Sunday, October 16, 2016

Something from the past

Here is an e-mail exchange today, which was fun:
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Kim:
 
Thanks for your kind e-mail.  Some 30 years ago, I was a career employee of the Utah child welfare agency, serving in the state office with a variety of assignments for strategic planning, effectiveness evaluation, and management system development.  While a full-time employee, I also worked on my doctorate, which I completed in 1990.  Our agency was interested at that time in preventative family-based services in child welfare, and I found faculty at the Graduate School of Social Work with an interest in testing these same kinds of programs.  I became part of a research team under the direction of Mark Fraser and Peter Pecora which published several books and articles flowing out of this research.  (One of these two men would be the primary authors of most of the reports.)  I wrote my dissertation on a piece o f this research.  We did not have the luxury of using controlled samples in these studies, but utilized correlational techniques such as event history analysis to try to tease out contributory variables for program successes.  During that time, as a favor to a friend who operated a small private non-profit youth treatment agency, I did some evaluation work on their programs.   I noticed the potential to develop a controlled study as they were not able to serve all of the families referred to them for a home-based intervention, and this became the study to which you refer.
 
I retired at about that time and have not had the opportunity to pursue other similar studies since then.  My wife and I served a service mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and I spend my time in various service and family projects, but not this kind of research.
 
If I have left out any detail in which you are interested, get back to me.
 
Robert
 
 
 
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2016 9:13 AM
Subject: 2004 Article
 
Hi, Mr. Lewis,
 
I'm a doctoral student at Boston College, and I'm using your 2004 article, "The Effectiveness of Families First Services," in a class project.  I just wanted to drop you a line to tell you how much I loved this study.  Have you done any others?
 
Hope all is well.
 
Yours,
 
 
Kim

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