An Enhanced Mentoring Model’s Impact on Youth in Boys and Girls Clubs

Although federal funding has been provided to add mentoring to youth development programs for decades, we still lack knowledge about the impacts of mentoring on youth outcomes. This research seeks to fill a gap by documenting youth outcomes from an enhanced mentoring approach for urban Boys and Girls Clubs (BGC) in the Southeastern United States delivered by paid staff who serve as mentors through group activities and 1:1 interactions with youth. We perform logistic regressions of secondary data from a cohort of BGCs to understand the relationships between enhanced mentoring and youth outcomes related to program retention, behaviors, and academics. We find the presented approach has a significant relationship with retention with those mentored being 1.92 times more likely to return the following program year. Mentored youth also experienced higher expectations from staff and were less likely to be involved in a physical fight with peers

Understanding Factors that Influence Referral-making and Referral Uptake within Early Head Start

The 2018 Baby FACES presents a renewed chance to reveal the inner workings of EHS programs, gain insights into the experiences of families and staff, and develop policy, program and funding responses to address best practices and areas of need. The research team at Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) will conduct secondary data analysis of the Baby FACES 2018 data set in order to support ACF in furthering its research and programmatic goals and inform the broader field of early care and education (ECE). The study focuses on referral-making processes and referral connections among children and families who are at-risk within EHS programs. This study seeks to understand which EHS families are being referred to services based on level and type of risk, including demographic and other risk-related indicators (e.g. absent parent, parent with substance use issue). This study will examine the level of need and how it aligns with the rates of referral and referral connection. Additionally, GHPC will conduct novel research on the following variables that may moderate referral-making and referral uptake: Urbanicity of the EHS program, quality of staff relationships with families, and the types of training staff have received. GHPC will employ a range of data methods to develop a family level risk index, analyze descriptive statistics, explore variables through regression models, and test moderating factors

Musculoskeletal pain stakeholder engagement and partnership development: determining patient-centered research priorities

BACKGROUND: Musculoskeletal (MSK) pain is a global public health problem with increased societal burden. Increased attention has focused toward patient and other stakeholder perspectives when determining future MSK pain research priorities, however infrastructure and capacity building within the community are needed for individuals and organizations to participate in patient-centered outcomes research. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe our collaborative experiences with several MSK pain stakeholders and processes to identify a top priority research topic. METHODS: Lunch meetings and formalized workshops were used to develop infrastructure for engaging patients and other stakeholders with early capacity building for partners to identify MSK pain research ideas based on their personal experiences. Additional capacity building and engagement through literature searching further prepared partners to contribute informed decisions about MSK pain research topics and subsequent selection of an important research question. RESULTS: Several key deliverables (e.g., Governance Document, Communication Plan) were developed and completed over the course of this project to provide partnership structure. Other key deliverables included a list of preliminary comparative effectiveness research ideas ( = 8) and selection of shared decision making for MSK pain as the top priority research topic with patient partners identifying pain self-efficacy as an important outcome domain. CONCLUSIONS: Our patient partners provided the catalyst for identifying shared decision making as a high priority research topic based on a wide spectrum of stakeholder perspectives and unique experiences. Patient partners were primarily identified using a single rehabilitation health system and clinician partners were heavily weighted by physical therapists which may have introduced selection bias