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Child and family Policy

Debbie Miller, Director

Engaged in:

• maintaining a Community Outreach Partnership Center to increase and enhance opportunities for community service and service learning
• working with the Jim Casey Youth Opportunity Initiative to improve outcomes for youth exiting foster care
• co-sponsoring an annual national family policy conference, Family Re-Union, moderated by Al & Tipper Gore
• working with the Annie E. Casey Foundation to engage state legislators and local elected officials in the Foundation's neighborhood transformation initiative
• working with the Mayor's Office of Children and Youth to build partnerships and collaborations to improve outcomes for children and youth
• working with Metro Council to increase and improve out of school time opportunities for school age children and youth
• educating parents, policy makers and child care providers about the importance of quality early childhood education through the Week of the Young Child
• working with the faith communities to better serve children and families

Center for Evaluation Research & Methodology

Mark W. Lipsey, Director

Currently studying:

• meta-analytic techniques for policy research
• risk and protective factors for intervention to reduce drug use and delinquency effectiveness of juvenile delinquency intervention programs
• innovations in dissemination of 'best practices' research to policy makers and practitioners
• effectiveness of intervention for adult criminal offenders
• effectiveness of early education curricula for improving school readiness
• evaluation of a middle school program for enhancing educational and career aspirations

Center for Health Policy

James F. Blumstein, Director

Currently studying:

• healthcare regulation and medical malpractice
• legal and institutional issues in TennCare
• evolving roles in hospital management and how the legal system affects or constrains the evolution of the healthcare marketplace
• federal fraud and abuse laws
• definition and measurement of health care inequality

Center for Psychotherapy Research Policy

Thomas F. Catron & Bahr Weiss, Co-Directors

(Tom Catron is on-leave until 2007)

Currently studying:

• adaptation of clinic-based treatments for use in the public school system
• evaluation of child psychotherapy under naturalistic conditions
• determining the effective components of community-based mental health treatments
• development of methods for maximizing the goodness-of-fit between different forms of treatment and different forms of psychopathology
• development of innovative publicly-funded mental health treatments for under-served populations
• adaptation of mental health treatments for Southeast Asian refugee children

Center for State and Local Policy

Dan Cornfield, Acting Director

Engaged in:

• 2002-03 Immigrant Community Assessment of Nashville, Tennessee
• examining links between immigrant advocates and labor unions in Nashville
• studying immigrant visual and performing artists in Nashville
• advising advocates, service providers, and policymakers on social services for Nashville immigrants
• undergraduate sociology seminar on social problems and social change

Center for U.S.-Japan Studies & Cooperation

James E. Auer, Director

Currently studying:

• U.S.-Japan political, economic, trade, technology, and defense relations
• comparative approaches to domestic policy design in technology, the environment, and intellectual property

Also engaged in:

• sponsoring research activities of Japanese government officials and private sector scholar.