I mean. When
I ask a front-line police officer what is causing street violence and hear the
response "a total lack of self-respect," I take that as an opinion, just as I
would "drug markets," or "family breakdown." But when a research team
presents a list of 100 homicides to a carefully selected group of
practitioners (with supporting information about victims, offenders,
locations, and weapons) and systematically debriefs them one incident at a
time about what they know (about the individuals, the incidents, the gang
or other group affiliations of the participants, the tensions between the
groups, and the reasons for those tensions), what emerges can be as
grounded--or better grounded--than the products of more traditional
research methods. This approach is not without biases and limitations, but
it can be very useful and has the advantage of being relatively quick and
inexpensive.[31] The approach can be particularly useful for
collaborations in the early stages of addressing a new problem or trying to
sort out how a problem is presenting itself in a particular jurisdiction. Ed
McGarrell, for example, has made good use of these techniques in
examining the growing homicide problem in Indianapolis.
Practitioners also can be invaluable sources of leads for actual
interventions. The hardest part of these collaborations, and indeed of any
problem-solving exercise, is trying to figure out what to do about a
problem. Researching a problem is child's play compared to sorting out
how to take action against it. However, every agency is a repository of
institutional memory about successes and failures and informed opinion
about what worked and why (or what did not work and why). Most of this
information never makes it to paper, much less outside the agency; much
of it is not even regarded as knowledge by agency personnel. Yet, some of
it is enormously important. Once again, the Boston Ceasefire intervention
is an example. The campaign was inspired by a type of operation the
Boston Police Department's gang unit occasionally mounted against
outbreaks of gang violence. While they focused interagency enforcement
and prevention resources on the gangs in question, it was made clear to
gang members that the pressure was a response to the violence and that a
cessation of violence would reduce the pressure. This combination of a
focus on violence, a broad use of interagency capacities, and continuing
direct communication between the authorities and offenders is at the core
of Ceasefire. The researchers and the large interagency group organized to
respond used these ideas in ways more elaborate and far reaching than the
gang officers had ever envisioned. But without the example of their past
practice, it is quite possible no one involved would have thought to follow
Ceasefire's path.[32]
Researchers' roles
We are leaving familiar academic territory. These new collaborations do,
indeed, stretch us. Beyond their roles as researchers and analysts,
academics can play helpful process roles as convenors, identifiers of
existing (or nascent) best practices, and outsiders who can help shed light
on matters practitioners may be unwilling to address or unable to notice.
They also can, as previously noted, become the architects, in addition to
being students, of actual interventions. Regardless of our skills and talents
in these realms, these are the roles the practitioners who want these
collaborations want us to take.
First and foremost, we, as researchers, have to acknowledge that we are
trained to do none of this. We are not trained to convene and manage
problem-solving or any other types of groups. We are not trained in the
odd combination of diplomacy, ethnography, administration, and
facilitation that is necessary to help such groups work well. There is no
training, no literature, and very little shared wisdom about the process of
total immersion in agency culture (itself a kind of ethnography) that it
takes to identify and understand what a particular group of partners might
be willing and able to do, and to find the best practices that might hold
clues to larger and more effective operations.
As researchers, we are not trained in policy analysis and design; that is,
what to do about crime, fear, and other public safety problems. More than
anything else, practitioners are looking for our help in telling them what
they should do. But researchers are not in the "what to do" business. We
are in the "what happened," "what is true," and "did this work" business.
Clear leads for policy in the context of effective interventions rarely, if
ever, come directly from understanding what happened or from the most
robust descriptive research. Nor is the highest quality evaluation research
the same as a clean-slate examination of what, from an infinite range of
options, should be the response to a particular problem in a particular city
building from a particular combination of partners, assets, and constraints.
Those few who are trained in policy analysis and design are trained in a
tradition that is somewhat removed from the messy, near-term, localized,
and customized framework that seems to be the norm in the new
collaborations.
It is a credit to the strength of the backgrounds both researchers and
practitioners bring to these collaborations, and to the basic good sense of
the collaborative framework itself, that these exercises seem worth
undertaking despite the problems. But researchers and those who support
the development of research would be well advised to face the facts and
frame an agenda for addressing them. Practitioners, in like manner, need
to understand what researchers can and cannot do. It appears that
practitioners hold two views about researchers. One is that they are good
for nothing; they invade, steal data, and say nothing useful, taking years to
do it. The other is that they are magicians; if they are made welcome,
given data, and left alone, they will magically cut through the most
intractable problems. I hope the former is not true. I am quite sure the
latter is not. Nor is it true that researchers will invariably be able to
function as management consultants, effective convenors of group
processes, effective administrators, designers of information systems, or
any of the myriad other roles that seem to spring up in the course of these
collaborations. Whether engaged in these collaborations or as observers of
the process, researchers need to think systematically about how to frame
roles within the partnerships and how to tender technical assistance and
other forms of facilitation.
Evaluation issues
Finally, no discussion would be complete without attention to evaluation
issues. I see three sets of such issues. One set stems directly from these
new collaborations and is concerned with the problems posed for
researchers as a result of personal participation and special access in their
evaluation efforts. The first and most obvious issue is bias in
self-evaluation. This is real--but less meaningful than many fear. None of
us is immune to wanting our own efforts to be fruitful. At the same time,
there are clear standards for thinking about impact and the attribution of
impact, and with a large community of researchers who will point out any
errors in this regard.
When findings are negative
More significant are the problems faced by researchers who have to say
that projects and interventions did not work well or at all. This may cause
disruption of the collaboration and of others that follow. Preparatory
conversations between researchers and practitioners will help minimize
these disruptions, but some degree of difficulty is inevitable. It appears
this is part of the necessary process of creating, in Herman Goldstein's
delicately nuanced phrase, "the norm of truth telling" in policing and other
criminal justice agencies.
Another special access issue, and one that may be more problematic, is
that researchers often will end up knowing more than either they or their
partners are comfortable with about the practices within, and relationships
among, collaborating agencies. It is one thing to look at an intervention
from the outside and say flatly that it was not fully implemented and
therefore did not work. It is another thing to look at it from a privileged
inside position and say that the intervention was not implemented because
a particular manager was incompetent or because relations between the
agencies were so poisoned that they could not work together. Researchers
in these collaborations learn an enormous amount of what would
otherwise be unavailable information about the actual workings of
partners. As collaborators, they owe their peers a certain degree of
discretion. As academics and evaluators, they owe outsiders a certain
degree of objectivity and transparency. Currently, we have no shared
understanding of how to handle these conflicts. However, it would be
worthwhile to begin addressing them.
Deciding what to evaluate
A second set of evaluation issues questions what exactly ought to be
evaluated. The key concern is impact. None of this work is meaningful
unless it delivers on its crime-control promise. Beyond that, researchers
ought to address at least the core elements of the broader problem-solving
process. The kind of collaborations under discussion are supposed to
progress by identifying a particular problem, convening a group to address
it, gathering information and generating a meaningful assessment of the
problem, crafting an intervention that is different from business as usual,
implementing that intervention (and perhaps modifying it), and finally
evaluating it for impact. Each of these elements would be worth
addressing individually in both process and impact terms: How did the
collaboration in question address this step? Did it do so successfully? If
researchers are to evaluate problem-solving processes in these ways,
appropriate standards need to be developed: What is the test for a
successful convening process? What does or does not constitute a
meaningful assessment?
Deciding on method
The third set of issues raises questions about what types of impact
evaluation are most appropriate for the different problem-solving
processes. For many of the problem descriptions and interventions under
discussion, classic random assignment designs simply will not be possible.
Boston's Operation Ceasefire is one such intervention. The collaboration's
assessment concluded that the proper point of intervention was with the
self-sustaining cycle of gang violence, which was posited as both a
product and driver of gang conflicts in the city. Although there were many
gangs, and even more chronic offenders, there was only one underlying
dynamic. Because it was the dynamic that needed addressing, it was
impossible to create effective control groups. In other settings, such strong
experimental designs will be theoretically, but not actually, possible,
given the legitimate needs of various practitioner partners, or the
challenges of implementing complicated interventions. If such
interventions are not to be dismissed simply on methodological grounds,
researchers need a conversation about what methods are appropriate and
what they will and will not tell us.
Beyond that, researchers need to think about the basic evaluation
enterprise in an environment where highly customized and site-specific
interventions are the norm. The strongest evaluation methodologies are
designed to supply answers for well-defined interventions (based on the
underlying and correct norm that before they are adopted we should be
sure about them). But many of the newer products of problem-solving
processes are not, in fact, well defined in this way. Even jurisdictions that
take inspiration from interventions that have worked elsewhere will
modify and adapt them to their own circumstances. If this is becoming the
new norm, then we need to address evaluation methodologies that fit it:
for instance, by being able to say with some authority that something is or
is not worth trying elsewhere and by identifying the basic elements that
are key to particular strategies.
A worthwhile investment
In closing, there are clashes of cultures to be bridged, pitfalls to be
avoided or survived, standards and methods to be worked out. All this is
well worth doing. These collaborations promise new knowledge and
insights for researchers, new and powerful ways of doing business for
practitioners, and progress on the crucial agenda of crime control for all.
They are also, I will say on a personal note, incredibly good fun. I wish us
all good luck.
-------------------------------
Notes
1. See, for example, Kelling, G., et al., The Kansas City Preventive Patrol
Experiment: A Technical Report, Washington, DC: Police Foundation,
1974; Spelman, W., and D. Brown, Calling the Police: Citizen Reporting
of Serious Crime, Research Report, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1981 (NCJ 82276); and Greenwood,
P., J. Chaiken, and J. Petersilia, The Investigative Process, Lexington,
MA: Lexington Books, 1977.
For examples of studies of selective incapacitation and the difficulty of
predicting criminal offending of career criminals, see Blumstein, A., and
J. Cohen, "Estimation of Individual Crime Rates from Arrest Records,"
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 70 (1979): 561-585; Elliott, D.,
F.W. Dunford, and D. Huizinga, "Identification and Prediction of Career
Offenders Utilizing Self-Reported and Official Data," in Prevention of
Delinquent Behavior, ed. J.D. Burchard and S.N. Burchard, Newbury
Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1987; and Gottfredson, S.D., and D.M.
Gottfredson, Classification, Prediction, and Criminal Justice Policy,
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice,
1990 (NCJ 126671).
For examples of studies of the limited impact of rehabilitative programs,
see Martinson, R., "What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison
Reform," Public Interest 35 (2) (1974): 22-54; and Martin, S.E., L.E.
Sechrest, and R. Redner, eds., New Directions in the Rehabilitation of
Criminal Offenders, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1981.
For examples of studies of the ineffectiveness of incapacitation, see
Zimring, F., and G. Hawkins, The Scale of Imprisonment, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991; and Irwin, J., and J. Austin, It's About
Time: America's Imprisonment Binge, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing Company, 1994.
2. Sherman, L., and D. Weisburd, "General Deterrent Effects of Police
Patrol in Crime Hot Spots: A Randomized Controlled Trial," Justice
Quarterly 12 (4) (1995): 625-648; and Braga, A., et al.,
"Problem-Oriented Policing in Violent Crime Places," paper presented at
the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Diego,
CA, November 1997.
3. Kelling, G., and C. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order
and Reducing Crime in Our Communities, New York: Free Press, 1996;
and Wilson, J., and G. Kelling, "Broken Windows: The Police and
Neighborhood Safety," Atlantic Monthly (March 1982): 29-38.
4. Kleiman, M., "Crackdowns: The Effects of Intensive Enforcements on
Retail Heroin Dealing," in Street-Level Drug Enforcement: Examining the
Issues, ed. M. Chaiken, Issues and Practices, Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1988 (NCJ 173155).
5. Kelling and Coles, Fixing Broken Windows; and Green, L., Policing
Place With Drug Problems, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996.
6. Skogan, W., Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in
American Neighborhoods, New York: Free Press, 1990.
7. Pate, A., et al., Reducing Fear of Crime in Houston and Newark: A
Summary Report, Washington, DC: Police Foundation, 1986.
8. Sparrow, M., M. Moore, and D. Kennedy, Beyond 911: A New Era for
Policing, New York: Basic Books, 1990; Goldstein, H., "Improving
Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach," Crime and Delinquency 25 (2)
(1979): 236-258; and Goldstein, H., Problem-Oriented Policing,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
9. Braga, A., et al., "Problem-Oriented Policing in Violent Crime Places."
10. See, for example, Blumstein, A., et al., eds., Criminal Careers and
Career Criminals, vols. I and II, Washington, DC: National Academy
Press, 1986.
11. See, for example, Farrell, G., "Preventing Repeat Victimization," in
Building a Safer Society: Strategic Approaches to Crime Prevention, ed.
M. Tonry and D. Farrington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
12. See, for example, Zimring, F., and G. Hawkins, Deterrence: The Legal
Threat in Crime Control, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
13. See, for example, Eck, J.E., and D. Weisburd, "Crime Places in Crime
Theory," in Crime and Place, ed. J. Eck and D. Weisburd, Monsey, NY:
Criminal Justice Press, 1995: 1-33; and Sherman, L., P. Gartin, and M.
Buerger, "Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and the
Criminology of Place," Criminology 27 (1) (February 1989): 27-55.
14. See, for example, Klein, M., The American Street Gang, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995; and Spergel, I., The Youth Gang Problem,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
15. See, for example, Felson, M., Crime and Everyday Life, Thousand
Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1994; and Cohen, L.E., and M. Felson,
"Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach,"
American Sociological Review 44 (4) (August 1979): 588-608.
16. See, for example, Clarke, R.V., ed., Situational Crime Prevention:
Successful Case Studies, Albany, NY: Harrow and Heston, 1992.
17. Sherman, L., Policing Domestic Violence, New York: Free Press,
1992.
18. This is not to detract from the excellent work of Terry Williams. See,
for example, his Crack House: Notes from the End of the Line, Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1992.
19. Wolfgang, M., Patterns in Criminal Homicide, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958.
20. Richard Janikowski and his team in Memphis, Tennessee, in
partnership with U.S. Attorney Veronica Coleman and others, currently
are studying sexual assault.
21. Kennedy, D.M., A.M. Piehl, and A.A. Braga, "Youth Violence in
Boston: Gun Markets, Serious Youth Offenders, and a Use-Reduction
Strategy," Law and Contemporary Problems 59 (1) (Winter 1996): 147-
196.
22. See Kleiman, M., and R. Young, "The Factors of Production in Retail
Drug Dealing," Urban Affairs Review 30 (5) (May 1995): 730-748.
23. See Green, L., "Cleaning up Drug Hot Spots in Oakland, California:
The Displacement and Diffusion Effects," Justice Quarterly 12 (4)
(December 1995): 737-754; and Weisburd, D., and L. Green, "Policing
Drug Hot Spots: The Jersey City DMA Experiment," Justice Quarterly 12
(4) (December 1995): 711-742.
24. Sheley, J., and J. Wright, In the Line of Fire: Youth, Guns, and
Violence in Urban America, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995; and
Zimring and Hawkins, Deterrence: The Legal Threat in Crime Control.
25. Klein, M., "Attempting Gang Control by Suppression: The Misuse of
Deterrence Principles," in The Modern Gang Reader, ed. M. Klein, C.
Maxson, and J. Miller, Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 1995.
26. Zimring and Hawkins, Deterrence: The Legal Threat in Crime
Control.
27. Pierce, G., and W. Bowers, "The Bartley-Fox Gun Law's Short-Term
Impact on Crime in Boston," Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 455 (May 1981): 120-137; and Cook, P.,
"Research in Criminal Deterrence: Laying the Groundwork for the Second
Decade," in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, vol. 2, ed.
N. Morris and M. Tonry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980:
211-268.
28. Wolfgang, M., Patterns in Criminal Homicide; and Wolfgang, M., R.
Figlio, and T. Sellin, Delinquency in a Birth Cohort, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1972.
29. Sparrow, M., "The Application of Network Analysis to Criminal
Intelligence: An Assessment of the Prospects," Social Networks 13
(1991): 251-274.
30. Bittner, E., The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, Rockville,
MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute
of Mental Health, 1970.
31. Kennedy, D.M., A.A. Braga, and A.M. Piehl, "The (Un)Known
Universe: Mapping Gangs and Gang Violence in Boston," in Crime
Mapping and Crime Prevention, ed. D. Weisburd and T. McEwen,
Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1998: 219-262.
32. Kennedy, D., "Pulling Levers: Getting Deterrence Right," National
Institute of Justice Journal 236 (July 1998): 2-8.
-------------------------------
The Changing Role of the Researcher in Working With Communities
J. Phillip Thompson, Ph.D., Columbia University
To begin the discussion of the changing role of the researcher in working
with communities, I will begin with a working definition of "community."
A community, as defined here, is a place with its own set of rules and a
capacity for self-organization. These two criteria could be assigned to any
structure; I have added the word "place." A community is a place with a
structure. Having said this, it is obvious that communities overlap. We are
part of a world community, a nation-state community, and an urban
community; we seek to understand inner-city communities embedded in
urban communities. An inner-city community typically includes thousands
of residents, plus dozens of public agencies: transportation systems, school
systems, policing systems, public housing systems, and social services of
various types; businesses, criminal justice systems, religious institutions,
and media (external and internal); and a proliferation of groups, social
circles, and individuals with varying connections to people and institutions
outside the communities. Communities are places with complicated
structures.
Communities are more than complicated, that is, involving many different
components. They are complex, meaning that they embody intricate and
constantly changing nonlinear interactions and recursive feedback loops
that prohibit comprehensive study at any one time.[1] In fact,
communities possess the characteristics of complex systems generally.[2]
Following is a brief discussion of nine such characteristics that researchers
need to keep in mind when working with communities:
1. Communities include many people--too many to study individually in
any depth. The size of the community also limits the impact of one
individual on the community as a whole.
2. Individuals in a community interact with one another in a rich way,
both physically and discursively. This is not meant to suggest that
everyone in a community talks to everyone else, but that dense
interactions take place within the community.
3. Interactions in communities are short range. Little is known about how
people in inner cities obtain information.[3] This is a major deficit in
understanding communities. It is assumed that most information comes
from immediate friends, family, and neighbors. This does not mean that
the effects of interactions are not widespread: A murder, for example, can
have widespread effects in a community; however, the effect of a murder
on a community depends a great deal on the nature of the surrounding
interactions in the community. Depending on factors such as press
coverage, the nature of community leadership, community history,
police-community relations, and the relation of the community to
surrounding communities, residents could move away from the place of
the interaction (avoidance) or could be galvanized into action
(intervention).
4. Individuals and groups in communities are intelligent. They monitor the
effects and consequences of their actions (on themselves and others) and
their environment and modify their behavior accordingly. Behavior is not
linear, unchanging, or unresponsive to interventions. Surprising
developments should be expected, precisely because community residents
may often seek to surprise or confuse.
5. Communities are open systems with fuzzy borders. They are in constant
interaction with an ever-changing environment. Defining any problem as a
"community" problem risks confusing what may be adaptive behavior--the
self-organizing characteristics or rules (folkways) of communities--with
external pressures that might be more properly considered causal.
Moreover, it is difficult to trace and predict how external interventions
affect communities.
6. Communities are constantly changing because of evolution and because
of changing patterns of competition and cooperation within them.
7. Communities have histories, as do researchers. Each side typically
holds deep prejudices and, not infrequently, differing instrumental
interests and power dynamics.
8. Knowledge in communities is "distributed." No one in a community
knows what everyone else in that community is doing, much less what is
meant by each individual's actions. A single researcher cannot know all of
that, either. For these reasons, studying individuals is insufficient to
understanding communities. It is necessary to study the structure of
interactions in a community. This is also why moving beyond the
particular frames of any one discipline is important.
9. Communities differ from each other in their different histories,
compositions, and environments.
Points 1, 2, and 9 are assumed to be noncontroversial. Point 3 may be
controversial, but little research on inner-city networks is available. The
following explains points 4 through 8 and provides examples of why these
characteristics are difficult to understand and yet important to understand.
Point 4: Individuals and groups in communities are intelligent. They
monitor the effects and consequences of their actions (on themselves and
others) and their environment and modify their behavior accordingly.
Behavior is not linear, unchanging, or unresponsive to outside
interventions.
Arline Geronimus, a social epidemiologist at the University of Michigan,
conducted a comparative study of teenage childbearing in
African-American inner-city communities. She found that women were
most likely to have borne children as teenagers if they lived in places
where they, the children's fathers, or members of their extended families
were likely to die or become sick before their children reached age 18 or
where they were likely to be in poor health before their children reached
age 18. Geronimus argued, "Postponing childbearing increases the
[teen-age mother's] chance that her young children compete with ailing
elders for her energies and decreases the chance that their father will
survive through much of their childhood. Her greatest chance of long-term
labor force attachment will be if her children's pre-school years coincide
with her years of peak access to social and practical support provided by
relatively healthy kin. Her best chance of achieving her stated goals is by
becoming a mother at a young age."[4]
Geronimus' empirical findings led her to construct an alternative
rationality for inner-city communities that suggests a high degree of
rationality in the behavior of inner-city youths. The rationality is based on
conditions that many researchers may not consider. To them, teenage
pregnancy is often simply a form of pathology.
Point 5: Communities are open systems with fuzzy borders. They are in
constant interaction with an ever-changing environment.
Communities are subject to multiple interventions from the outside at any
time. Each intervention is likely to have unintended spillover effects that,
if unaccounted for, can easily misguide analysis. For example, a New
York City housing program for the homeless provided a Section 8 housing
certificate and a cash bonus of $2,500 per family member to landlords
willing to house homeless families. This program inadvertently created an
incentive for landlords to evict working poor families unable to pay as
much rent as homeless families.[5] A researcher who is not careful, who
does not pay attention to context, may conclude that the behavior of
homeless families is driving the working poor out of certain buildings and
communities.
Historian Alice O'Conner emphasizes the role of external policies in
creating the contemporary African-American ghetto, criticizing notions
that "the contemporary ghetto is beset by a self-perpetuating cultural
pathology bred by the extreme concentration of an unassimilated, socially
isolated lower or under-class." Such analyses tend to minimize the effects
of "organized violence, zoning regulations, racial covenants, mortgage
lending practices, and block-busting."[6] Such analyses also give too little
weight to:
[A] whole series of race-conscious decisions about urban development and
infrastructure building over the years, whether seen in public housing,
urban "renewal," public transportation, highway and road-building and, in
most major cities, the construction of stadiums, urban shopping malls, and
other major "public" spaces. . . . [Public policy,] ranging from health care
and education to sanitation and recreational facilities [also] . . . reinforced
the "undesirable" designation of minority neighborhoods and symbolized
the relative absence of minority political clout. . . . But nowhere has the
racial differentiation of city services been more visible and explosive than
in local law enforcement, reflected in ongoing struggles over hiring and
promotion practices, in the absence or inadequacy of police protection in
many minority neighborhoods, or, especially, in the long history of
selectively brutalizing police practices in minority neighborhoods--
practices that have sparked well-known episodes of mass rebellion, but
that more devastatingly have left a seemingly permanent legacy of anger
and distrust.[7]
Clearly there have been changes in public policy, and especially law
enforcement, in major American cities during the past two decades. These
changes undoubtedly have effects in communities that need to be
measured, particularly against the backdrop described above. Cultural
theories of poverty ignore or minimize the effects of larger communities
and structures on inner-city poverty and give too little weight to the
effects of public policy.
Point 6: Communities are constantly changing because of evolution and
because of changing patterns of competition and cooperation within them.
Community dynamics are so complex that it is often hard to pin down
these dynamics conceptually. Similar difficulties hamper attempts to
discuss class and race, both important concepts used in reference to
communities.
Class. There are a variety of arguments about class with many nuances.[8]
Three of the major class arguments can be distinguished in an extremely
rough fashion to make a point. The different approaches all provide
contrasting accounts of the motives for human action, as discussed below.
For Karl Marx, the primary human motivation is physical survival.
Obtaining food, clothing, and water is a fundamental necessity for every
society. No other human endeavor can substitute for this necessity, and all
other human endeavors must build on top of it. Producing the means of
survival is the primary imperative of every society. The primary relations
in society are those people enter into to ensure production; otherwise,
there can be no society. Throughout most of human history, the grueling
labor of the many has been exploited to create greater freedom, leisure,
and comfort for the few; this is the source of a class struggle that
continues to evolve. Class analysis starts with a study of the mode of
production. Different systems of production have their own logics that can
be studied scientifically. Whether an exploiting class or an exploited class
understands its place in the overall system of production is a separate
issue.
Max Weber, more than Marx, focused on how people understand the
world, make sense of their place in society, and act within it. Weber paid
great attention to how the logic of the capitalist market emerged from
religion and how the market affected the organization of the state and of
business. Weber also recognized classes produced by the market, but he
saw class more as an objective "situation" rather than a relationship of
exploitation.[9] This does not mean that class situations cannot be seen as
relationships of exploitation, but such understandings are contestable and
far from transparent. Moreover, people's motivations for action are
complex and not entirely rational. Weber used the term "status groups" to
distinguish people's socially recognized and self-conscious understandings
of their place in the world from their class situations. He suggested that
people act out of four motives: (a) to achieve some rational end (formal
rationality); (b) to realize their values (substantive rationality, which from
a formal standpoint may still be irrational); (c) from emotion, love, or
hate; or (d) out of habit.[10] Humans act out of a combination of motives,
never just for one reason.
Functionalists write from the perspective of a society in which the logic of
the market has been extended throughout society (which is therefore
differentiated, bureaucratized, and complex) and in which the key issues
revolve around maintaining social cohesiveness. "Class," when used at all,
refers to power conflicts in localized settings where roles are being
defined and contested.[11] In this view, class also is an identity that is not
particularly salient until an economic crisis looms. Generally, because
people play many roles in complex societies, conflict in one arena tends to
give way to cooperation in another. The prospect of overarching class
struggle in the Marxist sense is remote.
These various meanings of class often are interchanged in interpreting
modern society. All three class arguments are important for understanding
contemporary society, and their boundaries are not always distinct.
Dynamics within communities, as with society, are complex and
changing. Trying to capture these dynamics in a single paradigm requires
an extremely narrow framing of the issues. This is commonly reflected in
a fuzzy usage of concepts such as class, which is tolerated precisely
because of the difficulties--if not futility--of defining such a fluid target.
Race. Because much criminal justice research focuses on African-
American communities, it is also useful to discuss the complexities and
ambiguities of "race."
Perhaps the most influential view of racism is that it is an attitudinal
legacy of the premodern political economy--the South before 1965. In this
view, racism will disappear with the passing of generations, with
education, and with growing economic interactions between
African-Americans and whites. The liberal position on race holds that
racial divisions are perpetuated by inadvertent, unintentional, or
historically accidental effects of political-economic processes and by
informational barriers and cultural isolation between groups remaining
from previous eras.
A pluralist perspective on race, in its strongest form, can be identified
with sociopsychological perspectives. Pluralists hold that African-
Americans and whites are strongly competitive groups who are threatened
by each other and who socialize their young into different life-worlds that
are defined around racial identities and relative group position. An
important component of the pluralist theory is that individual reason and
rationality are not particularly individual; they are strongly affected (if not
bounded) by the racial group. From this point of view, greater resource
equality may not relieve racial tension but could increase racial
competition and conflict.
From an institutional perspective, racial difference and biases have been
embedded in American institutions over centuries and are, in large part,
normative. The point has often been made that despite America's
self-image as an open and free country, it is a highly ideological "liberal"
society. This means that Americans tend to view individual outcomes in
life as a result of individual decisions and effort. Making institutional
changes sufficient to ameliorate racial inequality, however, may require
fundamental change in institutions that Americans believe are virtuous (if
not infallible). The liberal view contradicts centuries of African-American
experience in racial discrimination and therefore is often considered as
irrational by African-Americans. From the perspective of African-
American history, views derived from the perspective of white
historical experiences masquerade as universal wisdom applicable to all
Americans. The generalization of white experiences has a blinding effect
on whites as a group. This view of racism is more insidious than a
conscious intention of whites to harm blacks; rather, it is the view that
supporting dominant institutional practices and values do not already do
harm.
To complicate racial matters even more, there is a substantial critique of
race among scholars. Many African-American feminists argue that
discourse about class led by white men, discussions about race led by
black men, and discourse on gender led by white women have all
excluded the concerns and issues of black women. African-American
women are simultaneously affected by class, race, and gender
discrimination in their interactions, and these interactions are not part of
the discourse in social science or the law.
Again, the word "race" stands for a complex set of issues and interactions
that are rarely sorted out. No single paradigm captures all of the issues and
interactions necessary to understand race in the community context.
Point 7: Communities have histories, as do researchers. Each side
typically holds deep prejudices and, not infrequently, differing
instrumental interests and power dynamics.
This point is crucial but difficult to discuss. At one level the concern is
simply to understand enough about community, racial groups, or family
histories to provide a better context for the analysis of behavior. For
example, a political scientist who studies public opinion discovered a
"paradox" in African-American public opinion. It appears that
middle-class African-Americans, despite earning more money than their
working-class and poor African-American counterparts, are more cynical
about the American dream. One author calls this "succeeding more and
enjoying it less."[12] However, sociologists who studied not just
African-American income but African-American wealth (which requires
greater attention to historical issues) made some relevant points, noting
that members of the black middle class on average have less than
one-twelfth the wealth of those of the white middle class (as measured by
income): They have less money to send their children to college, start
their own businesses, purchase homes in neighborhoods with quality
schools, and so forth.[13] They may not have achieved the American
dream, despite their middle-class expectations, and they may therefore be
angry. Moreover, the sociologists point out that African-Americans tend
to have extended families and that their elders are far less likely to have
pensions and substantial Social Security income than whites. The
African-American middle-class person at middle age in the 1980s and
1990s--the most successful generation of African-Americans--is also
confronted with the immediate effects of history in the form of family
dependents. History is not dead, and it plays an important part in the
attitudes and behavior of people in communities.
Additional insight into this issue comes from the field of public health. A
social epidemiologist studying hypertension and related diseases among
African-Americans first studied "normal" risk factors such as obesity,
smoking, and drinking.[14] The researcher then asked what led to
smoking, drinking, and obesity and discovered that his subjects lived
under a great deal of economic stress. Further investigating whether
cultural factors have led some African-Americans to cope with stress
better than others, the researcher found that African-Americans who
believe in the American dream--that anyone, including blacks, can "make
it" in America if they work hard enough--are much more prone to
hypertension, heart attack, and kidney failure than are African-Americans
who believe that America is a racist society that does not reward their
work. The conclusion, literally, is that, if you are black, believing in the
American dream is bad for your health. The point is that there may be
value in certain historically formed perspectives among people in
communities that are counterintuitive yet extremely useful for community
residents. Researchers should be attuned to that possibility.
Issues on which researchers and inner-city African-American community
residents are likely to encounter value conflicts are easily imagined. One
is the notion that researchers and evaluators, government agencies, and
nonprofit organizations and foundations are attempting to help
communities rather than trying to exploit or supervise (dominate) them.
Before rejecting such a critique, researchers should study African-
American history. There are many examples, mostly before the civil rights
movement, of Government agencies using unknowing African-Americans
as subjects in experiments, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which
adequate treatment for syphilis was withheld from a group of poor
African-Americans (and which resulted in a Presidential apology to the
survivors). These stories are part of the folklore in black communities.
Researchers also should consider that they are getting paid to work in
communities where many people need jobs. The image of a paid
researcher from outside the community walking around the area and
"using" it for his or her job is enough to anger some people, who rail,
"Why can't we get jobs like that? Why didn't we have opportunities to go
to good schools?" Researchers also should consider the context of
foundation work. Wealthy corporations and individuals are subsidized
(through taxes) to create foundations that spend a great deal of effort
intervening in disadvantaged communities to pursue their own private
notions of what communities need. In short, the practice of research and
evaluation is not value-neutral and affects communities even before the
first question is asked.
Programs that are being evaluated may have been developed on the basis
of many naive assumptions about communities that render it difficult for
residents to participate meaningfully or seriously in the program itself or
the evaluation. Carol Weiss vividly demonstrated this when she elaborated
on the assumptions embedded in job-training programs that are based on
the theory that "youths do not get jobs because they lack the proper
attitudes and habits for the world of work and they lack skills in a
craft."[15] Designing a job-training program on the basis of this theory
leads to program designs that include "micro-steps" that are in turn based
on important assumptions. Weiss provided a list of these micro-
assumptions:
o Training for attractive occupations is (or can be) provided in accessible
locations.
o Information about its availability will reach the target audience.
o When young people hear of the program's availability, they will sign
up for it.
o Participants will attend regularly.
o Where necessary, stipends (and perhaps child care) will be available to
young people while they are in training.
o Trainers will offer quality training, and they will help young people to
learn marketable skills.
o Trainers will provide helpful and supportive counsel.
o Young people will learn the lessons being taught about work habits and
work skills.
o Young people will internalize the values and absorb the knowledge.
o Having attained the knowledge and skills, young people will seek jobs.
o Jobs with adequate pay will be available in areas in which training is
provided.
o Employers will hire young people to fill the jobs.
o Young people will perform well.
o Employers will be supportive.
o Young people will remain on the job, and they will become regular
workers with good earnings.[16]
Weiss' example brings to the surface many potential problems in a
realistic community context and suggests that one of the first things a
researcher or program designer should do is elaborate a theory of what the
program is supposed to achieve and then describe in detail the
assumptions embedded in each micro-step. The researcher should
understand where his or her assumptions are wrong and then elaborate, at
least from a formal standpoint, on the elements of a "community
rationality"--a way to begin thinking about a particular community based
on the community's conditions and history.
Point 8: Knowledge in communities is "distributed." No one in a
community knows what everyone else in that community is doing, much
less what is meant by each individual's actions. A single researcher cannot
know all of that, either. For these reasons, studying individuals is
insufficient to understanding communities. It is necessary to study the
structure of interactions in a community.
This longstanding issue deserves revisiting. Communities--like society,
human anatomy, and the ecology--are highly complex. The aspects of
community that are chosen to be studied--our "frame"--is culturally
determined. This does not mean that researchers are all simply relativists;
this was pointed out by Weber long ago.[17] Within a given frame,
patterns and trajectories can be perceived, and this is what a good deal of
empirical science does. However, to understand causes--why this
trajectory and not another--counterfactuals must be constructed. Without
this event or this particular variable acting in a certain way, the trajectory
would likely be significantly different. More accurately, such a statement
is limited to statistical probabilities: The trajectory has a higher or lower
probability of being different. It should be acknowledged that there is a
good deal of variation that is not understood. This is an important
qualification, made especially necessary by the admitted cultural biases of
scientific inquiries.
It follows from the above discussion that singular narratives such as
Marx's unidirectional economic class analysis or Freudian unidirectional
psychological theories are suspect when it comes to complex systems
analysis, and that cross-disciplinary research is a necessity. Distributed
knowledge in the community context means something more than and
different from cross-disciplinary research (i.e., knowledge distributed
among experts in different fields). It means that much knowledge about
the community is likely to reside in the community, and it is unlikely to
reside in any one place in the community. Because communities are
complex, it is extremely difficult to generalize across communities. Rather
than discover universally valid truths through deductive reasoning,
investigators must spend their time simply getting a handle on community
dynamics. On the one hand, this may appear to be a status demotion for
researchers interested in making broad authoritative statements. On the
other hand, researchers who make the effort to understand broad
community dynamics have the advantage of making a good deal more
sense.
Lastly, no single person in a community understands all the interactions in
a community. In addition, because the effects of interactions and
interventions in communities have indirect and unexpected effects, the
researcher must search for knowledge from a broad array of potential
sources.
Researchers should understand the social distance between themselves and
the communities they study. They should form social bonds with the
subjects of their research that allow for useful discourse and learning from
community residents. They should understand that communities are
complex and that knowledge about communities is necessarily distributed;
they should therefore gather as much information about communities as
they can. Researchers also should pursue knowledge from a variety of
disciplinary perspectives. Because communities are changing and because
community residents are intelligent, judgments made about communities
should be revisited frequently.
-------------------------------
Notes
1. For an introduction to the study of issues of complex systems, see
Jervis, Robert, Systems Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997; and Cilliers, Paul,
Complexity and Postmodernism, New York: Routledge Press, 1998.
These books offer many examples and are useful for novices.
2. See Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism, p. 4, for a general
description of complex systems.
3. Michael X. Delli Carpini has noted that basic information on
community information sources is lacking. We lack "an inventory of
existing voluntary associations, neighborhood publications, local cable
and broadcast television stations (including public access), local radio
stations, computer/Internet availability of public spaces' for interpersonal
exchanges such as community centers, libraries, coffee houses, parks,
taverns, and so forth. Understanding the existing infrastructure for
communications is the first, key step for revitalizing communities." See
Delli Carpini, Michael X., "Race and Community Revitalization:
Communications Theory and Practice," unpublished draft prepared for the
Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives,
June 1, 1998: 19.
4. Geronimus, Arline, "Teenage Childbearing and Personal
Responsibility," Political Science Quarterly 112 (3) (1997): 425.
5. See Thompson, J. Phillip, "The Failure of Liberal Homeless Policy in
the Koch and Dinkins Administrations," Political Science Quarterly 111
(4) (1996-97): 657.
6. O'Conner, Alice, "Historical Perspectives on Race and Community
Revitalization," unpublished draft prepared for the Aspen Institute's
Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives, June 1, 1998: 6.
7. Ibid., 6.
8. For a concise and useful overview, see McAll, Christopher, Class,
Ethnicity, and Social Inequality, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University
Press, 1990.
9. Ibid., 30.
10. Ibid., 21.
11. Ibid., 36.
12. See Hochschild, Jennifer, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race,
Class, and the Soul of the Nation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995: 972.
13. See Oliver, Melvin, and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth, White
Wealth, New York: Routledge, 1995.
14. See James, Sherman A., "John Henryism and the Health of African
Americans," Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18 (1994): 163-164.
15. Weiss, Carol Hirschon, "Nothing as Practical as Good Theory:
Exploring Theory-Based Evaluation for Comprehensive Community
Initiatives for Children and Families," in New Approaches to Evaluating
Community Initiatives, ed. James P. Connell, Anne C. Kubisch, Lisbeth
Schorr, and Carol H. Weiss, Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute, 1995:
67.
16. Ibid., 67-68.
17. See Ringer, Fritz, Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the
Cultural and Social Sciences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1997.
-------------------------------
Summary of Response by Henry L. Gardner
Managing Partner, Gardner, Underwood and Bacon
Many communities have talked about collaborating--gathering
representatives of the police department, the school district, and
neighborhood groups to talk about community problems. The
communities of Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond, California, tried a
noble experiment--a true collaboration bringing together 21 cities, 19
school districts, and 2 counties--when the occurrence of 15 to 20
homicides in one weekend in Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond sparked
the realization among community members that "we can do more working
together than we can do separately."
Trying to get communities as diverse as these three to collaborate--and
then adding to that mix communities such as Fremont, Hayward, and
Union City--was itself a challenge. Despite already fierce competition
among local elected officials, State legislators and congressional
representatives were also added to the collaborative mix. Yet all of this
cooperation was needed to make things happen.
Professional practitioners--although experts in their fields--do not always
realize how much knowledge they lack or how much research can help
them define problems, develop strategies for dealing with them, and avoid
repeating mistakes made by others. It can be frustrating to work with
communities that are suspicious of their city managers, superintendents,
the police department, and university researchers. Add to that the
suspicion that the people who are studying their communities and telling
residents what should be done do not understand the community or its
issues. There is a lot of work to be done to convince communities that
research has real value, that it can help in designing programs that work.
Summary of Response by Margaret Hamburg
Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services
Meaningful and enduring solutions to complex and challenging societal
problems will be achieved only if a collaborative, multidisciplinary, and
multifaceted approach is used. The tuberculosis (TB) epidemic in New
York City is a case in point.
From the late 1970s through the 1980s, the number of TB cases was
steadily increasing, and there was a dramatic increase in the incidence of
drug-resistant TB. Although public health officials recognized the danger
of this growing trend, policymakers were unwilling to invest in TB
control. While the New York numbers were increasing, resources to
combat TB were declining because national statistics showed an overall
decline in tuberculosis. However, in communities such as Central Harlem
and Bedford Stuyvesant, it was clear we had a serious epidemic. We had a
crisis, but public health practitioners working in their communities were
unable to impress upon policymakers and the public the importance of this
concern. It required the New York City tabloid press--in particular, the
New York Post, with headlines such as "Killer Tuberculosis on the
Subway"--to help make the case.
The TB epidemic was not simply a medical problem: The drugs to treat
and cure TB were available, as were the means to prevent it. With time
and appropriate strategies, almost every case could be cured. Yet, literally
hundreds of people were falling through the cracks. The challenge was to
establish links to ensure their treatment and their cure. Our efforts to work
with the criminal justice system as well as with homelessness and housing
issues proved vitally important to our overall TB control program. In just
a few years' time, health practitioners cut TB rates by almost 50 percent,
and drug-resistant TB declined by about 85 percent.
Looking exclusively at overall statistics can distort the big picture, as
witnessed in the early days of the resurgence of TB by the failure to invest
earlier in reversing the epidemic. When the statistics were broken down,
however, targets for intervention emerged. Through collaborative
approaches--the marriage of research, policy, and practice--health care
practitioners were able to make a real difference.
The other lesson learned from the New York TB epidemic was about
complacency. By this I mean the danger that once you begin to make a
difference, you think the problem is solved. In the desire to move to the
next issue, resources are pulled from one problem to the other, and an
ongoing crisis is created that requires continued cleanup. As the TB case
illustrates, it often is necessary to invest far more dollars and use up many
more human resources than might have been needed had we invested in a
sensible, continued, and committed course of action.
Research and evaluation need to move forward. For this to happen,
practitioners must try to generate the best possible data and educate
leaders and the public about why this thing called "data" is the critical
foundation for effective policy and practice in the social science arena.
The effective marriage of research, policy, and practice is not easy:
It requires the following:
o Learning from practitioners what gaps in knowledge need to be filled.
o Educating policymakers and the public about the importance of research
and evaluation.
o Investing in the quality research and evaluation needed.
o Improving strategies for rapidly translating research knowledge and
advances into practice in both the biomedical and the social science fields.
Clearly, achieving these goals will require training people to have a
multidisciplinary focus. In addition, the people involved in research and
evaluation need to reflect the demographics and sensibilities of the
communities where these problems exist.
The limits of evaluation need to be recognized, however. It would be
foolish for anyone studying and evaluating complex social problems and
social interventions to believe that a clear-cut answer will emerge.
Research and evaluation should be geared toward targeting critical
problems, designing the best possible studies, gaining more knowledge
and information about what works, and creating a process that builds on
that knowledge.
-------------------------------
Replicating Complex Community Partnerships
Lisbeth B. Schorr, Director, Harvard Project on Effective Interventions
I am thrilled to be able to speak to this audience about what has been
learned in a variety of domains about replicating complex, collaborative
community initiatives. Not because I know all the answers, but because I
think that finding the answers to the replication conundrum also has to be
a collaborative process, and I hope the lessons that come out of other
domains shed some light on your efforts to spread and sustain effective
initiatives.
This subject is exciting because so much progress has been made on the
first step, which is to identify effective interventions. In the crime and
justice domain, quite a number of effective initiatives are worth spreading
and sustaining. Boston's victory over gun-related youth violence is the
most widely known of the many community-based successes that show
how dramatic change can be brought about through thoughtful,
systematic, collaborative action.
The good news is that it can be done. The bad news, or at least the
complicating news, is that if it is to be done on a scale large enough to
matter, it will not be accomplished overnight. That requires fundamental
departures from tradition on many levels--in the way we think about how
public agencies should work, about public-private partnerships, and about
how systems actually go about the business of funding, regulating, and
holding programs accountable.
My work of the past two decades has been an effort to take a fresh, hard
look at what is and is not working to change the life trajectories of those
most at risk, beginning at the level of individual programs, and then at the
efforts to spread and scale up what works.
The clearest message that emerges from analyzing what is working is that
as a result of massive societal changes during the past few decades, our
helping systems must now find new ways to make personal connections
with the individuals, families, and neighborhoods they hope to affect.
(This was not as crucial in the period when most of these systems and
institutions were designed.) This message comes out of the successes in
schools and early childhood programs, in family support and child
protection, and in welfare-to-work and community building. It is the
lesson coming out of community policing, Weed and Seed initiatives,
community courts demonstration projects, and communitywide
collaborations among police, parole and probation officers, and
faith-based and other neighborhood organizations.
Critical attributes of effective interventions
By and large, the interventions that change lives for children and families
in high-risk circumstances share the following attributes:
o They are comprehensive, flexible, and responsive.
o They see children in the context of families, and families in the context
of communities.
o They have a preventive, long-term orientation, knowing that many
negative outcomes, such as teenage pregnancy, school failure, and
juvenile violence have deep roots, and are unlikely to respond to quick-fix,
contemporaneous interventions.
o They are managed and staffed by people who believe in what they are
doing.
o They operate with intensity and perseverance to achieve a clear,
coherent mission.
o They recognize the limits of a single strategy and of intervention in a
single domain, and link up with other social change efforts, be they school
or service reforms, community building, or efforts to improve housing,
public safety, or job readiness or to expand economic opportunity.
o They encourage staff to build strong relationships based on mutual trust
and respect, often going well beyond the boundaries of their job
descriptions.
These critical attributes of effective interventions seem to be key to
understanding why so many good programs are difficult to spread and
sustain, especially in the public sector, and what it is that causes these
programs to be so easily undermined and destroyed beyond the pilot or
demonstration stage.
President Clinton has called the challenge of sustaining and spreading
what works "our enduring problem in American public life." The day
before his first inauguration in 1993, he noted that his number one
disappointment as Governor of Arkansas had been that it was so hard to
"take something that works to the next level, and figure out a way to make
the exception the rule."
The people who operate successful programs find it a constant struggle to
swim upstream to run them. Some time ago, I was in Charlotte, North
Carolina, giving a talk on the attributes of effective programs. I
subsequently received a letter from the head of a local neighborhood
health center, who wrote that the attributes I described reflected exactly
what occurs at her health center every day, and that those attributes were
the exact opposite of the policies and practices they were told to adopt by
the hospital under whose auspices the center operates.
Challenges to scaling up and spreading what works
Typically, the people who run successful programs say they have to be
willing to break or bend the rules to get the job done. They can bend the
rules, they can do it by stealth, while they are running pilot programs that
remain small and operate at the margins. Yet when they attempt to scale
up, they are immediately confronted by rules, regulations, and mindsets
that end up destroying or diluting the very attributes that made the original
model successful.
Even with documented program success, what works turns out, too often,
to be a round peg that cannot fit into the square hole provided by most
large systems and institutions. The following contradictions are at the
heart of the mystery of why it is so hard to scale up and spread what
works:
o If relationships are a critical ingredient of effectiveness but the system
does not allow staff to spend the time it takes to create and cultivate those
relationships.
o If keeping children safe is the agency's purpose, but the auditor only
counts whether the forms are filled out and the required documentation
was filed on time.
o If front-line discretion is a critical ingredient of effectiveness but the
regulators or evaluators require that the home visitor follow a prescribed
protocol to teach parenting skills even if she finds that the family has just
been evicted or the abusive boyfriend has returned.
o If local variation is another critical ingredient of effectiveness but the
evaluators insist that, unless a standardized intervention is replicated in all
sites, they cannot evaluate impact.
o If objectives cannot be achieved without the active involvement of more
than a single system but the money flows in such a way that it cannot be
pooled, and the reporting requirements designed to keep everyone's
contribution identifiable threaten to defeat the effort.
If these contradictions are apparent, we should not be surprised if model
programs get terrific results only while they are small and led by wizards
who are willing to break all the rules because they are some combination
of a Mother Teresa, a Machiavelli, and a certified public accountant.
These contradictions require that we very carefully examine how the
major systems that have been established to educate and protect our
children, ensure their health, and keep all of us from harm can be made to
work.
With that as the challenge, I set out to discover examples of people and
places that have overcome the obstacles that have made it difficult to scale
up from success. I determined as well to understand how these few
exceptions were becoming the rule by changing major systems and
institutions to make them hospitable to what works. I found a number of
common themes or strategies. Five strategies emerged as the most critical
characteristics of effective scale-up efforts.
1. The successful, system-changing efforts focus unrelentingly on
outcomes, such as how children and families are managing and whether
the neighborhood is safer--not whether a detailed maze of rules is being
followed. They focus on results as a way of taming bureaucracies. They
acknowledge that we, as a body politic, have been so eager to eliminate
the possibility that public servants will do anything wrong, that we have
tied their hands at the front lines in ways that have made it virtually
impossible for them to do anything right. The clear focus on results also
drives both funders and program people to think more realistically about
the connections between investments and outcomes, and reduces some of
the longstanding confusion between the means and ends of social
interventions. The fact that many individuals and agencies are
participating in new neighborhood coalitions may be the product of a great
deal of effort but is not necessarily evidence of progress toward stipulated
outcomes.
There is a constant temptation to fall back on process measures as
evidence of progress. Process measures become substitutes for outcome
measures because they provide comforting evidence of activity--they
demonstrate that something is happening. Funders often find it easier to
move or remove the goalposts than to strengthen the players. The typical
forget-about-the-goalposts conversation takes place a few months into the
implementation phase, when the funder says to the grant recipient: "We
gave you the grant in the hope that you would reduce teenage pregnancy
and youth violence in this community, and now you say that was really an
unrealistic expectation? You may be right. But we do need some hard
evidence that our grant is making some sort of difference, so let's get an
evaluator to design a survey that will show how many youngsters come to
your meetings and classes."
The new outcomes focus exposes the sham of asking human service
providers, educators, and community organizations to accomplish massive
tasks with wholly inadequate resources and tools, and forces the question
of whether to expect less from limited investments or to invest more to
achieve promised outcomes.
2. In their efforts to spread a proven model, successful programs do not
clone; rather they replicate the essence of a successful intervention while
allowing each new setting to adapt many of its components to their
particular needs and strengths, and in response to experience. The
programs and institutions that effectively serve depleted neighborhoods
are deeply rooted in those neighborhoods and reflect their particular needs
and strengths.
This seems to be one of the most difficult lessons for policymakers to
learn--that most successful interventions cannot be imposed from without.
There is no simple model that can just be "parachuted" in. Rather,
successful programs are shaped locally to respond to the needs of local
populations and to ensure that local communities have a genuine sense of
ownership. At the same time, successful replication requires distilling the
essence of an intervention and disseminating what is essential to the
model's success.
3. Successful scale-up efforts create new kinds of partnerships between
formal agencies and neighborhood groups, between local reformers and
outside intermediaries, and between the grassroots people that bring local
wisdom and outsiders who have access to the levers that can change the
rules under which local programs operate.
The Boston youth violence reduction story (see "Research for Problem
Solving and the New Collaborations," by David Kennedy, in this Research
Forum) not only illustrates that important changes in outcomes can be
brought about by systematic efforts but also serves as an illustration of
what can be achieved when every element of the community--ministers,
community residents, academics, police, probation officers, teachers,
and youth workers--work in partnership.
In Los Angeles County, the child welfare agency has contracts with 21
neighborhood-based networks consisting of churches, child care centers,
and family support programs to provide help for troubled families where
they live. They have found that you cannot strengthen families and protect
children without having a deep connection with the individuals and
agencies that are in touch with what is going on in their neighborhood.
The Beacon schools in New York City have placed services and
community activities in 37 schools that are now open afternoons,
evenings, and weekends and that are the centers of revitalized
communities. This was made possible by providing new funds to
community-based organizations and by a public-private partnership
between the city's Department of Youth Services and the Fund for the City
of New York, which provided the sustenance and guidance needed by
innovators and reformers entering uncharted waters. Such intermediaries
often are found in the background of successful scale-up efforts offering a
brain trust, savvy advocates, expertise, peer-to-peer support, professional
development and training of key staff, legitimization, and clout.
In addition to the new horizontal partnerships being crafted to spread and
sustain success, the need for new vertical alliances is becoming
increasingly apparent. Many of the needed changes cannot be made by the
people who run the local programs. Systems change cannot be left to
program people acting alone. They do not have access to the levers that
could change how money flows, how funding streams are put together,
how programs are held accountable, and the rules they must observe.
Systems change must be firmly anchored in programmatic experience. It
is futile for funders, public and private, to search for program people who
will work smarter, more innovatively, and more collaboratively to come
up with the money to sustain a program when the demonstration funds run
out. They need powerful allies to convince the rulemakers to make the
changes that can be made only from the outside.
This is why we need new vertical alliances between program people who
know what needs to be done and the people who can influence policy
because they have access to the levers of policy change.
4. Many of the newest community initiatives aim to transform entire
neighborhoods, knowing that even the strongest families cannot achieve
their goals for their children in neighborhoods characterized by long-term
disinvestment and deepening isolation. These initiatives are based on
knowledge that social disorganization undermines family formation,
family resilience, and family success, and increases the chances of
violence. They are based on the understanding that you cannot improve
outcomes for large numbers of children without fostering more
family-supportive environments, especially in the inner city.
Comprehensive community initiatives take a long-term view of change
and recognize that success is based on employing multiple solutions to
multiple problems. Their own efforts are linked to those of others, be they
efforts to improve the justice system and increase public safety, improve
services and schools, expand economic opportunities, or improve housing.
5. The comprehensiveness and complexity of these efforts highlight the
need for new approaches to learning what works. Over the past 20 years,
as social problems became more intractable and more complex,
interventions that could respond effectively also became increasingly
complex and therefore harder to assess.
The evaluation "industry" has exerted its influence over social policy
through its promise to use scientific methods, such as random assignment
of subjects into treatment and control groups, to provide data on what
works. The trouble is that what has been regarded as scientific, because it
is based on a biomedical model, is poorly positioned to assess today's
most effective interventions. It is reasonable to determine the effectiveness
of an antibiotic through controlled clinical trials. It makes no sense to use
that method to determine the effectiveness of a community-building
initiative, with its early childhood, youth development, family support,
school reform, job training, housing, and public safety components and its
continually evolving program design.
If interventions that change only one thing at a time fail because they
change only one thing at a time, then traditional evaluation has excluded
from consideration precisely those interventions most likely to have an
impact on individuals, neighborhoods, institutions, and systems. If
interventions that differ from one site to the next (and even from one day
to the next because they are responding to particular diverse and changing
community desires and conditions) are deemed "unevaluatable" by
traditional evaluators, we are robbed of the most relevant and timely
lessons about what is most likely to work.
The new evaluators
Many efforts are now under way to combine a variety of evaluation
approaches to generate more usable information and greater understanding
of complex interventions. It is not going to be easy to break with
experimental designs using random assignment as the only source of
reliable knowledge. Swarthmore College economics professor Robinson
G. Hollister, a leading figure in the evaluation field since the mid-1960s,
says that experimental designs are "like the nectar of the gods: once you've
had a taste of the pure stuff it is hard to settle for the flawed alternatives."
These flawed alternatives may provide less certainty about what, exactly,
caused the observed effects, but they do offer a broader range of
information, possibly more useful in making judgments about what really
matters. The new evaluators embrace both the old and the new in the
belief that there is knowledge worth having and acting on even if it is not
absolutely certain knowledge. They do not reject, on grounds of messiness
or complexity, information that can shed light on real-world efforts that
promise to improve outcomes. The new approaches to the evaluation of
complex interventions:
o Are built on a strong theoretical and conceptual base linking activities
to results.
o Emphasize shared interests rather than adversarial relationships
between evaluators and program people.
o Employ multiple methods and perspectives.
o Offer both rigor and relevance in the belief that knowledge is worth
having even it if is not absolutely certain knowledge.
The new, multipronged approaches to evaluation furnish tools to combat
what the late Don Schoen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
described as "epistemological nihilism in public affairs"--the view that
nothing can be known because the certainty we demand is not attainable.
The thoughtful observer's informed understanding, based on a wide array
of rigorous data on what happened and what might have happened under a
different set of circumstances--especially when combined with
understanding of similar interventions and events elsewhere--can
ultimately build a strong and useful knowledge base. Although offering
less certainty about causation, the new evaluators can bring to the table
information that is not only rich but rigorously obtained and analyzed, and
that can lead to effective action on urgent social problems.
In our efforts to expand the knowledge base, we have to welcome new
roles for evaluators that allow them to demystify the evaluation process
and build on the shared interests between program people and funders,
with whom they collaborate in problem solving to improve outcomes.
The danger, of course, is that the evaluator who does not maintain his or
her distance from an initiative will lose his or her objectivity and become
a cheerleader for that initiative, regardless of its merits. This problem
begins to recede as an outcomes orientation becomes the norm. When
accountability is based on achievement of agreed-upon outcomes, the
evaluator will no longer be the sole arbiter of the extent to which
outcomes were realized. Evaluators will be free to focus more on how
desired outcomes were achieved, as opposed to whether they were
achieved. They can better position themselves to achieve an accurate and
nuanced understanding of the nature of interventions and how they link to
the desired outcomes. They can move toward an explicit posture of
helping practitioners learn from their daily experience, thereby improving
their interventions and practices. The new evaluator can provide feedback
to practitioners for midcourse corrections, enhancing their capacity to
reflect and to conduct on-the-spot experimentation. They can help
practitioners think more carefully about both theory and practice.
We may want to try out a new image of the evaluator as the cheerleader.
The evaluator would become a declared partisan, not of a particular
initiative or intervention, but of solving the problem, fully legitimized as
an engaged participant in the quest for better ways to improve outcomes.
The new evaluator does not offer the old evaluator's certainty about
causation. He or she cannot prove that it was element A or element B that
caused the change. But by understanding how interventions interacted and
are logically related to changed outcomes, program and policy people as
well as funders will have a great deal more usable information than they
did before.
The new evaluation approaches have the potential to move the whole field
away from the oversimplified yes/no, success/failure judgments about
what programs work, toward a richer, more complex compendium of
strategies that are plausible, promising, or proven. Practitioners, program
designers, and communities will be able to use the lessons learned from
both research and experience to construct stronger theories and more
effective interventions. This process involves, of course, a willingness to
make judgment calls about the implications of data that accumulate to
point in promising pathways, but does not lead to conclusions for which
certainty can be claimed.
We must recognize the social value not only in innovation and creating
new knowledge, but also in expanding our understanding by assembling
and analyzing existing knowledge. The alternative is to remain mired in
the categorical thinking and fragmented interventions and supports that
cannot solve today's most serious problems.
Let me conclude by suggesting that we know a great deal more about what
works than we have been acting on. By assembling, celebrating, and
acting on what we now know, we could go far toward strengthening
American families and rebuilding neighborhoods so that all Americans
can feel safe in their homes without squandering the Nation's riches on
building more prisons. By acting on what we now know, we could ensure
that all our children will grow up with a stake in the American dream.
Question and Answer Session
Q: How can you have some of these more flexible approaches to
evaluation when it is required that you state exactly how you are going to
do the evaluation at the time you submit the original grant proposal?
Schorr: I think one of the reasons it is so hard to change evaluation
methods and traditions is that there are so many variables that have to
change at once. There is little overlap between what is valued by the
funders and the academics who set the tone for what is a respectable
evaluation and what is needed by the people who are designing and
improving programs. If the actors in each of these domains fail to
recognize the need for new approaches, then it is very difficult for one of
the participants in this mix to make a change. So I think we have to push
on many fronts at once for some of the newer approaches to become
acceptable.
I cochair a group, the Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Comprehensive
Community Initiatives, that is concerned with trying to remove some of
the obstacles from community revitalization. One of the obstacles we have
focused on is the difficulty in measuring community change and in
measuring and documenting what a healthy community looks like. We are
ready to publish some preliminary results, but it has been a long, hard
struggle because so little work has been done on this. The importance of
community contributions to all the outcomes we are trying to change is
only beginning to be recognized. I think one of the things we agree on is
that you have to have a "comprehensive" mindset. You do not have to do
everything at once; however, you must be willing to look without blinders
at what factors may be affecting the outcomes of what you are trying to
change. Unless you are willing to look outside your professional domain
to see what others can contribute--unless you are comprehensive in that
sense--you are not going to be successful. That does not mean you cannot
focus, for example, on reducing gun possession among youths in a
particular neighborhood or that that is not a worthwhile thing to do. There
is room for very focused efforts, and I think a number of successes have
been achieved by very focused efforts.
Comprehensive Community Initiatives, particularly, has found that you
cannot do everything at once. You cannot change someone's employment
prospects, prepare people for employment, ensure public safety, and house
everyone on day one. However, you can look at all of those domains and
figure out what you want to focus on and be totally eclectic about the
methods and tools you use to address that problem.
-------------------------------
Forced Bonding or Community Collaboration? Partnerships Between
Science and Practice in Research on Woman Battering*
Jeffrey L. Edleson, Ph.D., and Andrea L. Bible, M.S.W., Minnesota
Center Against Violence and Abuse (MINCAVA), University of
Minnesota
* This paper is an updated version of Jeffrey Edleson's presentation at the
1998 Conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation. It is
available online at http://www.vaw.umn.edu/research.asp. The authors
wish to thank Dr. Claire Renzetti and Dr. Sandra Beeman for their helpful
comments on the first draft of this paper. Address correspondence to
MINCAVA, 386 McNeal Hall, University of Minnesota, 1985 Buford
Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108-6142 (e-mail: jedleson@tc.umn.edu).
Social scientists and practitioners alike are familiar with the frantic search
for letters of support as grant proposal deadlines approach. From the
community perspective, calls and letters from academicians seeking their
agency's last-minute research funding that often exceeds their agency
budgets are met with a mixture of anger and fear. They are angry that they
were not included in the design and development of the research questions
or methods and fearful that the researchers will use tremendous staff
resources to collect data and never be heard from again. Practitioners in
the field of domestic violence may also fear that the published results of
the research will compromise the safety of battered women and their
children. Many social scientists also resent the expectation that
community organizations will be partners in a research endeavor. It is
sometimes viewed as an extra hurdle required by funders that impose tight
deadlines. Such requirements are sometimes seen as compromising the
independence of scientific inquiry or researchers' academic freedom and
often are not taken seriously by the scientific community. These tensions
have led one advocate to reframe collaboration as "forced bonding."[1]
The issues that arise when scientific and practice communities attempt to
collaborate on research and evaluation projects have been the subject of
discussion and publications for more than 50 years. One of the earliest and
most frequently cited publications is Kurt Lewin's article describing action
research.[2] Models expanding on his ideas have been proposed in a
variety of disciplines over the intervening decades: participatory research,
participatory action research, collaborative inquiry, cooperative inquiry,
feminist research, and multicultural research.[3] These models tend to
share several characteristics that make them unique in scientific inquiry.
For example, they generally contain an explicit assumption that research is
value based, not value free. They also promote research that serves social
transformation and avoids harming those studied. Those being studied are
believed to have extensive knowledge that requires their participation in
the design, data collection and analysis, and use of research. Finally, the
role of the researcher is also transformed in these models from one of
detached expert to a partner, educator, and facilitator who works closely
with those being studied. Similar calls have been heard for a movement
toward a collaborative research model that serves battered women. A
decade ago Hart outlined strategies for collaboration between researchers
and advocates. Eisikovits and Peled and Dobash and Dobash have called
for greater use of qualitative methods, which often reflect a collaborative
stance. More recently Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell described a
collaborative model of advocacy research in domestic violence.[4]
In this paper the term "collaborative research" is used to describe
investigative partnerships between advocates, practitioners, social
scientists, community activists, and women who have been battered.
These relationships are characterized by intensive consultation from the
beginning to the end of the research endeavor and include collectively
identifying research questions, designing data collection methods,
constructing implementation strategies, interpreting findings, and writing
and disseminating the results. The collaborative researcher seeks to share
control of the research process with her or his collaborators.
The first part of this paper identifies potential challenges to research
partnerships that partially explain the scarcity of these collaborative
relationships. Following this, we explore four successful collaborations
between practitioners and researchers who examine the impact of adult
domestic violence and the effectiveness of services aimed at preventing it.
We then highlight strategies for successfully navigating the challenges
presented by collaborative partnerships and conclude by arguing that such
partnerships between science and the practitioner communities strengthen
rather than weaken the process of scientific inquiry and program
development.
Advocates, practitioners, and researchers involved in four successful
collaborative research and evaluation projects on woman battering were
interviewed in preparation for writing this paper.[5] Participants were
asked to describe the nature of their collaborative relationship and to
discuss the basic guidelines or elements they believed made these
collaborations work (for example, the partners' behaviors, the project
design, and program elements). Participants were also asked to identify
specific benefits resulting from their collaborations, as well as the
challenges they encountered in collaborating and the strategies used to
respond to them
Challenges to collaborative research partnerships
Barriers invariably arise when attempts are made to conduct collaborative
research, making such partnerships relatively rare. A number of authors
and individuals interviewed identified several challenges, including those
related to shared control of the research process, time and trust,
differences among collaborative partners, and skills of the researcher.
Shared control of the research process
Perhaps the most common framework supporting interventions to prevent
woman battering is one that sees power and control as the central driving
forces behind violent behavior.[6] It is not surprising, therefore, that when
researchers approach these programs with requests to engage in research,
there is an expectation that control over the research process--from
conceptualization to interpretation and dissemination--will be shared
equally among researchers, practitioners, and, in some cases, the research
subjects themselves.
Researchers may be concerned that this degree of collaboration will
compromise the integrity of research designs if advocates and others do
not understand the need for the experimental controls necessary to
maintain scientific standards.[7] Similarly, some funding agencies have
traditionally viewed close collaborative relationships unfavorably and
question researchers' independence when they are actively involved with
the program being evaluated. Some funders and researchers believe that
such a close relationship will compromise the detached objectivity of the
scientist by putting pressure on her or him to alter or even conceal results,
especially when the results show unintended negative outcomes. In
addition, some practitioners hesitate to collaborate on research projects out
of fear that potentially negative evaluation results will harm their
program's funding or reputation.[8]
The situation at funding agencies has begun to change in recent years as
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute
of Justice (NIJ), among others, have encouraged collaborative research
projects. For example, in a recent NIJ research solicitation, practitioner-
researcher collaborations in the area of violence against women were
actively encouraged.[9]
Time and trust
One of the most commonly cited challenges of collaborative research is
the intensive time commitment required by all involved.[10] Negotiating
the research design, implementation procedures, interpretation, and
publication of results is extremely time consuming in general, especially
when the process is shared among collaborators from different disciplines
who often have different values. Further, differences in race, class, sexual
orientation, gender, and professional experience require more time for
building trust in relationships.[11]
Time is a tension-filled issue for both researchers employed in an
academic setting and program staff. Researchers generally have more time
than practitioners to devote to a research project because it is recognized
and rewarded as part of their jobs. To be sure, although they have
additional time, many researchers are expected to produce multiple
products from their studies and to publish them as sole or first authors in
academically respected journals. Practitioners, on the other hand, are
seldom offered rewards for participating in research or publishing
manuscripts and usually fit work on a research project into their already
full days.[12]
Practitioners and researchers may be distrustful of each other's motives.
Many domestic violence program staff have experienced or heard stories
of researchers who came to programs to collect data and never contacted
the program again after the data were in hand.[13] This causes program
staff to feel exploited.[14] Practitioners' concerns about exploitation may
also extend to the women or other family members studied. Advocates
may worry that interview questions will unnecessarily reactivate
emotional trauma about battering, appear to blame victims by focusing on
women's behavior, or compromise women's safety.[15] Practitioners may
also fear that the research protocol will substantially alter services, to the
detriment of clients.[16] Finally, as stated earlier, researchers may not trust
that practitioners will understand or be helpful in designing a sufficiently
rigorous study.
Differences among collaborative partners
Practitioners and researchers bring different skills, training, and
experience to the collaboration. This is both a source of strength and a
potential point of conflict. Researchers, advocates, and battered women
may have different views on the relative value of empirical and
experiential knowledge.[17] Different perspectives, terminology, methods,
interpretations, and concerns may lead to misunderstanding and perpetuate
feelings of fear and mistrust among collaborative partners if they remain
unexplored.[18]
Further, the differences in race, class, gender, and sexual orientation
mentioned earlier may add to differences in professional credentials
among researchers, practitioners, and battered women and reinforce power
in traditional ways.[19] These differences may fuel mistrust and
miscommunication among collaborative partners if unacknowledged.
Skills of the researcher
The challenges identified above may well destroy attempts at
collaborative research if left unresolved. Elden; Riger; Short et al.; Uehara
et al.;[20] and others have all argued that truly collaborative research
places many new demands on the researcher. The collaborative
researcher's role is much different from that of the detached expert who
designs a project and supervises its implementation by other research or
agency personnel. The interpersonal skills required to negotiate and
maintain collaborative relationships are not commonly taught in graduate
research programs. Many researchers have excellent command of
scientific methods but fail miserably in their ability to be an effective part
of an interpersonal and interagency network of relationships.
Four case studies in research on woman battering
There are challenges in collaborative partnerships, yet many advocates,
practitioners, battered women, and researchers have overcome them and
been involved in highly successful research relationships. Researchers and
practitioners involved with four successful collaborative research projects
were interviewed, and brief summaries of each collaborative partnership
are presented. Drawing from their experiences and those of other
researchers, the underlying assumptions and research strategies that appear
to promote successful research collaborations are identified.
The Community Advocacy Project: a Michigan battered women's shelter
The Community Advocacy Project (CAP) was a multiyear study that
examined the effectiveness of alternative interventions for women leaving
abusive partners.[21] The project's co-principal investigator was Dr. Cris
Sullivan, an associate professor of ecological psychology at Michigan
State University. Abby Schwartz was the administrative coordinator of the
collaborating shelter. The study involved a close partnership with the
shelter and actively engaged shelter residents as collaborating partners in
the research design.
Sullivan initiated the collaborative relationship as a volunteer with the
shelter, where she facilitated support groups and came to know agency
staff and other volunteers. She informed the staff and volunteers that she
was a researcher interested in designing and evaluating an intervention
project that would examine what women needed after leaving the shelter
to increase their safety. She received permission from the shelter
administration to speak with shelter residents about her research plan.
Sullivan's discussions with battered women led to the development of a
10-week advocacy program designed to aid women in identifying and
accessing the necessary resources to increase their safety after leaving the
shelter. The subsequent study randomly assigned battered women to
experimental and control groups, teaming members of the experimental
group with trained paraprofessionals for the 10-week program.[22]
The Domestic Abuse Project: a Minnesota multiservice agency on
domestic violence
The Domestic Abuse Project (DAP) was 4 years old when Dr. Jeffrey
Edleson first volunteered at the agency. A professor of social work at the
University of Minnesota, Edleson co-led groups for men who batter and
helped organize data collected for reporting to funding agencies. These
data also were analyzed by several staff at the agency.[23] At the same
time, Edleson assisted the agency in documenting its work and analyzing
other datasets.[24]
With Edleson's facilitation, DAP's management and staff, led by executive
director Carol Arthur, established research priorities based on their
personal and clinical experiences. These priorities resulted in a
decade-long research program that experimentally examined group
treatment programs for men who batter, surveyed the impact of
coordinated interventions on battered women and their batterers, and
investigated services to children who witnessed adult domestic
violence.[25] The culmination was an extensive dissemination effort
through an agency newsletter, DAP Research & Training Update, sent to
approximately 9,000 individuals and organizations, and publication of
several studies.[26]
The African American Task Force on Violence Against Women
The collaborative work of the African American Task Force on Violence
Against Women is unique among the four case studies featured here
because its collaborative research project was undertaken in support of a
larger community initiative. The Task Force received funding from the
Office of Justice Programs' Violence Against Women Office to bring
together various community stakeholders in the Central Harlem
community of New York City in response to violence against women. It
comprised community residents and representatives from organizations
working on behalf of children and families, job readiness programs, public
assistance programs, Head Start, the Urban League, health care providers,
religious organizations, law enforcement, and others. Gail Garfield,
director of the Institute on Violence, Inc., in New York City managed the
Task Force. Dr. Beth Richie, formerly of Hunter College of the City
University of New York and now a professor in the Departments of
Criminal Justice and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, is a senior research consultant with the Institute.
The goal of the Task Force was to develop a community-defined plan of
action to address the complex issues of violence against women in Central
Harlem. To accomplish this, a community involvement model developed
by the Institute on Violence was implemented. As part of this model, a
multiphased needs assessment was conducted that included a systematic
survey of organizations in the community, gathering of descriptive
information and data from community organizations and governmental
agencies, and a series of focus group interviews with community residents
and clients of community services. To guide the implementation of the
needs assessment, the Task Force established subcommittees composed of
community members.
The focus group subcommittee identified appropriate questions to be
asked and which community populations would participate, assisted Dr.
Richie in facilitating the interviews, helped analyze the findings, and
reported the results to the community in various forums. Overall, 11 focus
group interviews were conducted during a 3-month period in 1997. The
data from the needs assessment helped community members develop a
plan of action to respond to violence against women.
Battered women as survivors: Texas battered women's shelters
The collaboration regarding battered women in Texas shelters began when
Dr. Edward Gondolf, a professor of sociology at Indiana University of
Pennsylvania, and Ellen Fisher, then director of a Texas battered women's
shelter, met at the Third International Institute on Victimology in 1985.
Fisher approached Gondolf regarding statewide data the Texas Council on
Family Violence and the Texas Department of Human Services had
collected from battered women living in shelters. Fisher invited Gondolf
to analyze intake and exit interviews of more than 6,000 women who used
the services of 50 shelters during an 18-month period in 1984 and 1985.
Gondolf and Fisher's analysis of these data is presented in their study,
Battered Women as Survivors: An Alternative to Treating Learned
Helplessness.[27]
Best practices in successful collaborations
A review of the strategies researchers and practitioners have outlined as
keys to the success of their collaborative ventures points to a set of
underlying assumptions and best practices. Individually, the identified
assumptions and strategies may look rather mundane, but taken together
they create a very different experience for both the social scientist and the
practitioner. They are likely to significantly affect every aspect of the
scientific inquiry, from the way initial problems and questions are
formulated to the way results are presented and disseminated. Uehara et
al. suggest that research projects become truly collaborative when
strategies such as these become organic to the entire research
endeavor.[28]
Described below are three basic underlying assumptions that commonly
appear in published accounts of collaborative research and were voiced by
the individuals interviewed for this paper. These assumptions include
using woman-centered advocacy as a metaphor for the research process,
viewing researchers and those studied as equal partners in the research
enterprise, and understanding that research is value based.
Assumptions in collaborative research
Women-centered advocacy as a metaphor for the research process. Davies
et al. recently defined women-centered advocacy as giving women "the
opportunity to make decisions . . . to guide the direction and define the
advocacy . . . [because] she is the decision maker, the one who knows
best, the one with power."[29] In both the literature on collaborative
research and the interviews, a similar theme appeared. The successful
collaborative researcher appears to spend a great deal of time being
involved with a program or community, shares decisionmaking power
with others in the collaborative partnership, and helps shape battered
women's and practitioners' questions into research projects.
For example, a key element that contributed to the success of the CAP
collaboration, according to interviews with both Sullivan and Schwartz,
was that Sullivan became actively involved in the life of the shelter and its
residents by volunteering as a support group facilitator and serving on the
board of directors. According to Schwartz, the fact of Sullivan's
involvement helped build trust because she was considered one of them.
She spent a great deal of time listening to battered women, shaping a
service response with them, and then evaluating it.
The skills of the collaborative researcher consist of many of those
commonly outlined in the program evaluation literature[30] and include
listening to the needs of practitioners and battered women, providing
adequate information about the research project so collaborative partners
can make informed decisions about their involvement, and going forward
with what the community partners want. The researcher also enters into
the partnerships with an expectation that he or she is there to learn from
women who have been battered, and views them, program staff and
volunteers, and community members as equal partners.[31]
Blurring the line between researcher and those studied. If researchers
adopt a woman-centered or practitioner-centered approach to research, the
traditional line between the researcher and the client, advocate, or
practitioner is often blurred. As Elden suggests:
In participatory research compared to other types of research the
researcher is more dependent on those from whom data come, has less
unilateral control over the research process, and has more pressure to work
from other people's definitions of the situation.[32]
The collaborative researchers interviewed for this paper and many others
have, to varying degrees, practiced in a way similar to what Elden
describes. They have given up unilateral control over the research
process[33] and may be characterized as "advocate-researchers."[34] They
make the questions, ideas, and strategies of advocates, battered women,
and community members central to the research study. Further, such
researchers are immersed in the advocacy community and function both as
advocates and researchers, serving in volunteer or administrative
positions, on boards of directors, or as activists in the larger community.
The active involvement of battered women, advocates, and community
members greatly enhances a research project by bringing knowledge based
in practical and direct experiences, as well as critical analyses crucial to
the project. Their contributions to research design, implementation, and
analysis are vital. When a project is fully collaborative, all those involved
function as co-researchers.[35] Underlying the sense of participants as
co-researchers is the notion of reciprocal learning. The researchers,
advocates, and battered women both teach and learn from each other, with
each partner bringing complementary and necessary skills to the
project.[36] When a truly collaborative relationship is established,
everyone's expertise and contributions are valued equally.
Fisher and Gondolf report that, although Gondolf was responsible for
analyzing the data, they interpreted the analyses together. Fisher would
provide feedback on the written responses, suggesting the addition of
summary charts or other tools to make the text more helpful to
practitioners. Working in separate States, the two visited each other as
often as possible to devote uninterrupted time to the analysis. Their
mutual commitment of time and energy to the process suggests that Fisher
clearly functioned as a co-researcher.
A value-based science in service of social change. Many authors
promoting models of collaborative research reject the traditional notion
that research is value free, arguing that all researchers bring a specific set
of values to the enterprise.[37] These values are viewed as playing a major
role in every stage of the research process, affecting the selection of a
problem and research question, design of the study, definition and
measurement of variables, and interpretation and dissemination of
results.[38] Collaborative research models call on researchers to make
their value orientation explicit rather than assert they are value free.[39]
Uehara et al. argue that research objectives should be linked to community
empowerment, social justice, and social transformation goals.[40]
Advocacy research is intended to support the development of programs
and public policies that improve the lives of battered women and their
children.[41] As Small states, "If our research is to be more than an
intellectual exercise, we need to seriously consider who we hope will
benefit as well as who may be harmed by our work."[42]
The collaborative research partners we interviewed spoke of these values.
Carol Arthur of DAP believes that one of the benefits of collaborative
research is "creating a culture where we're constantly asking if what we're
doing is effective."[43] In response to needs expressed by former clients
in followup interviews, the agency developed an aftercare program for
women and men who had completed DAP groups. In addition to
improving agency services, DAP's research supports the organization's
efforts for social change by providing it with data on the effectiveness of
the criminal justice system's response to victims and perpetrators of
domestic violence.
Strategies for successful collaboration
The three key assumptions lead to several concrete strategies for
collaboration. They include providing equal access to funding; involving
battered women and their advocates in research projects from the
beginning; offering incentives for all parties involved; making research
products useful; and establishing communication between research
partners to better understand partners' roles, allow flexibility in problem
solving, and spend time in each others' domains and in neutral settings.
Provide equal access to funding. Community agencies must be recognized
by researchers and funders as equal partners in collaborative research. The
organization that controls the budget often wields the greatest power in the
relationship. Practitioners and their agencies should be compensated fairly
for their contributions to research.[44] Collaborating partners should
develop agreements in advance regarding funding allocations for
operations, indirect costs, and strategies for fundraising.[45]
Involve survivors and practitioners from the beginning. Research that
actively involves battered women in the conceptualization process will
likely be enriched.[46] Involving battered women and their advocates in
the collaborative research process will increase the likelihood that the
research questions and the interventions designed to help them are
relevant to the lives of battered women. Survivors and practitioners can
identify potential safety risks in the research design and implementation,
create effective strategies for improving response rates and minimizing
attrition, identify outcome variables, and validate the interpretation of
results.[47] Battered women and their advocates can also identify issues
that are salient to survivors but may not be viewed initially as
scientifically relevant.[48]
In the Texas collaboration, Gondolf and his colleagues conducted initial
statistical analyses of the data and reached tentative conclusions, which
shelter staff then tested with women in the shelter. In one case, this led the
collaborators to modify the severity ranking of different kinds of threats.
The researchers initially ranked threats to children as moderately low
level, while shelter residents asserted that threats to children were the
number-one risk.
In the CAP collaboration in Michigan, Sullivan spent considerable time
talking informally with shelter residents and gathering information to help
develop an experimental advocacy program and evaluation project. As she
recounts, "I think I would never have designed an effective intervention if
I hadn't listened to the women themselves, because everything I was
reading at that point--the literature in the journals--would have led me in a
completely different direction."[49] Sullivan's experience demonstrates
the value of involving battered women as equal partners in research and
investing significantly more time in consultation with battered women,
advocates, and community members.
Offer incentives to all parties. Collaborative research on domestic violence
should offer tangible benefits to all participants to help ensure the
commitment of community programs and dispel feelings of mistrust or
fear of exploitation.[50] Examples of benefits to domestic violence
programs include scientifically sound data to use in grant applications,
evaluation of programs to help improve services, sharing and interpreting
new research information from journals and conference papers, donated
services and materials, and a greater understanding of the experiences of
battered women and their children.
Both Fisher in Texas and Arthur in Minnesota described a vested interest
in the analysis of program data to demonstrate the need for additional
financial support to funders. In addition, as researchers, Gondolf and
Edleson each had a professional interest in publishing quality research.
Further, all collaborators were motivated by the desire to learn more about
the needs of battered women. According to Fisher, these incentives
ensured that she remained responsive to requests from Gondolf.
The CAP collaboration provided several incentives to the shelter. First,
residents assigned to the experimental group were provided advocacy
services upon leaving the shelter. In addition, advocates solicited
donations for the shelter as part of their training to become familiar with
community resources. Participants in the research also were well paid for
their time and their expertise. Finally, Sullivan was able to use the positive
research findings to help the shelter write a grant proposal for funding an
advocacy coordinator position. This position has received additional
funding and is now an integral part of the program.
Make research products useful. Small argues that research products must
be available to and useful for research partners to truly fulfill the mission
of collaborative research.[51] The African American Task Force on
Violence Against Women used its research findings to support the
development of community-generated strategies for responding to
violence against women in Central Harlem. According to Gail Garfield,
the Task Force collaboration also began to "lay a foundation for the
community, however defined, to begin to take ownership of the issue."[52]
DAP disseminated the research findings in multiple formats to make the
information more useful. Study results were used to shape the redesign of
agency programs and were integrated into training manuals to assist other
programs in implementing and refining services. The findings also were
distributed widely in newsletters, press releases, community presentations,
and a variety of lengthier publications as well as books. Funders,
policymakers, and other practitioners have appreciated DAP's willingness
to subject itself to evaluation and disseminate the findings, even when the
results do not coincide with the agency's current program.
Establish ongoing communication. Effective and culturally relevant
communication is possibly the most essential and complex element of
successful collaborations. Effective communication begins with all parties
exploring their objectives, assumptions, roles, limits, and concerns. The
participants in the 1996 conference in Detroit, Michigan, on Creating
Collaborations developed a helpful list of questions to guide dialogue
among those considering collaboration.[53] Honest dialogue from the
onset lays the foundation for establishing trust and alleviating fear.
As the research process evolves, collaborators must continue to build into
it regular opportunities to discuss the process and express concerns.
Turnover in personnel at nonprofit agencies is often frequent enough that
even the clearest communication must be repeated many times to ensure
that all collaborators continue to be adequately informed. Regular and
repeated communication also will help ensure that interventions and data
collection methods are implemented as intended.[54] Schwartz, a staff
member of the shelter that collaborated with Sullivan, cited ongoing
communication as one essential element that contributed to the success of
the collaboration, as did Arthur, who collaborated with Edleson.
The content of ongoing communication will depend on the particular
setting in which a research project is conducted. The collaborators
interviewed for this paper raised a number of communication issues,
including role responsibilities, approaches to problem solving, and
spending time together in each others' domains and in neutral settings.
These are discussed below.
Be purposeful about roles in the research process. Several of the
successful collaborators cited the benefit of clarifying the roles and
responsibilities of each partner before engaging in research.[55] These
collaborators identified the need to resolve decisionmaking strategies,
lines of authority, authorship and publication, and timelines for task
completion.[56] Collaborators also must decide whose interpretation of the
data will prevail when researchers, advocates, or battered women
disagree.[57] Gondolf and Fisher explained that in their collaborative
project, agreeing upon an efficient division of labor, establishing practical
steps and check-in points, clearly identifying goals, and setting a timeline
were all factors that helped them complete the tasks in their collaboration.
In other cases, however, collaborations may benefit from allowing roles
and responsibilities to overlap and develop organically. Richie noted that
roles remaining undefined constituted a key element in the success of the
Harlem initiative. Because Richie and Garfield were perceived as
members of the community and not as outside researchers, the boundaries
between researcher and community were blurred. This facilitated feelings
of trust among collaborators. In either case it was helpful to be purposeful
about the clarity or lack of clarity in collaborative roles.
Be flexible in problem solving. Regardless of whether or not collaborators
find it useful to agree about roles and responsibilities, they must be
willing to address conflicts together and renegotiate agreements as
necessary. Fisher, Sullivan, and Schwartz all described the tendency for
outside researchers to label program staff uncooperative and cited this as
an indication that the researchers were not willing to work with program
staff to solve problems.
Schwartz recounted CAP's experience with one research team that wanted
to conduct surveys among shelter residents using a questionnaire written
in the vocabulary of college graduates. When shelter staff explained that
the language was not appropriate for shelter residents, the researchers
were not receptive to their feedback and did not change the questionnaire.
Further, the research team would not pay women for the considerable time
it would take to fill out the survey. When shelter staff cautioned the
researchers that they were unlikely to obtain a high enough response rate,
the researchers acted as if the shelter staff were not being cooperative.
As Schwartz recalls:
It was like they thought, "If you were really helpful, you'd talk them
[shelter residents] into it." But it wouldn't help us; it could in fact hinder
us in doing our work, because women might be put off by it, and we have
to spend a lot of time building trust, so there was no give-and-take.[58]
The shelter's experience demonstrates not only the necessity of assuming
an attitude of joint problem solving but also the benefits of recognizing
the expertise of program staff.
Spend time together in each others' settings and in neutral settings.
Advocates and researchers often work in very different environments.
Some collaborators find that exposure to the other's workplace can
increase understanding of the demands placed on each other's time and
attention. Researchers may consider attending regularly scheduled staff
meetings of community agencies to present and receive reports about the
research project or obtain feedback from staff.[59] Using time in this way
may be more efficient than scheduling additional meetings to discuss the
research.[60] Collaborators may want to schedule some meetings at the
research team's offices so that community partners can become familiar
with researchers' environments as well.
Conversely, advocates and researchers often find it is helpful to schedule
time away from their respective offices to devote their undivided attention
to the research project. This could be called "the kitchen table factor," as
several collaborators identified the kitchen table as the location where the
best work was accomplished. Fisher, in particular, stressed that
practitioners benefit by taking time away from the office to work on
required tasks without the distractions of competing demands.
How is science enhanced through collaboration with practice?
Throughout this paper it has been argued that collaboration on research is
beneficial. Although there is no guarantee that collaboration will generate
the benefits described, we believe that more meaningful and useful
research is generated by adhering to the assumptions and strategies
outlined here. A number of benefits accruing from research in a
partnership of scientists and practitioners have been identified in the
literature and through our interviews. They include improvements in
research questions, enhancements in research implementation, gains from
complementary talents, increased legitimacy and utilization, more
accountability to battered women and their advocates, and links to a larger
social movement.
Improvements in research questions
One of the most significant benefits of collaborating in domestic violence
research is that the inquiry is often made far more relevant to the lives of
battered women. Numerous researchers have testified that working with
battered women and their advocates led to the formulation of research
questions that researchers would not have created on their own--questions
grounded in the experiences of battered women. Gondolf asserts that
"Without Ellen's [Fisher] involvement . . . I probably would have asked
the wrong questions, because there are a lot of cases where, when you
have all of this information in a database, you can start asking crazy
questions."[61]
Adopting research questions generated from battered women and their
advocates also sets a precedent of valuing the expertise that these
collaborators bring to a research project, and this helps balance other
possible power differentials. Further, collaboration is likely to generate
multiple outcome measures that accurately reflect the complexity of
battered women's lives.[62] Richie recounted how community members
helped her view violence against African-American women in relation to
larger issues facing the community, stating:
It was very hard to stay on domestic violence in the narrowest sense. So
while I was tempted scientifically to bring the group back, I didn't because
I think it would have skewed what people were comfortable saying, and
would've made them focus on something that wasn't a discrete concept to
them.[63]
Enhancements in research implementation
Research projects designed collaboratively, particularly those that include
battered women, often find that data collection methods are improved.
Collaborative projects are more likely to obtain information in ways that
do not compromise the safety or confidentiality of participants by paying
attention to the timing, format, and location of interviews and surveys.[64]
Battered women, their advocates, and community members can help
develop survey instruments using language that is appropriate and
inclusive of its audience.[65]
Collaborative projects may also lead to the creation of more effective
strategies for retaining subjects in longitudinal studies by consulting with
battered women on what incentives and contact methods are likely to
work. The CAP staff interviewed women in the control and experimental
groups every 6 months for 2 years. On the basis of feedback from women
living at the shelter, Sullivan and others on the research team designed a
three-phase retention protocol that payed women progressively larger
amounts of money for their participation over time and, through their
social networks, contacted women who had moved. This strategy enabled
the study to maintain a 97-percent retention rate at the 24-month followup
interviews.[66]
Gains from complementary talents
When professionals with different training and experience collectively
direct their energies toward the same outcome, the process is often
synergistic. Battered women and their advocates are experts in interpreting
responses to abuse. They are therefore valuable interpreters and validators
of research results. They also may be more aware of the effects of culture
and ethnicity on those responses and can provide valuable insights on how
to modify research instruments for various populations.[67] Researchers
are trained in scientific methods and data analysis and can help link the
real-life experiences of battered women to the theoretical research on
violence against women.
When researchers, practitioners, and battered women apply their
complementary talents in tandem, their collective efforts often can reach
underserved populations in more effective ways than if they had worked
independently. The diverse talents of the African American Task Force on
Violence Against Women ensured that the data collected in, and the
community intervention strategies developed from, its initiative were
relevant to and inclusive of the Central Harlem community in which it
was based.
Increased legitimacy and utilization
Entering into a collaborative relationship with practitioners and their
associated programs often provides increased legitimacy for researchers.
Associations with domestic violence programs often afford researchers
access to data that they would not otherwise have. After agreeing to
collaborate, Fisher and Gondolf met with the Texas Department of Human
Services to secure access to its data. Gondolf recalled that the shelter's
involvement in the project was a major source of legitimacy; without that
involvement, he would have been less likely to have received access to the
data.
Practitioners also may benefit from the credibility that researchers
contribute to a project through careful attention to the scientific rigor of
the research design, data collection, and interpretation. Fisher, Gondolf,
Sullivan, and Arthur all identified the benefit of using scientifically sound
data that express clients' needs, demonstrate the effectiveness of an
intervention, or support the assertions of battered women and their
advocates.
More accountability to battered women and their advocates
Truly collaborative research that involves battered women and their
advocates in the design, implementation, and interpretation of research
increases the accountability of the research to them. It is also more likely
to enhance their ongoing efforts to effect social change to end violence
against women.[68] When collaborators share power in the research
process, it may reflect a commitment to social change. The results of
research are more likely to be trusted and used by advocates and other
practitioners to make battered women safer and hold perpetrators
accountable.
Researchers who are active in advocacy or the larger community find an
added incentive to ensure that the research will make a difference in the
lives of battered women and other community members. As Richie
reports, "I was a part of the community, not an outsider. And I didn't want
to feel that I couldn't go back to a community meeting and have people
say, Whatever happened to that project that you did?' I didn't want to be
faced with that."[69]
Links to a larger social movement
Practitioners may find that collaborating on a research project can lead to
increased exposure to the national battered women's movement and can
expand advocates' understanding of issues concerning battered women and
their children. Fisher described working with Gondolf as a "life-
transforming experience" that broadened her thinking and analysis
beyond the local or State level to a national analysis of how to make a
difference in the lives of battered women.
Researchers also may benefit from connection to the larger movement to
end violence against women as a result of collaborating with battered
women and their advocates. Gondolf asserted that his collaboration with
Fisher grounded him in the relevant political issues and pointed him
toward research that affected public policy issues. Further, the dialogue
with Fisher and others matured his understanding of the field because
real-life issues were involved.
Conclusion--toward a new research culture
We have attempted to describe elements of a collaborative research model
that is grounded in the experiences of researchers, practitioners, and
battered women. Many research partnerships and program evaluations use
elements of this model, but given the challenges outlined, it is rare that
most or all of these elements are applied in a single project. Interestingly,
there are few studies of collaborative research models themselves.
Taken together, the assumptions and strategies of collaborative
partnerships create a research environment with a culture very different
from that of more traditional research projects. Research conducted
collaboratively has the potential to transform both the researcher and
community partners because control of the research process is shared.
Researchers may learn to shape studies around questions important to
those in the field, reaping great benefits from the input of practitioners and
battered women who have direct experience. Practitioners may
increasingly value the opportunity to find answers to their specific
questions, becoming more motivated to use research findings to shape
practice and to participate in future studies. Collaborative research
partnerships offer a potential path for helping to create more useful
research and improved services for battered women, their families, and
their communities.
-------------------------------
Notes
1. Thanks to Sarah O'Shea, executive director of the Nebraska Coalition
Against Domestic Violence, for her humorous contributions at many
meetings, including coining the term "forced bonding."
2. Lewin, K., "Action Research and Minority Problems," Journal of Social
Issues 2 (1946): 34-46.
3. Park, P., M. Brydon-Miller, B. Hall, and T. Jackson, eds., Voices of
Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada,
Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993: 157-176; Kondrat, M.E., and M.
Julia, "Participatory Action Research: Self-reliant Research Strategies for
Human Social Development," Social Development Issues 19 (1) (1997):
32-49; Mies, M., "Liberating Women, Liberating Knowledge: Reflections
on Two Decades of Feminist Action Research," Atlantis 21 (1) (1996):
10-24; Torbert, W.R., "Why Educational Research Has Been So
Uneducational: The Case for a New Model of Social Science Based on
Collaborative Inquiry," in Human Inquiry, ed. P. Reason and J. Rowan,
New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1981: 141-151; Reason, P., "Three
Approaches to Participative Inquiry," in Handbook of Qualitative
Research, ed. N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1994: 324-339; Gergen, M.M., "Toward a Feminist
Metatheory and Methodology in the Social Sciences," in Feminist
Thought and the Structure of Knowledge, ed. M.M. Gergen, New York:
New York University Press, 1988: 87-104; Reinharz, S., Feminist
Methods in Social Research, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992;
and Uehara, E.S., S.S.L. Sohng, R.L. Bending, S. Seygried, C.A. Richey,
P. Morelli, M.  Spencer, D. Ortega, L. Keenan, and V. Kanuha, "Toward a
Values-based Approach to Multicultural Social Work Research," Social
Work 41 (6) (1996): 613-621.
4. Hart, B., "Collaboration for Change," paper presented at seminar of the
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington,
DC, March 21-23, 1988; Eisikovits, Z., and E. Peled, "Qualitative
Research on Spouse Abuse," in Family Violence: Research and Public
Policy Issues, ed. D.J. Besharov, Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 1990:
1-12; Dobash, R.P., and R.E. Dobash, "How Research Makes a Difference
to Policy and Practice," in Family Violence: Research and Public Policy
Issues, ed. D.J. Besharov, Washington, DC:  The AEI Press, 1990; and
Gondolf, E.W., K. Yllo, and J. Campbell, "Collaboration Between
Researchers and Advocates," in Out of the Darkness: Contemporary
Perspectives on Family Violence, ed. G. Kaufman Kantor and J.L.
Jasinski, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997: 255-267.
5. The authors thank the following individuals for their willingness to be
interviewed for this paper: Carol Arthur, Ellen Fisher, Bob Foster, Gail
Garfield, Edward Gondolf, Beth Richie, Abby Schwartz, and Cris
Sullivan.
6. Pence, E., and M. Paymar, Education Groups for Men Who Batter: The
Duluth Model, New York: Springer Publishing Company, Inc., 1993.
7. Galinsky, M.J., J.E. Turnbull, D.E. Meglin, and M.E. Wilner,
"Confronting the Reality of Collaborative Practice Research: Issues of
Practice, Design, Measurement, and Team Development," Social Work 38
(4) (1993): 440-449; and Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration
Between Researchers and Advocates."
8. Ford, D.A., "Conducting Family Violence Research: Thoughts on
Guiding Principles," paper presented to the Violence Against Women
Research Strategic Planning Workshop, Washington, DC, March 31,
1995; Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates"; Myers, T., and J. Daly, "View and Commentary from the
Trenches: A Battering Intervention Project's Reaction to Participation as a
Site in Program Evaluation," paper presented to the Fifth International
Family Violence Research Conference, University of New Hampshire,
Durham, NH, June 30, 1997; and Riger, S., "Challenges in Collaborative
Research: Trust, Time and Talent," paper presented to the Conference on
Collaboration Between Researchers and Activists on Domestic Violence
and Sexual Assault, University of Illinois at Chicago, March 28, 1997.
9. National Institute of Justice, Research and Evaluation on Violence
Against Women, Solicitation, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1998. NIJ encourages practitioner-
researcher collaboration in other areas as well.
10. Fisher, E., and E.W. Gondolf, personal communication with authors,
June 17, 1998; Myers and Daly, "View and Commentary from the
Trenches"; Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative Research"; Sullivan, C.,
personal communication with author, June 17, 1998; and Uehara et al.,
"Toward a Values-based Approach to Multicultural Social Work
Research."
11. Hart, "Collaboration for Change"; and Renzetti, C., "Confessions of a
Reformed Positivist: Feminist Participatory Research as Good Social
Science," in Researching Sexual Violence Against Women:
Methodological and Personal Perspectives, ed. M.D. Schwartz, Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997: 131-143.
12. Fisher, personal communication with author, June 17, 1998; Miedema,
B., "Building a Research Team: The Struggle to Link the Community and
the Academy," Atlantis 21 (1) (1996): 89-93; and Riger, "Challenges in
Collaborative Research."
13. Schwartz, A., personal communication with author, June 26, 1998.
14. Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative Research."
15. Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates"; Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative Research"; and
Schwartz, personal communication with author, June 26, 1998.
16. Galinsky et al., "Confronting the Reality of Collaborative Practice
Research"; and Arthur, C., personal communication with author, July 2,
1998.
17. Hart, "Collaboration for Change."
18. Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates"; and Hart, "Collaboration for Change."
19. Hart, "Collaboration for Change."
20. Elden, M., "Sharing the Research Work: Partici- pative Research and
Its Role Demands," in Human Inquiry, ed. P. Reason and J. Rowan, New
York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1981: 253-266; Riger, "Challenges in
Collaborative Research"; Short, L., M. Hennessy, and J. Campbell,
"Tracking the Work," in Family Violence: Building a Coordinated
Community Response, ed. M. Witwer, Chicago: American Medical
Association, 1998: 59-72; and Uehara et al., "Toward a Values-based
Approach to Multicultural Social Work Research."
21. Sullivan, C.M., "The Provision of Advocacy Services to Women
Leaving Abusive Partners: An Exploratory Study," Journal of
Interpersonal Violence 6 (1) (1991): 41-54; and Sullivan, C.M., and D.I.
Bybee, "Community-based Advocacy for Women with Abusive Partners:
Promising Findings," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 67
(1) (1999): 43-63.
22. Sullivan, "The Provision of Advocacy Services to Women Leaving
Abusive Partners."
23. Grusznski, R.J., and T.P. Carrillo, "Who Completes Batterers'
Treatment Groups? An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Family
Violence 3 (4) (1988): 141-150.
24. Brygger, M.P., and J.L. Edleson, "The Domestic Abuse Project: A
Multi-systems Intervention in Woman Battering," Journal of Interpersonal
Violence 2 (3) (1987): 324-336; Edleson, J.L., and M.P. Brygger, "Gender
Differences in Self-reporting of Battering Incidents: The Impact of
Treatment Upon Report Reliability One Year Later," Family Relations 35
(3) (1986): 377-382; Edleson, J.L., and R. Grusznski, "Treating Men Who
Batter: Four Years of Outcome Data from the Domestic Abuse Project,"
Journal of Social Service Research 12 (1-2) (1988): 3-22; and Grusznski,
R.J., J.C. Brink, and J.L. Edleson, "Support and Education Groups for
Children of Battered Women," Child Welfare 67 (5) (1988): 431-444.
25. Edleson, J.L., and M. Syers, "The Relative Effectiveness of Group
Treatments for Men Who Batter," Social Work Research & Abstracts 26
(2) (1990): 10-17; Edleson, J.L., and M. Syers, "The Effects of Group
Treatment for Men Who Batter: An 18-month Follow-up Study,"
Research in Social Work Practice 1 (3) (1991): 227-243; Gamache, D.J.,
J.L. Edleson, and M.D. Schock, "Coordinated Police, Judicial and Social
Service Response to Woman Battering: A Multiple-baseline Evaluation
Across Three Communities," in Coping with Family Violence: Research
and Policy Perspectives, ed. G.T. Hotaling et al., Newbury Park, CA:
Sage Publications, 1988: 193-209; Syers, M., and J.L. Edleson, "The
Combined Effects of Coordinated Intervention in Woman Abuse," Journal
of Interpersonal Violence 7 (4) (1992): 490-502; Peled, E., and J.L.
Edleson, "Multiple Perspectives on Groupwork with Children of Battered
Women," Violence and Victims 7 (4) (1992): 327-346; Peled E., and J.L.
Edleson, "Process and Outcome in Small Groups for Children of Battered
Women," in Ending the Cycle of Violence: Community Responses to
Children of Battered Women, ed. E. Peled, P.G. Jaffe, and J.L. Edleson,
Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1995: 77-96; Peled, E., and J.L.
Edleson, "Predicting Children's Domestic Violence Service Participation
and Completion," Research in Social Work Practice 8 (6) (1998): 698-712;
and Peled, E., and J.L. Edleson, "Barriers to Children's Domestic Violence
Counseling: A Qualitative Study," Families in Society, in press.
26. Peled, E., P.G. Jaffe, and J.L. Edleson, eds., Ending the Cycle of
Violence: Community Responses to Children of Battered Women,
Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1995; Peled, E., and D. Davis,
Groupwork with Children of Battered Women, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1995; and Edleson, J.L., with C. Frick, Evaluating Domestic
Violence Programs, Minneapolis, MN: Domestic Abuse Project, 1997.
27. Gondolf, E.W., and E. Fisher, Battered Women as Survivors: An
Alternative to Treating Learned Helplessness, New York: Lexington
Books, 1988.
28. Uehara et al., "Toward a Values-based Approach to Multicultural
Social Work Research."
29. Davies, J., E. Lyon, and D. Monti-Catania, Safety Planning with
Battered Women: Complex Lives, Difficult Choices, Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications, 1998: 3-4.
30. See, for example, Posavac, E.J., and R.G. Carey, Program Evaluation:
Methods and Case Studies, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1997.
31. Hall, B.L., "Participatory Research, Popular Knowledge, and Power:
A Personal Reflection," Convergence 14 (3) (1981): 6-17; and Kondrat
and Julia, "Participatory Action Research."
32. Elden, "Sharing the Research Work," 261.
33. Torbert, "Why Educational Research Has Been So Uneducational."
34. As described by Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration
Between Researchers and Advocates."
35. Kondrat and Julia, "Participatory Action Research"; and Reason,
"Three Approaches to Participative Inquiry."
36. Maguire, P., Doing Participatory Research: A Feminist Approach,
Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Center for
International Education, 1987; and Renzetti, "Confessions of a Reformed
Positivist."
37. Kondrat and Julia, "Participatory Action Research"; and Meis,
"Liberating Women, Liberating Knowledge."
38. Dobash and Dobash, "How Research Makes a Difference to Policy
and Practice"; and Eisikovits and Peled, "Qualitative Research on Spouse
Abuse."
39. Small, S.A., "Action-Oriented Research: Models and Methods,"
Journal of Marriage and the Family 57 (4) (1995): 941-955.
40. Uehara et al., "Toward a Values-based Approach to Multicultural
Social Work Research."
41. Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates."
42. Small, "Action-Oriented Research."
43. Arthur, personal communication with author, July 2, 1998.
44. Fisher and Gondolf, personal communication with authors, June 17,
1998; and Miedema, "Building a Research Team."
45. Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates."
46. Short, Hennessy, and Campbell, "Tracking the Work."
47. Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates"; and Short, Hennessy, and Campbell, "Tracking the
Work."
48. Renzetti, "Confessions of a Reformed Positivist."
49. Sullivan, personal communication with author, June 17, 1998.
50. McGee, S., "Commentary on Domestic Violence Research," 1997
[Cited May 15, 1998]. Available from
http://www.ssw.umich.edu/trapped/commentary.html.
51. Small, "Action-Oriented Research."
52. Garfield, personal communication, 1998.
53. Creating Collaborations, "Guidelines for Creating Collaborations
between Researchers and Community Organizations for Research," 1996
[Cited May 15, 1998]. Available from http://www.ssw.umich.edu
/trapped/irwg.html.
54. Galinsky et al., "Confronting the Reality of Collaborative Practice
Research."
55. Gondolf and Fisher, personal communication with authors, June 17,
1998; Arthur, personal communication with author, July 2, 1998; and
Edleson, with Frick, Evaluating Domestic Violence Programs.
56. Galinksy et al., "Confronting the Reality of Collaborative Practice
Research"; Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between
Researchers and Advocates"; and Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative
Research."
57. Gondolf, personal communication with author, June 17, 1998; and
Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative Research."
58. Schwartz, personal communication with author, June 26, 1998.
59. Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative Research"; and Schwartz, personal
communication with author, June 26, 1998.
60. Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative Research."
61. Gondolf, personal communication with author, June 17, 1998.
62. Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates."
63. Richie, B., personal communication with author, July 3, 1998.
64. Gondolf, Yllo, and Campbell, "Collaboration Between Researchers
and Advocates."
65. Renzetti, "Confessions of a Reformed Positivist."
66. Sullivan, C.M., M.H. Rumptz, R. Campbell, K.K. Eby, and W.S.
Davidson, "Retaining Participants in Longitudinal Community Research:
A Comprehensive Protocol," Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 32
(3) (1996): 262-276.
67. Riger, "Challenges in Collaborative Research."
68. Hart, "Collaboration for Change."
69. Richie, personal communication with author, July 3, 1998.
-------------------------------
Summary of Response by Howard Black
Detective, Domestic Violence Unit, Colorado Springs Police Department
Each year, the police in Colorado Springs, Colorado, respond to 15,000 to
20,000 domestic violence calls and make about 5,000 arrests in a
metropolitan area of approximately 500,000 people. To shoulder the
caseload, the city created DVERT, the Domestic Violence Enhanced
Response Team. Because we are trying to take a "seamless systems"
approach to domestic violence, DVERT includes 21 people from different
disciplines working under the same roof. Among them are detectives,
police officers, prosecutors, caseworkers who deal with children, and
advocates who deal with domestic violence victims. One of our 22
partners, the University of Colorado, lends a new discipline--11 research
projects--to the collaboration.
DVERT currently is developing nine in-house research projects and
inviting representatives from other universities and research fields to join
the collaboration. While it is a challenge, pooling resources has made a
big difference in how we deal with the victims of domestic violence.
My first experience with research was in the mid- to late-1980s in
Colorado Springs with the Spousal Assault Replication Project (SARP),
which replicated the Minneapolis project. I served as law enforcement
liaison and had very little input in the project's design. Obtaining buy-in
from law enforcement officers was difficult because they did not
understand the project or its terminology. Discussions about
randomization, for example, which was more than a voice coming from
the communications center assigning a particular call and modality,
confused officers. As a result, an overall lack of sample cases temporarily
stopped the project in midstream. During the interim, approximately 500
police officers were trained in the project's goals. When the project
resumed, officer understanding was greater, and 1,666 cases were brought
into the sample. The training revealed errors we had made, both as an
agency and as designers of research.
DVERT recently received more than $1 million for its next funding cycle,
and the police department is evaluating its collaboration efforts,
specifically in the area of program development. Current programs
incorporate information from all disciplines, and researchers work out of
law enforcement and prosecutors' offices. We have set up databases to
help everyone involved handle domestic violence cases.
Open project development meetings invite staff involvement. Further,
each individual staff member is assigned to one research project as a
liaison to the principal investigator to share information and outcomes.
National Institute of Justice research funds are being used to establish a
database on stalking and to evaluate local Level 1 cases, which represent
the most dangerous perpetrators in the metropolitan area (the Colorado
Springs Police Department covers some smaller cities and unincorporated
areas). The department attributes low Level 1 recidivism rates to
perpetrator confinement, which sends a strong deterrent message--one that
is echoed throughout the system.
Additional arrests have been made in the area of civil orders as well,
including violations of restraining orders. Most recently, the department
has been holding perpetrators accountable through DNN or civil actions
on children. In such cases, judges have ordered, for example, that the
perpetrator may have no contact with his children or wife. Since those
violators are charged criminally, more arrests are being made in
previously unresearched areas.
-------------------------------
Summary of Response by Alana Bowman
Supervising Deputy City Attorney, Domestic Violence Prevention Unit,
Los Angeles City Attorney's Office
Among prosecutors, research reliability depends on collaboration because
it proves to them that investigators were familiar with both the subject
matter studied and prosecutors' everyday challenges. Without practitioner
input, research often lacks essential information.
The Los Angeles City Attorney's Office has had two previous research
project experiences. The first dates to the Law Enforcement
Administration Act grants of the 1970s, and the second stemmed from a
1985 Bureau of Justice Assistance grant. Each experience was something
of a "drop in," in that, after we received funding, a researcher dropped in
to see what was happening and then disappeared. Although interesting and
nerve-racking, little seemed to come of the experiences. Currently,
however, from the moment we receive a grant, we in the city attorney's
office work with researchers to develop the project.
In my more than 25 years of working on the issue of domestic violence--
including 13 years as a prosecutor and in conducting my own informal
research--I have frequently asked prosecutors if they use published
research studies. I usually receive one of two answers: Either they say, "If
it meets our criteria, then we definitely use it," or "We use the research if
we think it is reliable and relevant." The underlying message is that
prosecutors do not trust research studies. They look at them, critique them,
and then put them aside.
To change that, I offer these thoughts for making studies trustworthy.
First, consider the reality of prosecutors' offices. Understand their
everyday problems and goals, as well as the politics in their office--for
example, who is elected and where is that person in the election cycle?
What is the level of the prosecutor you are dealing with, and what political
power can he or she bring? Realize that statistics can lie and that
prosecutors can hide their win-loss records.
Second, clearly explain the methodology used. What is the number of
cases in the study? Is the sample large enough? Were only "yes" or "no"
offered as forced choices in the instrument? Is the percentage reported
based on a significantly large study group? In one study the total studied
was less than 50 people; the difference between one group and the other
was three people. That doesn't mean very much to presenters, but it didn't
matter to us if you have a final sample size of 50, when you begin with a
study of about 400 people, but at the end of the longitudinal study, you
only have 50 people with a difference in results of 26 people with one
result and 24 people with another result. This particular piece of
information, that at the end only 50 were studied, was contained in the last
2 pages of a 40-page report. When information of that nature is revealed,
it is difficult to trust the next two or three reports that come across our
desks.
Third, specifically define who or what is being studied. For example, is
domestic violence defined by the State statute, or is it defined by
researchers for the study? If the issue is child abuse, describe the injuries
in question--burns, slaps, broken bones, and so forth. Identification of the
perpetrator is also critical information to prosecutors.
Fourth, be open about both the race and social class of the researchers, as
well as of the class of subjects studied. These factors can produce deep,
personal presumptions about the group studied, and to ignore them may
cause prosecutors to conclude that the results are unreliable or irrelevant.
Along these same lines, provide context describing the cooperating
agencies. Is there a strong advocacy community? A strong police
presence? Are judges involved?
Fifth, clearly identify the essential elements of what worked and what did
not. If a procedure works for one group of crime victims but not another,
state this so that prosecutors are not just providing "blanket"
recommendations that may not be helpful to all victims. Include the
essential elements for success, such as the level of the staff necessary or
the need for computer tracking of cases or victims. Prosecutors need to
know whether to support arrest or not. They want to know, "Should I do
that? Will it work here?"
Research projects are strengthened by the checks and balances of
multiple-agency involvement. For example, the police department knows
how prosecutors could hide statistics in the prosecutor's office. Involving
the police department would mean they could explain how to discover
information the prosecutor might try to conceal.
Jeffrey Edleson's paper is a good road map for collaboration. Both
researchers and practitioners would benefit if uniform standards and a
research template were established for all research in domestic violence
prosecutions. This would allow any prosecutor to identify criteria he or
she is using and then quickly review and evaluate that specific research.
To improve overall quality, compensate the people involved in the study
for their time. This is one of the key incentives to keep people involved
and to maintain a reliable end sample size.
Also, respond to feedback. When a practitioner says something will not
work, it usually will not. I have heard more than once a story about a
researcher who tore up a research instrument after various shelter directors
she consulted with said the instrument was terrible. Practitioners now
want to work with that researcher because she listened to them. By
starting over with the evaluation instrument, she gained credibility with
the field.
Finally, I urge you to conduct research beyond just "what works," toward
a goal of perpetuating justice. As a prosecutor, I want to know more than
what makes an efficient prosecuting agency. I want to know how to stop
mangling people in the legal process and how to work toward a social
goal.
The year 2000 strategic challenge, developed by the National Institute of
Justice under Jeremy Travis, emphasizes this, urging research and practice
toward creating just communities--and understanding the nexus of crime
and the social context.
Summary of Response by Barbara J. Hart
Legal Director, Legal Office, Battered Women's Justice Project
When researchers and cooperating agencies consider themselves equal
partners in a project, collaborative research offers benefits beyond those of
traditional studies, including expanded definitions of methods and
outcomes, earlier insight into findings, and expanded subject pools.
A recent investigation by researchers Daniel Nagin and Laura Dugan may
provide a model for such work. From the outset, they involved
practitioners in their study of advocacy programs for battered women and
the programs' effect on domestic homicide rates. They first visited the
Women's Center and Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania
Coalition Against Domestic Violence to present their ideas and forge a
research partnership. Together, the parties spent a considerable amount of
time identifying the best evaluation techniques.
The Women's Center analyzed domestic violence policies and practices in
the Nation's 50 largest cities over the past 20 years. The Coalition studied
the evolution of civil protection order laws in these jurisdictions for the
same period. Nagin and Dugan examined data sources on firearms, the
status of women, and the socioeconomic and demographic profiles of the
selected communities. Information from all sources will combine to
address the question, "Does advocacy affect the domestic homicide rates
of women?"
This arrangement worked because the researchers acknowledged that they
were not experts on domestic violence or its laws and practices. They
looked instead to practitioners for this information--a situation quite
different from typical evaluation tactics. Researchers should approach the
advocacy community with genuine curiosity and a willingness to work
together. To ensure ongoing cooperation, they must keep open minds
about any investigation's design. The advocacy community is less
interested in finding out whether programs work than in knowing how it
can more effectively engage battered women, effect social change, and
improve individual and systemic outcomes. Well-designed collaborative
studies offer a number of benefits:
o Collaboration expands the definition of research. The Philadelphia
Women's Death Review is a team made up of representatives from the
medical examiner's office, police and probation departments, legal aid and
health care groups, the prosecutor's office, shelters, counseling agencies,
child protective services, public schools, and research institutions that
each year reviews all premature deaths of women in the city with an eye
to identifying links to domestic violence. By investigating the full context
of these deaths, the team hopes to identify precipitating factors and
potential points for intervention and prevention. Few would call this
research by the traditional definition, yet the results have immediate uses
to practitioners.
o Collaboration changes the research process. The Philadelphia project is
jointly sponsored by the District Attorney's Office, the Philadelphia
Health Management Corporation, and the medical examiner's office.
Participants furnish comprehensive data about victims on each month's list
of the prematurely deceased. This includes individuals' histories of
domestic violence, specific reasons the victims sought each agency's
services, agency interventions, victims' family contacts, agency service
outcomes, and other relevant information.
o Collaboration periodically provides policy briefings to field
professionals, allowing them to apply emerging findings. One finding was
that many of the Philadelphia women who died prematurely were
prostitutes. Evidence revealed that some were victims of both domestic
and other violence but that they were not well served by community
agencies. Though not surprising, these findings brought sharpened focus to
the problems faced by women living in abject poverty and made that
condition a clear risk marker. On the basis of this finding, providers began
asking how they could assist women living at the economic margin. Ideas
included providing information and services to women at needle-exchange
programs and taking legal assistance and advocacy into the community.
o Collaboration helps researchers understand practitioners' work.
Although they need not be experts, researchers need a fundamental
understanding of practitioner work to evaluate it. Advocacy, for example,
employs practices, philosophies, and goals very different from those of
victim assistance provided by government agencies. Because many
criminal justice researchers lack appreciation of the sharp differences
between case-based assistance offered by victim assistance specialists and
advocacy provided by domestic violence programs, they may approach
research in these different areas in uninformed ways. Collaboration fosters
informed investigation and analysis.
o Collaboration may expand the pool of human subjects as well as
individual privacy, therapeutic, and safety interests of victims. Tracking,
contacting, and communicating with batterers poses risks because many
batterers will blame their partners for research intrusions and may seek to
control their responses by threatening retaliation. Inappropriate
investigation and analysis--stemming from lack of researcher-practitioner
communication--may result in intervention strategies that compromise the
safety of battered women.
o Collaboration changes outcome measurement, as measures of success
expand and become more complex. The work of researchers Ed Gondolf
and Susan Keilitz, collaborating with advocates, investigated
quality-of-life standards for battered women--not merely batterer
recidivism, the extent of compliance with protection orders, or safety
during legal proceedings. Keilitz's protection order study found that,
although protection orders worked in reducing recidivism, women were
significantly less stable financially 6 months after protection orders were
entered. Outcomes need to focus on the autonomy, safety, well-being, and
restoration of battered women and their children, as well as to identify
whether batterers meet their financial obligations, give up involvement in
and control over the lives of battered women, and undertake responsible
parenting.
o Collaboration alters researchers' ideas about context. When constructing
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded study of batterers'
programs, Gondolf and various practitioners sought ways to look beyond
batterers' education and treatment programs to examine what bearing, if
any, context had on outcomes. Gondolf studied the demographics of each
program's location, shelter services, and criminal justice practices because
intervention programs operate within that context. In fact, without
evaluation of context, results will likely be misleading. Though it is
difficult to design research tools that capture context data, practitioners
with context knowledge are better able to identify whether internal
program design or external system design and practice require change.
o Collaboration limits research that jeopardizes victims. Research must
not create barriers between battered women and services and safety.
Recently, researchers at a local university seeking to examine the sexual
experiences of battered women placed significant political pressure on
battered women's programs. They sought to impose their investigation on
shelter residents despite advocates' concerns about the study's effect on
victims' willingness to seek services. Advocates feared the research would
shift residents' focus from strategic planning--protecting their children,
securing new housing, acquiring or retaining employment, and obtaining
protection orders--to an examination of their predators' sexual practices
and their own sexual histories. They feared that participation might appear
as a quid pro quo agreement for advocacy services--thus creating a barrier
to services and advocacy. Some programs concluded that sexual violence
research might be a postcrisis project to be pursued after implementation
of safety strategies.
Summary of Response by Lawrence Hauser
Judge, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Superior Court
Judges who choose not to take advantage of research for fear of
compromising their impartiality should realize that there is a fundamental
difference between educating an independent judiciary and influencing an
independent judiciary.
I am a judge. As such, my presence on this panel may be suspect to the
researcher audience. Yet you cannot leave the judges behind, despite
books such as Out of Order, which propose that the number one problem
in this country is not too much government, too little government,
overzealousness, or too many lawyers, but rather, judges. Unless judges
buy in and become an informed judiciary, research may slow to a
substantial degree.
I propose that most judges are competent, independent, and want to do the
right thing. They simply do not have the research knowledge necessary to
do a better job. Having this information will not diminish neutrality.
Rather, it facilitates sound, well-reasoned decisions.
Collaboration is not easy. Researchers must be willing to compromise,
examine old beliefs, and take some chances for partnerships to bear fruit.
We know intuitively that collaboration works. About 5 years ago, the first
intermediate sanctions team was established in Connecticut, which later
became the basis for 15 to 20 other protocols in the State. People with
different thoughts, beliefs, agendas, and "turf" issues developed a set of
protocols and a menu of options.
Also recently, without Federal funding, the greater Bridgeport area of six
communities, its citizens, health care providers, schools, family and child
service groups, courts, and police, joined to coordinate a community
response to domestic violence. The court subcommittee of that
collaborative effort produced a dedicated domestic violence docket, which
handles 98 percent of all felony and misdemeanor domestic violence cases
in the six-town area.
Researcher involvement occurred at different times in each of the above
collaborations. In the intermediate sanctions partnership, the researchers
did not join until the end of the project, making it more difficult to
analyze its results and progress. Researchers were part of the domestic
violence docket project from the beginning. They attended meetings every
2 weeks to exchange ideas and information. I believe the results of the
second collaboration will be superior to those of previous research
projects.
It may not be easy for these relationships to work; it may well be difficult.
The results you will gather, however, will be worth your efforts if
dedicated partnerships can be worked out between all the players.
-------------------------------
About the National Institute of Justice
The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a component of the Office of
Justice Programs, is the research agency of the U.S. Department of
Justice. Created by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of
1968, as amended, NIJ is authorized to support research, evaluation, and
demonstration programs, development of technology, and both national
and international information dissemination. Specific mandates of the Act
direct NIJ to:
o Sponsor special projects and research and development programs that
will improve and strengthen the criminal justice system and reduce or
prevent crime.
o Conduct national demonstration projects that employ innovative or
promising approaches for improving criminal justice.
o Develop new technologies to fight crime and improve criminal justice.
o Evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and identify
programs that promise to be successful if continued or repeated.
o Recommend actions that can be taken by Federal, State, and local
governments as well as by private organizations to improve criminal
justice.
o Carry out research on criminal behavior.
o Develop new methods of crime prevention and reduction of crime and
delinquency.
In recent years, NIJ has greatly expanded its initiatives, the result of the
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (the Crime
Act), partnerships with other Federal agencies and private foundations,
advances in technology, and a new international focus. Some examples of
these new initiatives:
o Exploring key issues in community policing, violence against women,
violence within the family, sentencing reforms, and specialized courts
such as drug courts.
o Developing dual-use technologies to support national defense and local
law enforcement needs.
o Establishing four regional National Law Enforcement and Corrections
Technology Centers and a Border Research and Technology Center.
o Strengthening NIJ's links with the international community through
participation in the United Nations network of criminological institutes,
the U.N. Criminal Justice Information Network, UNOJUST (United
Nations Online Justice Clearinghouse), and the NIJ International Center.
o Improving the online capability of NIJ's criminal justice information
clearinghouse.
Establishing the ADAM (Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring) program--
formerly the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program--to increase the
number of drug-testing sites and study drug-related crime.
The Institute Director establishes the Institutes objectives, guided by the
priorities of the Office of Justice Programs, the Department of Justice, and
the needs of the criminal justice field. The Institute actively solicits the
views of criminal justice professionals and researchers in the continuing
search for answers that inform public policymaking in crime and justice.
To find out more information about the National Institute of Justice,
please contact:
National Criminal Justice Reference Service
Box 6000
Rockville, MD 20849-6000
800-851-3420
e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org
To obtain an electronic version of this document, access the NIJ Web site
(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij).
If you have questions, call or e-mail NCJRS.