TOPICS OF INTEREST

COSMOS’s work is dominated by both quantitative and qualitative research. COSMOS also provides technical assistance, develops specialized databases, and designs and implements research-based information systems. In carrying out this work, COSMOS uses and contributes to the development of state-of-the-art tools. In research, such tools may involve the use of case studies, hierarchical linear models, surveys, or techniques related to empowerment evaluation. In technical assistance, such tools may involve video-conferencing, electronic polling at conferences, and fully automated databases for maintaining client information.

Typically, COSMOS’s work has fallen within five major areas. In their totality, the five reflect the major aspects of federal-local-private initiatives aimed at improving local residents’ everyday lives.

Healthy People

COSMOS supports a wide array of investigations and projects dealing with public health, especially health promotion and substance abuse prevention, but also focusing more broadly on managed care, community health planning, and community health systems. A common theme is the improvement of local public health systems through newly formed government, private, and grassroots community coalitions. COSMOS’s efforts have varied from providing medical records, monitoring, and data entry support for clinical trials; to surveys of mental health services; to the evaluation of major community partnership programs in substance abuse prevention; to the identification of exemplary prevention policies in managed care systems. As another example, a recent project is using a stakeholder driven process to develop a national evaluation strategy for prevention research centers housed in schools of public health and medicine.

Education and Informal Education

COSMOS has had a longstanding involvement in evaluating or assisting education systems, both at the K-12 and postsecondary levels. For K-12, the emphasis has been on programs dealing with whole school reform and improving student achievement. For postsecondary, the investigations have included programs in undergraduate as well as graduate education. Several current projects are evaluating initiatives in K-12, science, mathematics, and technology education. The evaluations attend to student performance outcomes and also the education processes that might have produced these outcomes. Other projects have assessed informal science programs delivered through science museums as well as the mass media. Yet another recent study is focusing on the work of successful urban superintendents.

Violence, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice

COSMOS also has developed a broad expertise over violence and crime prevention and intervention. Studies and evaluations cover such topics as: response to terrorist activities; providing protective services to U.S. ports; community-based violence prevention; innovative policing practices; community-police collaborations; and probation initiatives to reduce recidivism. COSMOS’s work has included technical assistance to service providers at both state and local levels. The work includes the evaluation of efforts aimed at preventing youth gang-related violence, as well as programs trying to prevent the use of guns by youths. Several studies also have dealt with domestic violence, including measurement of coercive control in intimate relationships, the use of protection orders by battered immigrant women, and rural communities prevention and intervention efforts to combat intimate partner violence.

Community Development and State and Local Economic Development

Community development usually calls for residents’ participation in collective efforts to attain such objectives as improving local services, increasing local economic development and entrepreneurism, increasing job opportunities, and improving neighborhood and public safety. COSMOS’s work typically focuses on evaluating or assisting these local efforts. The efforts commonly involve the development of comprehensive approaches to community development, making evaluation or assistance more difficult and challenging. For instance, COSMOS has been evaluating community partnerships funded as part of a single state’s initiative to improve early childhood services in multiple communities; part of the evaluation role also is to assist the partnerships in collecting the needed data.

Management, Technology, and Communications

COSMOS uses its analytic and technical assistance work to improve management, technology, and communication policies and practices. Projects have ranged from evaluating state initiatives to stimulate technology-related economic development to studying the implementation of paperless electronic systems for universities’ submissions of proposals to federal agencies; to case studies of management transformations in small- and medium-sized manufacturing firms; to the study of the use of specific Web sites. Major goals of COSMOS’s work are to identify promising policies and practices that will produce economically viable technological systems that also are user-friendly and self-improving.