The proposed work builds on Raudenbush and Bloom’s prior strategies for building research capacity, and will include a three-day workshop entitled, “Learning from Variation in Program Effects.” Similar to prior years, Raudenbush and Bloom will develop new analytic techniques, produce software to assist researchers in applying those innovations, provide individualized consultation to researchers and research organizations, and disseminate their work. These advances will be shared with other methodologists at the aforementioned workshop, which this supplement is also funding. In addition, Raudenbush and Bloom will continue to: (1) develop new methods and software for understanding the reliability of measures; (2) enhance measures for assessing whether the impact of an intervention on youth is due to its effect on youth settings, including the development of a user-friendly statistical tool for researchers; and (3) continue developing a framework for studying whether variation in intervention effects can be explained by characteristics of the intervention, its implementation, its target population, and its context. Raudenbush and Bloom will also disseminate papers on these innovations, lead grantee meetings, provide ongoing consultation for grantees, and continue their collaboration with meta-analysts pursuing similar investigations.
Raudenbush and Bloom will continue to develop the field’s ability to conduct more rigorous and cost-effective intervention and measurement studies. They will also advance methods for determining whether intervention impacts on youth operate through their effects on youth settings and how intervention impacts vary across places, organizations, and groups of youth.
