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The Research and Evaluation staff provides the facts and scientific information that form the base of our policy development and advocacy for many of our programs. Our staff is professionally trained in research methods and can provide technical assistance such as program evaluation, surveys, or summary reports to your organization.

Research is collected from the community level. For instance, during the Spring 2004 semester, CAHS staff worked with four students from Wesleyan University on a project to determine the self-sufficiency levels for 70 different family types based on the costs of living in Middletown. The students: Linden McEntire, Terence Poon, Rachel Curtin, and Margaret Garrett were part of Professor Rob Rosenthal’s Community Research Seminar class, and devoted the entire semester to the study. The study was based on the statewide Self-Sufficiency Standard developed by Diana Pearce, and commissioned by the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. The same formulas and assumptions were applied in developing the Middletown Standard as were used in the statewide version, which divides the state into regions. The Self-Sufficiency Standard is a measure of the real costs associated with living in a given city or town.

In other areas, CAHS is working with the Connecticut Department of Public Health on their Child Health Access Project (CHAP). CHAP encompasses a series of activities designed to increase access to health care for mothers and their children. This year, CAHS is completing the third phase of a research project on adolescent health. CAHS will use the findings from its recent adolescent focus groups and surveys, a review of the current literature, and a series of new focus groups with providers and youth to clarify the reasons why many Connecticut adolescents are not making use of the preventative health services that are currently available to them. CAHS will use the information culled to develop a tool kit for providers of adolescent care. The tool kit will be developed from the perspective of both health providers and potential clients, and will be used to promote more “user- friendly” practices in health care delivery to adolescents. CAHS will be holding a female adolescent focus group to further investigate the factors that cause a teen to detour from the patterns of what they believe is the “norm for the timing of life events.” This will build upon the findings of an adolescent focus group survey administered last year to pregnant and parenting teenage women that explored attitudes toward reproductive health and acculturation.

Over the next few months, CAHS will be collecting information from parents and providers who have received assistance and/or training from CPAC. The Connecticut Parent Advocacy Center (CPAC) is a statewide non-profit entity that provides families with information and support to improve outcomes for children with disabilities. The research will be accomplished through a series of focus groups and a statewide survey. The results of this process will help CPAC to understand which aspects of the services they provide are most useful and how they may maximize the trainingand services they provide. In addition, CPAC hopes to use the information to increase utilization of their centers by populations that are not currently accessing them.

CAHS has been the statewide leader in promoting Family Economic Security (FES) based on financial literacy. The Hartford edition of our recent publication, Your Family's Money - Simple Ways to Build a Better Future - received such overwhelmingly positive feedback that we have since received the support needed to produce version for New Haven, Norwich/New London and Bridgeport. The guides are written at a 6th grade level and produced in both English and Spanish and cover topics including how to budget, benefits of traditional banking, saving for education, building and repairing credit, and others.

CAHS is planning to produce a FES provider guide to accompany Your Family's Money so that service providers can help their clients become economically self-sufficient. The provider guide will contain more sophisticated content, and will contain additional information and resources. CAHS would also like to produce a second addition of Your Family's Money that will contain FES information on new topics including identify theft, home equity loans, co-signing loans, debt consolidation, ATM and debit cards, etc. These additional topics of interest were identified through community based focus groups of low-income consumers.

This past June, CAHS held a conference titled It Takes More than a Job: Tools to Promote Family Economic Success. The conference was very well attended and we look forward to conducting similar activities in the upcoming year. According to evaluations, participants felt enthusiastically that we had met our goals and were ready to work with us to move the state's FES agenda forward.

CAHS will continue to publish FES policy briefs, letters to policymakers, and other public education materials to move policy forward and to make our proposals more visible. Our work will also include documented strategies, evaluation tools and implementation manuals, which could be used for replication purposes. Through research and evaluation, CAHS can continue to work in recognizing vital needs in our community and use this information for education, advocacy and policy change.

Connecticut Association for Human Services | 110 Bartholomew Ave, Suite 4030 | Hartford CT 06106-2201
Email: info@cahs.org | (860) 951-2212 | www.cahs.org