The Center for Public Health Evaluation and Research

Our Approach: Evaluation and research staff utilize scientific methods for conducting program evaluations, measuring outcomes, and tracking performance measures.

How We Help Your Agency

Our staff have years of experience and a broad range of skills to assist your organization and projects with community-based, culturally competent evaluation, research, performance measurement, and program improvement strategies.

We work with federal, state, and local government, private nonprofit and for-profit organizations to measure, report and improve outcomes of programs of all kinds across the country. We have particularly strong expertise with programs that serve children and families, although we have experience with evaluations in other fields including community and behavioral health, community development, and health disparities.

If you have project or program that you would like to discuss, please contact our Research Director, Dr. Brad Richardson at brad-richardson@uiowa.edu or any of our research staff.

The Center for Public Health Evaluation and Research, a project of the National Resource Center for Family Centered Practice at The University of Iowa School of Social Work, provides evaluation and research expertise to human service agencies and organizations throughout the nation.

Methods and Approach

The Center for Public Health Evaluation and Research (TCER) is committed to assisting agencies and organizations operating across the health and human services spectrum in performing to their full potential.  We accomplish this by engaging in open dialog and shared decision-making with all  of our clients and utilizing the inter-disciplinary skills and expertise of our staff to cater evaluation and research plans to client needs.
 
All staff have completed University of Iowa Institutional Review Board (IRB) training for human subjects protections which conforms to federal requirements and operate under the American Evaluation Association's Guiding Principles.

Areas of Expertise

Our multidisciplinary approach allows us to work with an array of projects and topic areas. We employ a culturally sensitive approach which allows us to understand the strengths and resilience of diverse projects and communities. 

News

UI Center Staff Speak at the Public Health Conference of Iowa

Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Center Director Brad Richardson, Ph.D., and Assistant Research Scientist Sherry Gao, Ph.D. of the Consortium for Substance Abuse Research and Evaluation, presented at the 2024 Public Health Conference of Iowa, March 26-27 in Des Moines. Topics included "Using measures of community collaboration to strengthen public health interventions" and "Improving healthy equity through more accurate assessments of disparities."
Sherry Gao presentation at American Evaluation Association

Dr. Gao presented at AEA 2023 conference

Monday, March 18, 2024
NRC Assistant Research Scientist Sherry Gao, PhD, presented research findings at the 2023 American Evaluation Association (AEA) annual meeting on Oct 11, 2023. Her presentation was entitled “Examining the Construct Validity of the VI-SPDAT (Version 3) Instrument: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis.”

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