how can research help your family and the community

• About the Project

• Evidence-Based Strategies for Supporting and Enhancing Family Engagement

Priscilla Little

• Read more about Priscilla Little

Family engagement should be a vital component of any strategy to expand learning opportunities for children and youth after school and during the summertime—whether at the organizational, community, state, or national level. Under current federal guidelines for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative, “family engagement” takes the form of activities to support parental involvement and family literacy. All centers are required to track and report the number of family members who participate as part of the annual Profile and Performance Information Collection System (PPICS). Consistently those data indicate that the majority of centers do, indeed, provide these important activities for families.


[21st Century Community Learning Centers] are supporting some of the most economically needy families in the country.

In 2010 alone, 9,139 centers (approximately 85% of all centers funded) served over 250,000 family members; the average adult attendance at adult activities was almost 28 family members. Further, data indicate that of the centers funded in 2010, over 60% served students eligible for free and reduced lunch, indicating that these centers are supporting some of the most economically needy families in the country. Summary data from the past 5 years of reporting indicate that the centers have cumulatively served over one million family members, with the average adult attendance per center rising each year. 1

Figure 1. 21st Century Community Learning Centers adult family member participation, 2006–2010.


Despite impressive numbers of families served, however, many 21st Century Community Learning Centers and other afterschool and summer programs struggle with more fully engaging families. This article presents six research-derived strategies that afterschool programs can and do use to engage families. A set of additional resources for educators and program managers is also included, along with examples drawn from several programs that have experienced noteworthy success in engaging families.


What can afterschool and summer learning programs including 21st Century Community Learning Centers do to support and improve family engagement? The following are six research-based strategies that 21st Century Community Learning Centers and other similar programs can use to improve their family engagement efforts (Bouffard, Westmoreland, O’Carroll & Little, 2011; Little, 2011). 


Frequent and positive communication with family members is critical to effective family engagement.

• Have adequate and welcoming space to engage families. Helping families feel welcome is an important first step on the road to building trusting relationships with families. 21st Century Community Learning Centers and other similar afterschool and summer programs can help families feel welcome by establishing a “family corner” in which family members can find resources about the program and services in the community. They can also make sure the signage at the center is welcoming and accessible in the languages spoken by the families served.

• Establish policies and procedures to promote family engagement. To ensure that family engagement is a priority, afterschool and summer programs should include a section on family engagement in their operations manuals, laying out their strategies for engaging families; they should also consider including family engagement as part of their program quality standards. At minimum, this should include conducting at least one family open house per year. Many programs also have created a Family Handbook that helps family members understand the goals and purposes of the center. 

• Communicate and build trusting relationships. Frequent and positive communication with family members is critical to effective family engagement. This means treating family members with respect; asking them about their own lives and interests, as well as those of the students in the program; and ensuring that interactions with family members are not solely in response to negative student behaviors or performance. Some programs use a communications log to monitor the frequency and nature of communications with family members.

• Be intentional about staff hiring and training to promote effective staff-family interactions. At the heart of quality afterschool programs are the staff who run them. Core components of effective staff-family interactions include hiring staff who reflect the demographics of the families served and who are trained in respect for cultural differences, including an examination of their own biases. Once hired, it is important to provide ongoing training and support to ensure that family engagement is part of a staff member’s daily duties. In addition to external training, programs can set aside a time at staff meetings to reflect on and improve their family engagement strategies.

• Connect families to each other, to the program staff, to schools, and to other community institutions. Afterschool and summer programs can play a vital role in facilitating connections, both within the program to other families and outside the program to schools and other community institutions. This role is emerging as particularly important for 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which have the opportunity to support a more holistic approach to education—one that requires afterschool programs, schools, and families to partner to provide expanded opportunities for learning throughout a longer learning day and across the entire calendar year.

• Help support families and their basic needs. Support for families and their basic needs runs the gamut from providing access to community resources to hosting forums and discussion nights to address topics of concern to families to providing training on leadership and advocacy. At minimum, afterschool programs need to help families overcome logistical challenges, such as transportation, that may affect their children’s participation. Many programs have community school partnerships. These partnerships can be enhanced in order to provide families with information about community resources to address particular social service needs.


While each of these strategies can serve to engage families, some research indicates that it is the constellation of many strategies that may best support participants. In a recent study of engaging older youth in afterschool, summer, and other out-of-school-time programs researchers found that programs for older youth that were successful in retaining at least 50% of the participants for 12 months or more utilized, on average, eight different family engagement strategies (Deschenes et al., 2010). 


Also from the research we know that engaging families is a win-win for programs, families, and afterschool and summer learning program participants. Moving forward, as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative and other efforts to expand learning beyond the school day continue to grow, it is imperative that the spotlight on family engagement, so evident in the 21st Century Community Learning Centers initiative, continues to shine throughout the expanded learning movement.


Find Out What Families Think and Need


New Settlement’s afterschool program at CES 64 in the Bronx decided that parent focus groups would be a good way to elicit information and initiate a strong platform for parent decision making in the afterschool program. To attract participants, flyers in Spanish and English were posted around the school and community. When the response was minimal, the site coordinator realized that this was not reaching her families. Since many parents had a history of feeling unwelcome, she had to take a different approach. She began direct outreach with a few parents, who in turn, gave her the names of others who may want to participate. She spoke to them individually, explaining the mission of her program and the need for parental input. In the end, 15 parents signed on to participate in the focus group sessions (The After School Corporation, 2006).


Case Management to Support Families’ Basic Needs


The 21st Century Community Learning Centers funds a Boys and Girls Club in Buffalo, New York, that recognizes the critical role it can play in helping its participants attend the program and school healthy and ready to learn by supporting families’ basic needs. It has created a full-time, salaried staff position at each clubhouse to help families deal with social issues, providing triage, case management, and referral services. It has also leveraged other resources to build an on-site kitchen that provides free meals and snacks to the program participants as well as deliberately cooks a surplus of meals and offers them to caretakers in “to go” boxes when they come to pick up their children (Manhattan Strategy Group, 2011).

For More Information 


Family Engagement in Afterschool Programs Resources


Several research-based toolkits and resources have been developed to help educators both in schools and in afterschool programs work more effectively with families. 


• Family Engagement in After School Inventory 
 Developed for 21st Century Community Learning Centers in Texas, this research-based inventory can be used as a self-assessment tool to help programs gauge their current and future capacities to engage families. (see Appendix 11)

• Focus on Families: How to Build and Support Family-Centered 
Practices in After School 
 A joint publication of United Way of Massachusetts Bay, Harvard Family Research Project, and BOSTNet, this resource provides four overarching strategies that programs can implement to engage families.

• BOSTNet Engaging Families in Out-of-School Time Tool Kit 
 The Engaging Families Toolkit is aimed at afterschool programs and provides templates for assessing family engagement practices, developing an action plan, and designing a family engagement program.
• Increasing Family and Parent Engagement in After-School 
 In this document TASC provides a guide for engaging parents in afterschool programs. TASC explains the importance of engaging families, offers advice and materials for effective outreach to parents, and highlights examples of successful family engagement methods.

• Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships 
 This comprehensive family engagement resource examines, among other things, how to know whether a school or afterschool program is really open to partnerships and how to develop trusting relationships with families.

• For two examples of this in action see www.bigthought.org/BigThought/SubNavPages/ThrivingMinds and www.citizenschools.org . ↩

References


After School Corporation. (2006). Increasing parent and family engagement after school . Retrieved from http://www.tascorp.org/content/document/detail/1455/ 


Bouffard, S., Westmoreland, H., O’Carroll, K., & Little, P. (2011). Engaging families in out-of-school time programs. In H. Kreider & H. Westmoreland (Eds.), Promising practices for engaging families in out-of-school time (pp. 3–19). Charlotte, NC: Information Age.


Deschenes, S. N., Arbreton, A., Little, P. L., Herrera, C., Grossman, J. B., & Weiss, H. B. (with Lee, D.). (2010). Engaging older youth: Program and city-level strategies to support sustained participation in out-of-school time . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Family Research Project.


Little, P. (2011). Family engagement needs inventory . San Antonio, TX: Edvance Research.


Manhattan Strategy Group. (2011). High school promising practices project for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program: Final report, addendum 2 . Washington, DC: US Department of Education.

About the Compendium

• Introduction
• I. A Focus on Student Success
• II. Expanding Skills and Horizons
• III. Recent Evidence of Impact
• IV. The Power of Community-School Partnerships in Expanding Learning
• Building Powerful Partnerships With Parents and Communities: Integrating 21st Century Community Learning Centers With Education Change and Reform
• Family Involvement as a Critical Element of Quality Expanded Learning Opportunities
• Effective Strategies for Engaging Parents: Real-Life Experiences that Make a Difference
• Engaging Families in Afterschool and Summer Learning Programs for Middle School Youth
• Family Involvement in Expanded Learning Programs for High School Students
• VI. A Growing Nationwide Infrastructure for Quality, Expansion and Partnerships
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• Share the Compendium

The Importance of Cultivating Community

Why we need each other..

Posted August 20, 2021 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• Living in a community promotes our health and well-being.
• Our minds are relational and affected by the quality of our social connections.
• Community is built through acts of intentionality, vulnerability, and creativity.

Our relationships, more than anything else, set the stage for our health, happiness , and well-being. Research indicates that the quality of our social relationships affects a range of health outcomes, such as our mental health, physical health, and mortality risk (Umberson & Montez, 2010). These relational effects start in early childhood and lead to cascading effects throughout life, which can either positively or negatively impact our health and development.

We are relational beings in nature, and when we’re isolated or detached from a community, our health and mental health can quickly take a toll. Life is hard enough on its own. We’re not meant to go about it alone.

Research within the field of interpersonal neurobiology sheds light on our biological need for community. Thanks to the work of Dan Siegel and others, we learn the degree to which our minds themselves are both embodied and relational . In other words, what we experience in our minds is highly influenced by our relationships and shared connections with others. Our network of social supports serves as the most profound predictor of our health and well-being.

In other words, our diet , how often we journal, or the number of daily positive affirmations we repeat isn't nearly as important as the community we surround ourselves in. The social connections we have (or don’t have) can literally shape the physical structure and development of our brains, leading to integrated or disintegrated mental states. As Siegel notes in Aware , “Relationships are not icing on the cake; they are the cake. In fact, they are the main course as well as the dessert."

Here are some tips on ways to cultivate a community:

In order to benefit from a community, we have to be intentional about creating and maintaining one. This includes all of us introverts , too. For even we need regular social interaction with others. This means stepping out and starting new conversations, joining a new group, going out to lunch with co-workers, or re-connecting with old acquaintances. Although COVID-19 precautions can make this challenging, we can still further our connections virtually.

One of the best ways to do this, it seems, is through the phone. According to a study with the University of Texas at Austin, phone calls produced feelings of connectedness between two people, more so than emails or texts. Try calling an old friend or family member who lives far away. Our community doesn't have physical limits; distance doesn't need to separate us.

Embrace vulnerability.

In addition, the quality of our relationships often depends on how willing we are to be vulnerable with others and the degree to which we can respect others' vulnerabilities. According to Brene Brown, vulnerability refers to the feeling we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, or emotional exposure. And genuine, authentic friendships and relationships often require these emotional risks.

If we want to experience deeper relationships and shared connections with others, we have to be willing to share our struggles, hopes, and needs with those we come to know and trust. The vulnerability arises when we let our most authentic selves be truly seen and known by others, which is both the antidote to shame and bedrock for trust and connection.

Take the small steps.

Building a community doesn't mean we have to befriend every new person we see or fill up all our weekends with social encounters. A sense of community can be nurtured by taking small steps, like starting a conversation with your neighbor, checking in on a new co-worker, or stopping to say "hi" to a custodian. Building a sense of community starts with small, intentional acts of kindness and acknowledgment.

With feelings of isolation and mental health problems on the rise, now, more than ever, it's important to be intentional about connecting with our community. If indeed our relationships serve as the foundation for our health, happiness, and well-being, they deserve the time, energy, creativity , and sacrifice needed to strengthen and maintain them.

Umberson, D., & Montez, J. K. (2010). Social relationships and health: a flashpoint for health policy. Journal of health and social behavior, 51 Suppl(Suppl), S54–S66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146510383501

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Positive Family and Community Relationships

What are they.

Researchers have found that the key to making the family-community-school relationship a success is by considering it a partnership of equals . In other words, educators and families from all backgrounds are seen and valued as experts in a child’s education. And community members are viewed as helpful contributors and supporters of schools.

This partnership is built on shared values and emphasizes the strengths that all stakeholders bring to the table. The trust and respect that is fostered helps to cultivate a sense of belonging in the school community among students and their families, which in turn creates a caring school climate.

A school dedicated to building strong partnerships with families and communities asks families at every parent-teacher conference about their expectations for their child’s education. In addition, they honor the cultural backgrounds of families through potluck dinners, whole school celebrations, and by providing opportunities for families to share their stories about their own educational experiences with teachers, students, and the whole school community. Schools welcome community organizations to these events and invite them to participate and share their knowledge and resources about things like after-school programs, arts and athletic events, and volunteering opportunities.

Positive school-family partnerships can also help cultivate students’ social and emotional well-being through methods that build relationships and through practical hands-on ways for families to become involved in their child’s education.

Relationally, schools can build strong partnerships with parents through two-way communication, by collaborating on what’s best for each student, and cultivating positive relationships between teachers and parents.

A middle school encourages school-family relationships by asking parents at the beginning of the year for their preferred method of communication, e.g., text, email, phone, paper. Teachers then use those preferences to create personal and classroom protocols for communicating with parents.

Practically, offering families methods for reinforcing social and emotional skills at home and suggesting ways for caregivers to partner with teachers can improve students’ well-being.

An elementary school that is interested in adopting an SEL program forms a committee that includes family members of students from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and they provide input on the relevance and/or cultural responsiveness of particular SEL skills. After choosing a curriculum, the school regularly texts or emails SEL tips to families so that they may reinforce the SEL skills at home. Schools also invite all families to give feedback to the teachers about the effectiveness of the skill and the relevance to their families’ background.

Schools can also engage community-based organizations such as businesses, colleges, religious organizations, libraries, and social agencies, to offer programs that develop students’ strengths and social-emotional skills.

To cultivate students’ civic engagement, a high school partners with local businesses, the city council, and libraries to create opportunities for students to get more involved in their communities. During students’ advisory meetings every week, they discuss the partnership challenges that come up for them and learn valuable social and emotional skills to help them handle these challenges.

Why Are They Important?

It takes a village to raise a child, and science is proving this. Here are a few findings:

Students do better in school when their families are involved in their education.

• Students whose families participate in their education have higher levels of attendance, homework completion, academic outcomes , and graduation rates .
• Students’ attitudes towards school , self-esteem, and behavior all improve when their families participate in their education.
• When schools suggest practical ways that families can support their children’s learning at home, students do better.
• Families from all cultural backgrounds, education, and income levels can positively influence student success.

Family-school partnerships improve students’ well-being.

• A meta-analysis of 117 studies found that when families are invited to participate and partner with schools in their children’s education, students’ mental health and social-emotional outcomes improve.

Family-community-school partnerships that focus on building relationships, especially with diverse families, create the conditions that support student achievement.

• School factors that cultivate these strong relationships include a welcoming attitude that encourages involvement and a focus on the specific needs of families and the community.
• Effective partnerships are strengths-based and power is shared among all stakeholders.

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The Case for Strong Family and Community Engagement in Schools

• Posted March 21, 2023
• By Elizabeth M. Ross
• Families and Community
• K-12 School Leadership

About 50 years of research has revealed the striking benefits of schools actively partnering with families to improve their children’s learning. For some educators though, it was not until COVID-19 blew the doors off their schools and the walls off their classrooms that the penny dropped, as Sonja Santelises, CEO the Baltimore public schools and Harvard Graduate School of Education alum, described in Education Week that first bleak winter of the pandemic.

“During the pandemic, educators realized that families knew a lot more about teaching and learning than they had given them credit for,” especially when it came to understanding the needs of their own children, explained Karen Mapp , a senior lecturer at HGSE. She recently shared some of Santelises’ insights and many of her own during a virtual event about effective family and community engagement, hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s EdRedesign Lab . “Now, a lot of educators want to know more about how to engage families because of the lessons that they learned during COVID,” Mapp added.

Mapp, a renowned family engagement specialist who said she has encountered a fair share of resistance to her ideas over the years, makes a strong case for them in the new book Everyone Wins! The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships & Implications for Practice . She and co-authors Anne Henderson, Stephany Cuevas, Martha Franco, and Suzanna Ewert dive into the latest research and drill down on the same question that senior citizen Clara Peller asked in the infamous 1984 Wendy’s commercial, as Mapp recalled with a chuckle, “Where’s the beef?” In other words, for any remaining skeptics, who benefits from effective family-school-community partnerships and what is the return on their investment?

As the title of Mapp’s book suggests, the answer is everyone:

• Students who enjoy higher grades, better engagement and attendance at school, greater self-esteem, and higher rates of graduation and college/ post-secondary enrollment.
• Educators who have increased job satisfaction, greater success in motivating and engaging with students from different backgrounds, more support from families, and an improved mindset about students and families.
• Families that enjoy stronger relationships with their children, better rapport with educators, and that can navigate their school systems, advocate for their children, and feel less isolated.
• Schools because of improved staff morale and school climate, greater retention of teachers, and more support from the broader community.
• School districts and communities , which become better places to live and raise children in, have students with fewer suspensions and high-risk behaviors, greater participation in afterschool programs, and expanded family and youth involvement in decision-making.

"This is love-work, [you must] love fully the families and the children and communities you serve."

Mapp, a former deputy superintendent for family and community engagement in the Boston Public Schools, shared the following strategies for putting effective partnership into practice:

•    Successful family engagement requires resources, infrastructure, and leadership.

Parent and community ties need to be an essential ingredient, not an add-on. “It’s real when I see it on your budget sheets,” Mapp explained in the webinar. Collaborate with your community to tap into outside resources as well.

•    Educators need to be intentional about building relationships based on mutual respect and trust.

Schools have not valued all families, especially those in historically underserved communities that have experienced “generational disrespect.” Listen to all parents and offer opportunities to them for leadership. Efforts should focus on students’ learning and development. Effective family engagement is never weaponized.

•    Educators must be trained and supported to work with families from all backgrounds.

“A lot of unlearning has to happen around family and community engagement,” according to Mapp who said some educators have adopted “bad and ineffective strategies” shaped by systemic racism. Context matters and engagement initiatives need to be designed to work at the local level. Home visits may not be appropriate in some communities, for example.

•    Begin reaching out to families when children are young.

Help families navigate the school system from the beginning and continue to engage with them up to college and career. Don’t forget middle and high school parents who need help supporting their students as well, albeit in different ways than younger children.

•    Communicate clearly and consistently.

Messages need to be accessible to everyone, including families who speak different languages.

•    Don’t forget equity.

Educators should be sensitive about the realities of busy family life, including parents’ work demands and childcare concerns. Immigrant families can also face unique challenges.

•    Show some love.

Student-centered schools focus on what is best for the children and the community, not just the educators. “This is love-work,” explained Mapp. You must “love fully the families and the children and communities you serve.”

Additional resources:

• The Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships
• A Family Engagement Framework for All, Usable Knowledge
• Supporting Success Through Authentic and Effective Family and Community Engagement, EdRedesign Lab
• Making Schools a Welcoming Place for Immigrant Students, Usable Knowledge

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Top Benefits of Family and Community Engagement

• October 27, 2023
• Topic: Culture, Climate, & Family Engagement , K–12 Education , Student Success
• Resource type: Insights Blog

Find out why K-12 family and community engagement play a key role in promoting student academic achievement, and how to increase these school partnerships.

It takes a village to raise a child — and support for that village to help the child succeed in school. In our report on The Current State of School Climate in Public School , only 50% of respondents agreed that their district modeled community engagement. With public school enrollment on a major decline, many districts are turning to K-12 family and community partnerships to promote more inclusive engagement. When families and community members are involved in student learning, students improve their academic performance and gain a stronger support system, helping them feel more confident at school.

K-12 family and community engagement has long been a focus for schools. However, parental involvement in education tends to decline as students get older. Some studies found as much as a 17% decrease in parental involvement between third through fifth grade and middle school. This trend paired with ongoing academic recovery challenges illustrates the need to involve and support more district community members in the K–12 learning environment.

By connecting family and community members to school experiences, districts can advance student development and learning, as well as improve school practices and operations by identifying the features that best support students. Use the following insights to learn more about how strong family-school-community partnerships positively affect student achievement, attendance and behavior, staff understanding of local needs, and school reputation.

Family and Community Engagement Increases Student Achievement

Increased family and community engagement in schools is strongly associated with  faster rates of literacy acquisition  among children, increased rates of promotion to secondary education, and decreased rates of school dropout. A 2020 study about family-school connections within low income Latinx communities, emphasizes the academic importance of school family networks for historically marginalized communities.

With busy lives, many parents need flexible ways to increase involvement in their students’ schooling. Districts should consider the following tips to help families promote student academic achievement:

• Encourage parents to monitor and assist with homework by providing helpful resources such as virtual or in-person “homework nights,” answer keys, and make accommodations for English-learning caregivers.
• Conduct scheduling surveys to better understand how work hours, extra-curricular commitments, and holidays may keep some family members from attending academic events at school.

Identifying prime challenges in the K-12 landscape is key to attaining district goals. Read our blog on The Top 3 Concerns on District Leaders’ Minds in 2023-24 for the latest insights.

Improving student attendance and behavior.

Chronic absenteeism remains a significant concern nationally. Many factors contribute to absenteeism, including disengagement due to a lack of meaningful connections to adults in the classroom. Some schools may spend resources providing incentives such as class pizza parties to promote good attendance.

While incentive-based initiatives encourage some students to come to school, family and community involvement in the school experience is a more important influence on student attendance. Some schools have implemented the practice of family-teacher home visits to significantly reduce chronic absenteeism . Schools can also support families by offering workshops, tip sheets, and messaging about the impact of positive attendance. Districts should provide clear, actionable steps to take if a student is experiencing barriers to attendance

Help break down attendance barriers by learning more about how to promote K-12 student belonging .

Family and community engagement enhances staff understanding of local needs.

Schools may wish to involve families and community members in students’ school experiences, but don’t understand their needs, interests, and partnership preferences. Many family members point to busy schedules preventing them from volunteering or being more involved in school activities, while others cite dissatisfaction with school communication. Many caregivers report a lack of tools and resources to support their child and frustration with interpreting school policies or practices. In addition, schools may not address language or cultural differences or the needs of single parents, grandparents, or foster parents, making some caregivers feel uncomfortable in school settings.

Districts should hold meetings and conduct surveys to collect feedback from family and community members on what schools need to do to improve. Transparency and open dialogue about school policies and initiatives are necessary to promote family understanding. Schools must also focus their efforts on accommodating language and cultural differences, so all families and community members can be involved in students’ learning. Partnering with local organizations or community members that understand these differences can be helpful in building community ties and meeting the needs of all student supporters.

Accommodating family-community needs means exploring challenging topics in K-12 diversity, equity, and inclusion. Learn more about how to Pave the Way for Brave Conversations about K-12 Equity .

Strengthening school reputation.

Districts that effectively engage families and community members see a statistically significant increase in positive attitudes toward their schools. Districts can earn parent and caregiver approval when they focus their efforts on making family members feel comfortable in the school setting. When strong family-school-community partnerships result in improved academic outcomes, attendance, and family support, the school becomes known as a valuable place to receive an education.

Creating an infrastructure for family and community engagement demonstrates a commitment to supporting students and building a positive bond between home and school. In one Detroit district , administrators implemented several community engagement initiatives in response to negative enrollment trends. The result was significantly increased interest and enrollment with families in their district. To improve your district’s reputation and support enrollment, consider the following takeaways:

• Periodically conduct surveys and/or focus groups to fully understand the needs and attitudes of your community.
• Proactively establish a warm and inviting presence in the community with strategies such as canvassing and partnering with local organizations to help meet local community needs.

Overall, increased family and community engagement is a key factor in bolstering positive outcomes for both students and districts. While most families wish to see their students achieve, they may lack the accommodations and tools to meet their full involvement potential. Districts should always keep family-community engagement at the forefront of their agendas to help ensure success for all.

It’s never too late to promote community inclusivity. Learn more about engaging families and communities in K-12 education .

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• Being A Participant

What Can Research Do In Your Community?

Research takes place in many different settings.

Some research is done in clinical settings like a hospital or doctor’s office. Some may take place on a university campus. Other research happens in community settings where community members themselves may play a variety of roles in the research. This unit will present ideas about how you can get involved in research and work with researchers to improve the health and well-being of your community.

"It's going to take a community to really deal with these kinds of issues." - Dr. John Ruffin, Founding Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)

Below are examples of how communities and researchers have been able to work together in the United States.

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King County Healthy Homes, Seattle, WA

The King County Healthy Homes project was an intervention research project to help prevent asthma and encourage healthy indoor environments in Seattle.

The indoor home environment presents a range of health risks, including asthma triggers and exposures to toxics such as lead, pesticides, and volatile organics. Minority and low income populations are at increased risk for many of these exposures and children are most sensitive to their effects. Asthma is an important health consequence of these exposures, and its incidence and mortality appear to be steadily increasing, especially among low-income children.

The Seattle-King County Healthy Homes Project addressed these concerns. Paraprofessional Community Home Environmental Specialists (CHES) provided a comprehensive package of educational materials to reduce the total exposure burden of indoor environmental health risks. CHES conducted an initial home environmental assessment in low-income households with asthmatic children age 4-12. The home environmental specialists offered education and social support, encouraged behavior changes, provided materials to reduce exposures (bedding covers, vacuums, door mats, cleaning kits). This initial assessment was followed by five to nine visits over the next 12 months in which CHES worked with tenants, offering continued education and social support.

Community participation was an important component of this project. The project was developed by a partnership of community agencies, a tenant’s union, an environmental justice organization, the local health department, the CDC-sponsored Seattle Partners for Healthy Communities and the University of Washington. Primary funding was provided by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with additional support from the Nesholm Foundation, the Seattle Foundation, and the Seattle-King County Department of Public Health. The project ran from 1997-2005 and found that the homes receiving the educational materials and supports had lower rates of development and severity of asthma in their children and higher awareness of how to prevent asthma.

Source  http://www.kingcounty.gov/healthservices/health/partnerships/sphc/projects.aspx

• King County Homes Project
• Healthy Mothers on the Move
• Vietnamese-American Cervical Cancer Screening
• Weact Northern Manhattan Food Survey

Questions to think about and discuss when reviewing the four examples.

• Who did the study aim to help?
• What problem was the study trying to address?
• When did the study take place?
• How did researchers and community groups work together?
• How did the study make a difference in the community?

Healthy Mothers on the Move, Detroit, MI

The Healthy Mothers on the Move project aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of a social support healthy lifestyle intervention designed to reduce risk factors for Type 2 diabetes among pregnant and postpartum women. The project worked with Latina and African American pregnant and post-partum women in Detroit. Two intervention programs were offered. One intervention was a Healthy Lifestyle Program with education and support for a healthy diet and exercise. A second intervention was a Pregnancy Control Program that taught stress management and provided general care support but did not include information or support for diet and exercise. Women’s Health Advocates from the community interacted with the study participants. 

Among Latinas, there was almost 90% retention through pregnancy and more than 80% retention through six weeks postpartum. There was also high participant, Women’s Health Advocate, and host site satisfaction. Vegetable consumption in the Healthy Lifestyle group increased significantly. Other analyses are still ongoing.

Preliminary results suggest significant decrease in diabetes risk factors for the healthy lifestyle group. The Community Women’s Health Advocates were instrumental in conducting home visits and working with the women.

Source  http://www.detroiturc.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=28

Cervical cancer screening, santa clara, ca.

Vietnamese-American women are five times more likely to develop cervical cancer than other American women. In Santa Clara, CA a REACH 2010 project aimed to increase Pap smear screening for early detection and prevention.  The researchers ran a media campaign on the importance of screening in the community. The University of California also worked with the Vietnamese REACH Health Coalition and lay health workers to encourage Vietnamese Americans to get screened for cervical cancer. The study concluded that the women who spoke with the community health workers were more likely to get screened than the women who were exposed to the media campaign alone.

An evaluation of coalition programs showed that 47.7% of participants who had never had a Pap test received one after meeting with a lay health worker. The evaluation also showed that 17.9% of participants received a mammogram and 27.9% received a clinical breast exam after meeting with a lay health worker, compared with 3.9% and 5.1%, respectively, of women who did not meet with a lay health worker. In addition, 52.1% of participants had a repeat Pap test within 18 months, and 4,187 women enrolled in a reminder system. The study took place from 2004-2007 and involved 105,000 Vietnamese-American women.

Source  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1494888/

Weact food justice initiative, new york, ny.

The goals of the Food Justice Initiative are to understand the challenges and opportunities that children, parents, school officials and residents face regarding healthy food choices in school and at home through research. The WEACT Food Justice Initiative works with community residents in Northern Manhattan grassroots groups and other New York organizations to help influence and develop programs, laws and policies that affect access to healthy food in Northern Manhattan. WEACT has conducted surveys with community residents and schools. They are currently investigating the supply chain of public school lunches to better understand the ingredients and nutritional makeup of the food purchased by the New York City Public School system. One key portion of the Food Justice Initiative is educating policy makers on food justice issues and providing recommendations for improved policies at the City, State and Federal levels.

In addition, WEACT works at the community level to involve parents, students, teachers, the school board, school administrators, and the public in development of the local wellness policies at several Northern Manhattan schools. Since nearly all Northern Manhattan public school students are low-income, this is a critical window of opportunity to empower the community work together to influence policy for greater equality.  WEACT educates and mobilizes the public school community to advocate for healthier policies at the NYC Board of Education, City Council, NYS Legislature and NYS Departments of Education and Health.

WEACT for Environmental Justice is a Northern Manhattan community-based organization whose mission is to build healthy communities by assuring that people of color and/or low-income participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.

Source  http://www.weact.org/Programs/EnvironmentalHealthCBPR/NorthernManhattanFoodJusticeInitiative/tabid/206/Default.aspx

Additional resources, cdc healthy homes, community engaged scholarship 4 health, community-campus partnerships for health, developing and sustaining community-based participatory research partnerships: a skill building curriculum, healthy homes ii asthma project, king county healthy homes project, seattle, wa, reach cdc success stories, reach: the power to reduce health disparities, the community toolbox (university of kansas), important question.

What could research do in your community?

Please take some time to think about and discuss this question with your group or others.

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How Work–Family Research Can Finally Have an Impact in Organizations

Ellen ernst kossek.

Michigan State University

Boris B. Baltes

Wayne State University

Russell A. Matthews

Louisiana State University

Although work–family research has mushroomed over the past several decades, an implementation gap persists in putting work–family research into practice. Because of this, work–family researchers have not made a significant impact in improving the lives of employees relative to the amount of research that has been conducted. The goal of this article is to clarify areas where implementation gaps between work–family research and practice are prevalent, discuss the importance of reducing these gaps, and make the case that both better and different research should be conducted. We recommend several alternative but complementary actions for the work–family researcher: (a) work with organizations to study their policy and practice implementation efforts, (b) focus on the impact of rapid technological advances that are blurring work–family boundaries, (c) conduct research to empower the individual to self-manage the work–family interface, and (d) engage in advocacy and collaborative policy research to change institutional contexts and break down silos. Increased partnerships between industrial–organizational (I–O) psychology practitioners and researchers from many industries and disciplines could break down silos that we see as limiting development of the field.

According to a 2011 American Psychological Association study, only about a third (36%) of U.S. workers are satisfied with the manner in which their employers assist them in balancing work and family and other personal life demands—a drop from 42% in 2009 ( Clay, 2011 ). And growing numbers of employers are not very satisfied with work–family benefits either. A recent Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey (2010) reports many firms are reducing or eliminating some family friendly benefits, with the biggest drops in flextime, elder care referral, and adoption assistance. Another survey shows a significant drop in employer provision of full-time pay and time off for maternity leave, down to 16% from 27% in the prior decade ( Shellenbarger, 2008 ). This decline in satisfaction with employer work–life supports is paradoxical as work–family research has mushroomed over the past several decades.

Work–family research—the study of positive and negative processes, antecedents, and outcomes related to work and family roles—has finally moved from the margins to the mainstream of industrial–organizational (I–O) psychology, management, and organizational behavior. Yet, research evaluating the effective implementation of work–family initiatives seems to have declined in the past decade. It is our contention that, to date, work–family researchers have not made a significant impact in improving the lives of employees relative to the amount of research that has been conducted. Evidence of having an impact would include the reduction of workplace stress, more positive work–family relationships in employment settings, and effectively implemented work–family policies.

We believe a big part of the problem is that an implementation gap remains between work–family research and practical impact. Even before the economic downturn, the implementation gap was evident ( Kossek, 2005 , 2006 ; Kossek & Lambert, 2005 ). However, the current economic climate has put into sharpened focus the disconnect between what research suggests are key ingredients about balancing work and family (e.g., positive organizational culture and supervisory support, employee control over work hours and workload, and opportunities for recovery outside the workplace), what organizations offer and allow for, and what options employees feel they can genuinely access that will be truly effective in helping them excel and thrive on and off the job.

The purpose of this article is to make the argument that better and different work–family research should be conducted to improve its impact in employing organizations. Before turning to the main body of the article, we give a brief overview of work–family conflict origins and define concepts related to organizational support of work and family roles. We discuss why there has been an implementation gap and argue why employers should (still) put organizational support of work and family roles higher on the corporate agenda than ever, even in light of current economic challenges. We will then discuss positive developments related to work–family research and suggest areas for improvement to enhance impact. Our discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, as the topic has benefited from numerous reviews (see Allen, Herst, Bruck, & Sutton, 2000 ; Casper, Eby, Bordeaux, Lockwood & Lambert, 2007 ; Eby, Casper, Lockwood, Bordeaux, & Brinley, 2005 ; Ford, Heinen, & Langkamer, 2007 ; Kossek & Distelberg, 2008 ; Kossek & Ozeki, 1998 , 1999 ; Michel, Mitchelson, Kotrba, LeBreton, & Baltes, 2009 ). We close with alternative yet complementary strategies to help bridge research–practice gaps.

Work–Family Research Origins

Most I–O psychologists study how the work side of the work–family relationship affects individual performance at work more predominantly than employee effectiveness in other life roles or how the work affects the family or the community ( Thompson, Beauvais, & Allen, 2006 ). The main theoretical foundation that I–O psychologists use to study work and family relationships emanates from role theory ( Katz & Kahn, 1978 ), which focuses on how individuals in social contexts enact expectations of their roles or positions. The notion of work–family conflict derives from the belief that when individuals have to enact multiple roles, psychological distress increases from the increased conflicts that are likely to occur when the expectations of one role, such as work, interfere with the expectations of the family role ( Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964 ).

The assumption that conflicts are the predominant dynamic between work and family roles emanates from stress theory and theories of role accumulation suggesting that human energy and time is a fixed commodity ( Thompson et al., 2006 ). The more roles individuals add on to their life demands, the greater the probability of role strain, role overload, and conflict ( Marks, 1977 ). The construct of work–family conflict has been central to the work–family field’s development ( Eby et al., 2005 ; MacDermid & Harvey, 2006 ). It has been well studied as an antecedent (e.g., of job satisfaction and life satisfaction; Kossek and Ozeki, 1998 ), interrelated processes ( Lambert, 1990 ), and an outcome ( MacDermid & Harvey, 2006 ). Allen, Herst, Bruck, and Sutton’s (2000) meta-analysis demonstrates that work-to-family conflict has clear negative effects on individual well-being as it is strongly related to job burnout, depressive symptoms, general psychological stress, physical health symptoms, and family strain.

Why the focus on conflict between the family role and the work role? Scholars examining the historical roots of work–family conflict (e.g., MacDermid & Harvey, 2006 ; Near, Rice, & Hunt, 1980 ) note that at the turn of the 20th century as economic development occurred and large social institutions grew (such as organizations employing a larger number of individuals), classical sociologist and organizational theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber became concerned with the potential negative impacts of power dynamics of large institutions, namely employers, on worker well-being and alienation.

The historical development of U.S. societal interest in work–family policies is also relevant to understanding the current research–practice relationship. Work–family policies have some ties to equal employment opportunity and social resistance to changing the workplace to be inclusive of new labor market entrants. With the passage of equal employment opportunity legislation (e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1971), work–family policies such as child care centers and part-time and flexible working arose to integrate women, who were participating in the labor force in unprecedented numbers, into the work place. The term work–family policies became popular in the business press, referring to employers’ support of child care and flexible work hours for employees with the most salient family demands—often women with young children. Yet, some employees without families or with stay-at-home spouses felt that work–family policy users were not carrying their weight at work and that their lower “face time” made them less committed. To address this stigmatization, large employers began to switch the names of their work–family policies to be labeled work–life policies to create the narrative that all workers need to be supported for personal life roles. Yet many researchers still prefer to study work and family policies, perhaps given a special interest in understanding organizational response to work–family conflict. These historical roots help explain why we see it as critical that I–O psychological research results in improved organizational support for work and family. It should be noted that we define family broadly and do not use the term simply to refer to traditional nuclear families, but to the nonwork and personal roles of all employees. In light of the shifting rhetoric on the evolution of work–family policies, it is not surprising that social conflict and ambiguity regarding their implementation remain.

Defining Organizational Support of Work and Family

Organizational support of work and family roles pertains to the degree to which the workplace is designed to reduce work–family conflicts and enhance work–family interactions. Employer work–family supports include three workplace characteristics that influence work–family relationships: (a) job conditions and the structure of work, such as work hours and job designs that give workers control over when, where, or how they do their job; (b) organizational culture and norms about the hegemony of work and nonwork relationships; and (c) human resource policies supporting the juggling of work and family roles ( Kossek, 2006 ). Of these three areas, the business press has paid most attention to employer work–family policies, setting up a cultural expectation that “progressive” employers offer these policies as a means of being nominated to working mother or other best employer lists.

Work–family policies are organizational programs, policies, and practices that are designed to assist employees with the joint management of a paid work role with nonwork roles such as parenting, elder care, leisure, education, volunteering, and self-care (e.g., exercise or medical needs; Ryan & Kossek, 2008 ). Examples include flexibility in the scheduling (flextime), location (telework, mobile virtual office), or amount of work (job sharing, part time, vacation, and leaves); benefits such as health-, and child-, and elder care and domestic partner; and information such as referral programs. A key problem is that work–family policies have often been implemented in silos and not well linked to the other workplace characteristics such as the conditions of employment (i.e., expected work schedules and the ability to control workload and work hours) or workplace cultural support (e.g., can the policies be used without backlash?).

Even more importantly, managers are unsure how to implement and manage new work–family policies such as flexibility where they cannot see the employees at work. Consequently, there is considerable anecdotal evidence suggesting that employers have had problems implementing policies in ways that create an inclusive workplace and increase productivity, yet research clarifying exactly how to address these problems is limited ( Kelly et al., 2008 ; Ryan & Kossek, 2008 ). Thus, although work–family researchers have demonstrated that employees who are able to effectively take advantage of work–family policies do benefit psychologically (e.g., have higher job satisfaction), we have failed to fully clarify how use of the policies link to productivity, how to avoid cultural stigmatization from use of the policies (e.g., being viewed as less committed or performing less effectively), and what challenges managers and organizations may face in implementing these policies to enhance competitiveness and, importantly, how to address these challenges to increase organizational effectiveness.

Why has work–family research been somewhat disconnected from improving practice? For one, how to translate and implement work–family research findings is not necessarily simple. Employers face many complexities in the development of work–family practice as workplace innovation. Many employers have far less experience in the work–family arena than in other traditional I–O and Human Resources (HR) areas such as selection or training or performance appraisal. Employers may also be unsure how to implement work–family policies effectively into existing HR systems and management philosophies of labor management. For example, increasing organizational support of employees’ ability to devote more time and energy to nonwork demands by giving workers more control over their schedules challenges traditional labor economic and capitalistic principles that employers should strive to get as much working time out of people as possible in the short run in exchange for the least amount of money.

Scalability is also an issue. For example, should policies like flextime be mandated for all employees or just those in tight labor markets, in conducive jobs, and who have an established work record? What about the tensions of standardization and customization? Should employers adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to ensure equity and ease of administration or customize support to individuals such as single parents compared to older workers? Given growing workforce diversity, it is increasingly difficult for employers to determine which strategies work best for which workers, how to ensure equity and coordinate diverse schedules and benefits, and how much work–family conflict is too much while trying to run a business and make a profit. These are the types of research questions that would help employers, but not much research has focused on these issues.

Another reason for a growing research–policy gap is that researchers and practitioners often have different agendas and fail to collaborate as much as they could. They also sometimes simply fail to trust each other and come from different perspectives. For example, they often use a different language. More specifically, practitioners talk about work–family balance, whereas most work–family scholars (barring some exceptions such as Greenhaus & Powell, 2006 ) emphasize the notion of work–family conflict. And evaluation of effectiveness could be problematic. For some firms, offering work–family policies serves as a public relations tool to increase worker recruitment and attraction. What if researchers show a failure to implement and that these policies are really more window dressing than real support?

Why Work–Family Research Can Really Help Organizations

A recent review of research notes that it is clear that employers benefit from offering and supporting the use of work–family policies in several ways: more positive employee attitudes, better talent, and cost savings ( Kossek & Michel, 2010 ). Recruitment and retention, job satisfaction and commitment, and workforce quality are improved from offering work–life policies and implementing them. Employers who implement these policies are more likely viewed as an employer of choice and reap the benefits of a larger applicant pool ( Kelly et al., 2008 ). Cost savings comes from a decrease in problematic employee behaviors, such as turnover, absenteeism, or accidents, as well as lower labor costs as some workers are willing to trade off flexibility for wages ( Kossek, 2006 ; Kossek & Hammer, 2008 ; Kossek & Michel, 2010 ). Yet, these trends have been documented for several decades and still have not resulted in a major tipping point that creates a ground swell of employer excitement for work–family policies. As noted previously, we have actually seen a decline in support for some work–family policies (e.g., Shellenbarger, 2008 ; SHRM, 2010 ).

What we would like to see is a research agenda focused on how work–life policies and positive role relationships can help organizations solve pressing critical organizational and societal problems. These include the facilitation of workforce engagement and creativity, more time for learning, and better communication and collaboration in a global world. Clear statistical evidence of the heightened work–family issues we are facing is provided from the National Study of the Changing Workforce ( Aumann & Galinsky, 2009 ; Galinsky, Aumann, & Bond, 2009 ). Although granting that there are currently many U.S. workers who lack jobs or are underemployed, the nationally representative survey results from Aumann and Galinsky (2009) suggest that many employees perceive overwork stress. Over a third report they “often or very often” felt overwhelmed by the amount of work they had to do on their jobs in the last several months. In the same survey, one third of respondents report signs of clinical depression, and one in five report high blood pressure. Only a little more than one quarter (28%) of workers rate their health excellent, down from 34% in 2002. Blurring work–family boundaries and interruptions are other issues: Nearly one third of workers report being contacted by a work colleague or client outside of normal work hours at least once a week, and over half of employees surveyed report they often or very often worked on too many tasks and multitasked too much. What if work–family research actually addressed these trends by providing tangible solutions for organizational practice or individuals?

Before discussing four possible paths for work–family research to improve its impact, we discuss what we see as positive developments in work–family research and areas where improvement is still needed, looking in turn at the framing and language used in the work–family field, the clarity of our constructs, issues of measurement and research design, and research samples.

Framing and Language

A positive development in work–family research has been the movement to focus not only on the negative aspects of work–family relationships, such as work–family conflict, but to include the study of positive work–family relationships as well. The work–family enrichment perspective advanced by Greenhaus and Powell (2006) and others argues that resources such as psychological assets (e.g., resilience and mood), social capital (e.g., knowledge and influence), or behaviors and skills can be transferred back and forth between work and family domains to enrich each. This spotlight on positive resource transfer among multiple roles has its roots in role expansion theories, which contrary to stress theories assume that greater involvement in meaningful roles involving positive experiences can enhance well-being and positive functioning ( Barnett & Hyde, 2001 ; Sieber, 1974 ).

Including positive perspectives advances work–family research for a number of reasons. First, more and more families and working individuals today have no choice but to juggle work and caregiving roles. Given these trends, research might as well examine how to make the joint enactment of work–family roles as positive as possible to create resilience and positive outcomes. Second, given the recent global economic slowdown and the aging population world-wide, it is clear that a growing proportion of the population will be involved in employment for longer periods of the life span and caring for their own health needs. And the high unemployment rates have highlighted the need to shift mindsets to the positive benefits of having a job and an income for individuals’ identities, families’ household economic security, and communities at large. Finally, a positive focus may increase understanding that can help individuals better optimize how they manage work–family conflict ( Baltes & Heydens-Gahir, 2003 ) or help organizations learn how to increase social support in the workplace to create more positive work–family climates ( Allen 2001 ; Kossek, Colquitt, & Noe, 2001 ; Kossek, Pichler, Bodner, Hammer, 2011 ). This could provide a new theoretical home for work–family research in the growing positive organizational scholarship (POS; Cameron & Caza, 2004 ) and positive organization psychology (POP) fields. Donaldson and Ko (2010) define POP as the study of “positive subjective experiences and traits in the workplace and positive organizations, and its application to improve the effectiveness and quality of life in organizations,” which seems very apropos for application of work–family research into a core I–O psychology and human resource policy domain.

At the same time, we argue that the work–family field needs to broaden and update its language. Language and cultural framing are very powerful. As Kegan and Lahey (2001) note, language, as the main way we communicate issues, does more than merely reflect attitudes and emotions, but rather the mere choice of one word over others can shape beliefs and attitudes and, ultimately and most critically, our actions. Language regarding work–family issues often implies deviancy or negative connotations regarding commitment to work. For example, those who use flexible work schedules are viewed as working “alternative” or “nontraditional” schedules. Teleworkers are “distant workers.” Those who do not work this way are “traditional” workers. We talk about the “nonwork” role as if it is juxtaposed against the work role, where work is seen as the norm, that is, the primary role or the standard with which all other life roles should be compared. Careers that are “full time” are “normal.” Any work arrangement that deviates from this, such as “part time” or “reduced load” or “customized work,” uses language implying that the worker is not giving his or her full effort and is getting special treatment. Yet in the Netherlands, nearly 39% of the workforce works part time and nearly 75% of women who work do so part time. This suggests that part-time work is the norm for some employee groups, and they are valued members of the workforce. Furthermore, research shows part-time workers can often bring higher intensity and productivity than full-time workers ( Kossek & Michel, 2010 ). We need new ways to talk about careers and jobs that move away from the notion that working flexibly is somehow cheating the employer, particularly as our companies become more global.

We also need to drop the use of “work–life” as the politically correct way to talk about work–family matters. As noted in the historical review of work–family policy development, a number of years ago “work–life” replaced the term “work–family” in many major companies and in the field as a well-meaning effort to minimize backlash against giving increased support and attention to people with caregiving demands. Yet we need to drop the term “work–life” as “work” is a part of “life.” We simply, in our research, need to be clearer on what personal life roles we are juxtaposing vis-à-vis the work role. Why don’t we just use the terms “work role” and “caregiving role” and “leisure role” for example, and actually name the role being compared to give greater clarity?

Finally, some authors use terms such as “work–family balance” and “work–family integration” as positive outcomes, assuming all workers want the same thing. Yet not all workers necessarily want work–family balance as some may have higher work identities. Others may have higher family identities. And, yes, still some others are truly “dual-centric,” meaning their identities truly are high for both work and family roles ( Galinsky et al., 2003 ; Lobel, 1991 ). Put another way, one person working 80 hours a week may perceive that they have achieved work–family balance, but another employee working a “traditional” 40-hour week may feel imbalanced. This is a function of the relative importance these two individuals place on work and family; balance does not mean the same thing to everyone. But the persistence of research on work–family balance normalizes this as the outcome that all workers want and the norm.

Similarly, not all workers want “work–family integration” as the goal. Some really do desire the ability to separate or control work–family boundaries more. As Kossek and Lautsch (2008) and Bulger, Matthews, and Hoffman (2007) note, people vary in terms of their preferences and their abilities to segment work and family and to detach from work. In fact, recent research suggests that some individuals are very unwilling to integrate work and family, and when they do, they experience more work–family conflict ( Matthews, Barnes-Farrell, & Bulger, 2010 ). We need to be more careful in our language to not assume that all workers want the same thing or normalize some outcomes as more desirable. Doing so suggests that variation from balance, integration, or other outcomes implies deviancy or being “less normal.”

Clarity of Constructs

We see a large challenge remaining in the work–family literature with respect to construct overlap. For example, on the conflict side, commonly measured constructs are work–family conflict, work–family interference, and work–family spillover. Work–family conflict is said to arise from simultaneous pressures from the work and family domains that are incompatible in some respect—participation in one role is made more difficult by virtue of participation in the other role ( Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985 ). Work–family interference describes the extent to which employees’ work (or family) demands interfere with their family (or work) responsibilities ( Gutek, Searle, & Klepa, 1991 ). Work–family spillover is defined as emotions, attitudes, skills, and behaviors established at work (or home) that employees carry into their family (or work) life ( Lambert, 1990 ). All three terms are often used interchangeably in empirical studies (e.g., Leiter & Durup, 1996 ; Major, Klein, & Ehrhart, 2002 ). Unfortunately, few authors have clarified if they are the same constructs with different names that could be used interchangeably, distinct but related constructs, or separate constructs altogether.

This lack of construct clarity is also reflected in overlapping items in scales used to measure these constructs. For example, an item from the work interference with family scale ( Gutek et al., 1991 ) reads “My work takes up time that I would like to spend with my family/friends.” An item from the work–family conflict scale ( Netemeyer, Boles, & McMurrian, 1996 ) reads “Things I want to do at home do not get done because of the demands my job puts on me.” An item from the negative work-to-nonwork spillover scale ( Bond, Thompson, Galinsky, & Prottas, 2003 ) reads “How often has your job kept you from concentrating on important things in your family or personal life?” All three of these items illustrate some construct overlap.

Similar issues exist on the positive side of the work–family interface where constructs like work–family enrichment (the degree to which the work role enhances the family role), work–family facilitation (the degree to which the work role makes it easier to perform the family role), work–family positive spillover (the degree to which positive emotions, skills, or other resources carryover over to the family role), and work–family integration (the degree to which work and family roles are synthesized or combined) are often used interchangeably, yet they all have different meanings (cf., Thompson et al., 2006 ). The field will be held back if we continue to use several overlapping constructs interchangeably to measure phenomena.

The lack of construct clarity also manifests itself in our measurement tools. Even when scholars and practitioners are claiming to be measuring the same thing (i.e., using the same construct name such as work–family conflict with conceptually similar items), two issues often arise. First, we have multiple measures of the same construct that potentially differ in many functional ways. For example, Matthews, Bulger, and Barnes-Farrell (2010) point out that measures of conceptually similar constructs can differ in terms of number of items, response scale, and scale orientation. These differences can affect the relationships found between those measures and other variables. Second, we too often create our own short measures or trim items from existing measures in a way that is often not specified in our publications. These abbreviated measures typically have not been subjected to much psychometric or validity evaluation ( Matthews, Barnes-Farrell, & Bulger, 2010 ). In summary, we think much more needs to be done to help with construct clarity, both theoretically and from a standardized measurement perspective.

Measurement and Research Design

The trend toward collecting multisource data from not just the worker but family members, coworkers, supervisors, and even clients represents an improvement in work–family research measures. This development moves the field away from its long and not so rigorous history of over reliance on same source self-report data ( Casper, Eby, et al., 2007 ). It also helps us better tap into the notion of cross-over , the idea that increasingly work–family issues impact not only the individual employee, but families and coworkers as well ( Westman & Etzion, 2005 ).

We are also seeing more triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as more longitudinal work (cf., Hammer et al., 2011 ; Kossek, Huber, & Lerner, 2003 ), although this trend is still somewhat limited ( Casper, Eby, et al., 2007 ). Building on the movement toward more multisource data, many studies are examining dyadic (e.g., Hoobler, Wayne, & Lemmon, 2009 ; Ilies, Schwind, & Wagner, 2009 ) and multilevel relationships ( Major, Fletcher, Davis, & Germano, 2009 ) to more accurately reflect the fact that work–family attitudes and outcomes are not independent but rather reflect nested relationships at home and at work.

However, our current measures of work–family conflict may not be up to the task when the goal is to understand dyadic and multilevel relationships. Although measuring perceptions of work–family conflict is valuable as a psychological measure and should be continued when this issue is central to the research question, it is most probably not the correct measurement technique when one is attempting cross-person prediction. For example, in dual career couples, if one wants to predict a husband’s level of marital satisfaction from his wife’s level of work–family conflict, we would argue that both objective and subjective data are needed. Specifically, it would be useful to predict a husband’s perceived level of satisfaction with his marriage from his wife’s level of work-to-family conflict. It may not be his wife’s perceived level of work-to-family conflict that is the most important in this scenario but indicators of how work is affecting family members. These include, for example, how often she is late because of work, how often she misses family functions because of work, and how often she has to complete work after hours at home. Some may argue that a spouse’s perception of his or her partner’s work impinging on family is still subjective, although it is better than having the employee’s self-report on the family’s views of their work–family conflict. Truly objective indicators of interference would be the number of family occasions missed because of work and the number of hours worked at home after hours before the children are asleep. Or health of family might be measured objectively to show the objective impact of work–family conflict on family. In summary, for many of the cross-person predictions we would like to see explored, objective data is needed. As objective scales will not meet many of the requirements made of perceptual measures (e.g., internal consistency), it will require some “relearning” for researchers, practitioners, readers, and reviewers in the work–family arena to be more open when it comes to objective, nonsame source scale development.

Unlike early research that focused on samples with a very restricted range of work–family issues, we are seeing a much greater diversity of job and family demographics represented in research samples. Examples of formerly understudied populations include singles ( Casper, Weltman, & Kwesiga, 2007 ), blue-collar workers, ( Grandey, Cordeiro, & Michael, 2007 ), low-income retail workers ( Hammer, Kossek, Bodner, Anger, & Zimmerman, 2011 ; Lambert, 2008 ), immigrant families ( Chien-Juh, 2009 ), unionized workers ( Berg, Kossek, & Misra, 2010 ), welfare-to-work recipients ( Kossek et al., 2003 ), and kin that live together but are not comprised of a married couple or a parent and children under 18 ( Rothausen-Vange, 2005 ).

At the same time, there is limited international sampling in work–family studies. U.S. cultural norms about the primacy of the work role and individualistic approach to work–family issues should not be viewed as the worldwide norm. The United States is also unique among industrialized countries as having a more limited public safety net for work–family issues because of the lack of nationalized paid family leave for newborn children. And the United States has a very individualist employer-driven approach to work–family support, where employers have far more latitude than in some other nations to determine how to manage work–family matters. We increasingly need to include measures of cultural values in work–family studies, particularly on collectivism and femininity ( Hofstede, 2001 ), which may deeply shape perceptions of the appropriateness of employer support of work and family demands.

A final issue is sampling heterogeneity. Numerous inconsistencies in antecedents and outcomes of work–family conflict have been noted in the past research. Some of these include flexible work arrangements ( Shockley & Allen, 2007 ), family friendly policies ( Brough, O’Driscoll, & Kalliath, 2005 ), job performance ( Cullen & Hammer, 2007 ), job and life satisfaction ( Kossek & Ozeki, 1998 ), social support ( Kossek et al., 2011 ), and perceived stress ( Voydanoff, 2005 ). For example, two meta-analyses conducted only a year apart provided widely different estimates of the relationship between flexible work arrangements and work-to-family conflict—from .30 in Byron’s (2005) study to −.01 in Mesmer-Magnus and Viswesvaran’s (2005) study. We argue that the lack of systematic management of sample heterogeneity may be a driving factor in some of the inconsistent findings. Sample heterogeneity is defined as the degree to which participants within a particular sample differ in terms of a variety of individual difference variables.

In a single study where sample heterogeneity is so high that two or more distinct subpopulations exist, incorrect inferences can be generalized to all subpopulations ( Matthews, Bulger, & Barnes-Farrell, 2010 ). Alternatively, when multiple subpopulations exist, a null effect might be observed for the entire sample if the process works in opposite directions for the groups (e.g., as in a traditional interaction effect). As an illustration of this issue, Matthews, Bulger, and Barnes-Farrell (2010) found in their overall sample that family social support had no relationship with work-to-family conflict. However, when conceptually distinct age groups were considered, they note that the null effect in their overall model was driven by a canceling out of the effect across the three age groups.

Across studies examining the same issues, sample heterogeneity may also play a role in the reporting of inconsistent results. For example, it is possible that within two independent studies, sample heterogeneity may be relatively low (all participants are relatively similar) within each sample. However, each study might demonstrate contradictory results for the constructs of interest if the samples are systematically different from one another. For example, if one study examines flexible work arrangements for a sample of nurses and a second study examines the same issue in a sample of blue-collar workers, different results may be observed as a function of the nature of the job, types of policies available, issues of organizational culture, and other distinguishing characteristics of individuals who comprise these occupations. Thus, the issue is not so much an inconsistency in the observed results but variation in results generalization. We must systematically examine the degree to which these sample idiosyncrasies may bias study results or how our findings must be understood as valid only for a very specified context.

One way to address sampling issue is to include greater use of individual, group, and organizational differences as moderators. Overall, relative to the total number of work–family studies that have been conducted, the role that important individual, group, or organizational difference characteristics play as moderators of relevant processes is understudied ( Casper, Eby, et al., 2007 ). Although we continue to develop a better overarching conceptual model of how the work–family interface functions ( Eby et al., 2005 ), we persist in ignoring the role that surface-level demographics and deep-level characteristics such as values play in moderating important relationships. We also would like to see more organizational- and occupational-level moderators used, given wide variation in occupations and family supportive organizational cultures and access to and use of work–family policies.

Different Paths Forward in Work–Family Research

In addition to addressing some of the persistent problems in work–family research so that “better” research is conducted, resulting in richer and more valid knowledge for organizations to use in figuring out what to do, we advocate for a renewed emphasis on several substantive paths. We do not see these paths as an either/or crossroad but rather that each are worthy of pursuit.

Path 1: Researchers Actually Study Effective Policy and Practice Implementation

Overall, we need work–family research to improve the understanding of effective policy and practice implementation. Going down this path, researchers would work to help organizations better implement policies. This would require more research focused on program evaluation and on linking work–family policies to organizational development and change. Such research would also focus on contextual differences—one-size does not fit all organizations and cultures. What would comprise such a research agenda?

First on the agenda are integrative studies of policy availability, timing, extent of use, and subsequent outcomes. A shortcoming of research examining policy implementation is that it often simply examines whether a policy, such as a flextime or telework, is reported by organizations as being available but does not examine variation in use and effectiveness of the policy, or consequences (good and bad) of policy use ( Kossek & Michel, 2010 ). We need to really look into organizations more carefully to understand what is happening within the firm and across workgroups. Many organizations have “lumpiness” or wide unevenness in policy implementation. That is, individuals are nested in workgroups that vary considerably in the degree to which they have jobs or bosses supporting work–family flexibility, which creates understudied work–family micro-climates. Unevenness in within-firm implementation and access also highlights issues of organizational stratification—the notion that within organizations there is workforce stratification or rigidity where only some workgroups, employees, or occupations are allowed to work flexibly while others are not. Yet at the firm level, a company can still publicize that it offers flextime or telework ( Ryan & Kossek, 2008 ).

Researchers should also not assume that all work–family policies, practices, or interventions affect people the same way. For example, different family structures (e.g., single parents, families with children with disabilities, elder caregivers) are likely to view (and experience) these policies differently. The ability to telework several days a week may be a moderately attractive job policy for an unmarried recent college graduate entering the labor market but viewed very differently by someone with an on going lifelong critical work–family demand. More than simply “nice to have,” the psychological meaning of such a telework policy may be viewed as a godsend for a parent whose child has long-term learning disabilities or physical or mental health problems ( Parish, 2006 ).

Scholars also need to more carefully measure and examine the conditions under which policy use leads to positive outcomes. Few studies include both measures of cultural support for work–family policies and actual policy use (from family members or work) in the same study or assess the negative consequence of policy use. Regarding the later, some studies have found that the heaviest users of work–family policies have higher work–family conflict than nonusers. For example, a study of teleworkers found that they had higher work–family conflict than nontelework users ( Kossek, Lautsch, & Eaton, 2006 ). One explanation (given the cross-sectional design) is that most teleworkers had higher work–family conflict than nonusers a priori, that is, the presence of work–family conflict motivated them to make use of the telework option. Work–family conflict may increasingly need to be measured not just as a dependent variable but as an independent variable shaping the effects of work–family policy use ( Hammer et al., 2011 ).

Hammer, Neal, Newsom, Brockwood, and Colton (2005) found that greater users of work–family flexibility had higher work–family conflict but surmised users were using policies to their detriment. Rather than ameliorating work–family conflict, sometimes work–family flexibility policies have the reverse effect of enabling more negative work–family spillover. This occurs because workers are trying to do both their family demands and their work demands at the same time without cutting back on either or having more open boundaries between work and home. For example, we should examine the possible negative consequences of flexibility policies leading to lower and more permeable boundaries between work and family, which in turn increases interruptions from family-to-work or work-to-family.

Another explanation for negative effects is that policy use may lead to backlash. That is, if policies do not fit with the company culture, using these policies can actually lead to greater work–family conflict, thereby hurting the users the policies were designed to help. We must increase our understanding on potential backlash of use from childless workers, clients, managers, and those in nondual-earner families. We also need to understand “family backlash” from use of flexibility policies enabling higher work-to-family conflict. Finally, we need to look at the stickiness of positive or negative effects from policy use. Some research has shown ( Baltes et al., 1999 ) that the positive effects of new flexible schedules may decline over time, particularly in terms of how they relate to job satisfaction. This may be because people start getting used to policies, they just become part of the normal expectations people have of a job design.

It could also be that having access to flexibility, particularly for professionals, will not reduce work–family conflict unless workload is also reduced. This may also be because professionals often have the “flexibility” to work 24/7, and policies that are well intentioned such as flextime and telework may actually be producing overwork and workaholism, and people are having increasing difficulty shutting work off.

Path 2: Researchers Focus on the Impact of Rapid Technological Advances That Are Blurring Work–Family Boundaries

This path could create a whole new ballgame in terms of understanding the work–family interface and perhaps mainstream work–family issues as essential to implementation of workforce deployment as a global organizational strategy.

Technology is increasing the spread of work into people’s personal time and the spread of the private domain into working time. As a result, individuals will have more difficulty maintaining work–family boundaries, unless they actively seek to do so ( Kossek & Lautsch, 2008 ). Research is needed to understand how work–family flexibility practices are being self-regulated by the employee, particularly for those who work on laptops or use cell phones. More and more employees are being given autonomy to enact personal differences in how they manage boundaries between work and home—either by choice (e.g., psychological preference to multitask) or constraints (e.g., global travel job, single parent).

Kossek and Lautsch (2008) have developed a typology of boundary-management styles: segmenters, integrators, and volleyers. Some employees prefer to segment boundaries and work in blocks where they separate work and family. Perhaps they only take phone calls from a doctor during their lunch hour, for example. Other employees like to integrate work and family boundaries and blend work and family all day long. Still other employees are volleyers who have periods of high segmentation and then high integration depending on how their jobs are structured (e.g. accountants who have peaks and valleys during tax season) or their family situation (e.g., divorced parent who gets full child custody every summer).

We need to continue to update our work–family measures to include preferences for balance and segmentation, integration, and how individuals and groups seek to actively structure temporal boundaries and work–family relationships. This will also enhance objective measurement issues discussed above, as now studies can measure actual behaviors such as the number of e-mails and texts individuals send and receive a day, how long they are on cell phones and computers for personal and work demands, and whether this is by individual choice. We can also measure the length of time someone is spending on work interruptions when at home and family interruptions when at work as e-mails and cell calls arrive.

Path 3: Researchers Work to Empower the Individual

Another avenue of research that could help employees achieve work–family balance is one that focuses on the individual and not the organization. Given the fact that many work–family policies still lag in impact in their current form, and the fact that the employer is powerful in fostering work-to-family boundary blurring via technology, one could argue that employees may often be on their own when it comes to dealing with work–family conflict. On this path, researchers assume organizations are unlikely to ever really make organizational support for work–family issues a top priority. Here researchers would focus studies to help individuals better help themselves.

Although the body of research that examines how individuals successfully deal with work–family conflict has grown considerably in recent years, relatively little is known about what individual factors may allow some employees to better cope with the antecedents of work–family conflict than others. It is reasonable to assume that both personality factors and coping strategies used by individuals in dealing with the limited resources resulting from work–family conflict may influence whether an employee can achieve some level of work–family balance, and recent research supports this hypothesis (e.g., Baltes & Heydens-Gahir, 2003 ; Rosenbaum & Cohen, 1999 ). Of special interest are coping strategies because individuals can use these and they would seem to be trainable (i.e., malleable), whereas personality factors are not. Recent research on coping strategies (e.g., Baltes & Heydens-Gahir, 2003 ) has shown that they are linked to lower levels of work–family conflict.

The most often tested model of coping in the work–family domain is the meta-model of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC; Baltes, 1997 ; Baltes & Baltes, 1990 ; Freund & Baltes, 2002 ). SOC is based on the underlying assumption that “the coordinated use of behaviors involving SOC can (a) increase one’s resources in the sense of developmental enhancement, (b) help maintain functioning in the face of challenges, and (c) help regulate impending losses in resources” ( Baltes & Heydens-Gahir, 2003 , p. 1006).

Selection is concerned with the degree to which individuals identify and select goals, alternative contexts, outcomes, and goal structures. Behaviors associated with the selection strategy provide a direction to behavior. Optimization refers to the acquisition, refinement, and use of means to achieve goals. Compensation concerns the acquisition and use of alternative means to maintain a desired level of functioning in the face of decreases in resources.

Early studies examining the usage of SOC and how it relates to work–family conflict have demonstrated that individuals who use SOC behavioral strategies in the work or family domain tend to experience lower amounts of job and family stressors and in turn lower levels of work–family conflict ( Baltes & Heydens-Gahir, 2003 ; Clark, Bal, Zhdanova, & Baltes, 2009 ) and that people in the most resource-stretched situations benefit the most from using SOC coping behaviors ( Young, Baltes, & Pratt, 2007 ).

Although a handful of studies that have examined coping strategies suggest that they can be very effective in helping individuals reduce work–family conflict, much more research is required before a practical impact may be seen. We propose three interrelated themes of research: (a) research that investigates which strategies work and which do not (taking into consideration boundary conditions that might influence the effectiveness of different techniques), (b) research that examines how the use of coping strategies affect the employees’ immediate partner and family, (c) research on the degree to which effective coping strategies are indeed trainable, what training methods are the most efficacious, and how organizations can enhance transfer of training.

Path 4: Researchers Engage in Advocacy and Collaborative Policy Research to Change Institutional Contexts and Break Down Silos

The movement toward research to change public policy and to advocate for the effective implementation of work–family policies could be achieved if organizations like SIOP were more active on Capitol Hill or partnered more with the U.S. Department of Labor and Census Bureau to better measure policy availability and use. There is an increasing availability of NIH grants to look at intervention and policy effectiveness research. Recently, the SHRM published principles for a 21st-century flexibility policy. The principles advocate for flexibility policies that facilitate employees’ abilities to jointly meet growing personal and work demands in their daily lives while still ensuring productivity and stability for employers and not hurting job creation ( SHRM, 2011 ). SHRM also argues for better coordination of state and federal laws and “safe harbors” standards where employers could voluntarily offer a certain number of paid leave days that workers could use for any need, as long as consistent with collective bargaining agreements or other organizational policies. I–O psychologists could play a bigger role here. Partnering with SHRM, employers, and other groups, we could help design and evaluate these policies and demonstrate the potential benefits of effective implementation.

The Need for Researcher – Practitioner and Interdisciplinary Partnerships

Providing technical assistance to help employers better implement work–family policies and develop supportive work–family cultures as organizational change interventions is needed. Scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners increasingly need to build bridges to help ensure continuous improvement in the implementation of work–family initiatives. Until this is done, practitioners may continue to be more comfortable with consulting firms who are not necessarily selling evidenced-based work–family policies.

Rather than seeing work–family consulting as a way to implement a quick fix to the work–family “problem,” consulting firms and companies should embed scholars to help with confidential evaluation as a neutral third party. This would help ensure that the work–life policies being sold by work–family vendors actually work. Researchers could be instrumental in measuring a pre- and post snapshot of current work–family stress. They could then do a follow-up evaluation to ensure that policies and practices being implemented actually work and are being uniformly implemented across the company. This would also lead to the development of multiple stakeholder measures of effectiveness as the views of employees, employee subgroups, and companies may differ. We need not spend more money on new policies, but we do need to better implement the policies we already have, as noted above. Certainly conducting needs assessments of unique workforce needs to prioritize work–family issues also would be helpful to ensure that employers don’t just buy what vendors are selling carte blanch but are customizing policies to unique workforce needs.

We would also like to see companies move toward adopting certified or validated interventions. Just like the total quality movement moved toward certification of certain quality procedures, we would like to see this done for work–family policies. We’ve noted that consultants rarely validate the interventions they are promoting. Yet in the employee selection realm, the International Journal of Selection and Assessment encourages practitioners to provide research briefs using “real” data as part of their Information Exchange manuscript submission process ( Viswesvaran, 2007 ). The write-ups are short and theory is not needed or warranted. This serves as fertile ground and empirical evidence for theorists to work from and supports inductive theory generation. We hope developments for validated knowledge sharing are something we can see in the work–family arena either as a recurring section in at least one of our top journals, in a series of special issues, or a SIOP online community.

Work–family research also needs to become more interdisciplinary, and the next generation of work–family scholars need to be more cross-disciplinary. Work–family phenomena, problems, and solutions indeed span many disciplines. Although there are many lenses to understand work–family issues, the field has been fragmented and studies do not talk to each other well. Deciding what research questions to ask and the perspectives used to “see” and interpret work–family phenomenon are very disciplinary specific. Take this example from a chapter in the Handbook of Work and Family ( Kossek, Sweet, & Pitt-Catsouphes, 2006 ).

A young woman who has been employed at the local factory for several years with an excellent attendance and performance record decides to quit work shortly after the birth of her and her husband’s second child. She had returned to work for a few months after her 6-week maternity leave and it seemed as if things were working fine, but then she gave her 2 weeks’ notice to her supervisor. Senior management noted that the young woman’s behavior was similar to that of many other working parents at the plant and they were becoming worried about the lost productivity. They decided to consult a variety of researchers from the local university. The psychologist stated that the working parents were probably experiencing role conflict between the demands of work and those of the family. The sociologist added that traditional societal and marital gender expectations were causing women to work a second domestic shift when they got home from their jobs. The economist surmised that the wages the plant was offering were not sufficiently generous to offset the cost of paying for quality child care. The demographer observed that workforce data suggest that if a working mother has more than one child under 3 years old and is also part of the sandwich generation providing elder care, she is likely to temporarily leave the labor force. The historian stated that the factory has retained employment approaches not much different from those first adopted a century ago, and these traditional production methods have made it difficult to alter workplace structures to provide flexible work hours. This perspective was echoed by the anthropologist, who noted the strong factory cultural norms reinforcing segmentation of the workplace for at least 10 hours a day from personal life. (p. 67)

As this example illustrates, researchers from different disciplines tend to frame research questions in very unique ways, using different measures, replicating and culturally reproducing knowledge in ways reflective of how they were socialized as doctoral students. I–O scholars, practitioners, students, or policymakers have probably overfocused on the employer and employee psychological perspectives and consequently have limited the utility of our studies. We need to look at work–family relationships more broadly to better understand the structural root causes perpetuatingwork– family issues—perspectives more often investigated by broader social and behavioral sciences.

An exciting university and company partnership that is interdisciplinary is the National Work–Family Health Network, which is supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and many other foundations and agencies. This team of leading scholars from a broad range of disciplines, including public and occupational health, I–O psychology, human resources, and sociology, has teamed up to design workplace interventions to reduce work–family conflict, increase social support for work–family issues, increase schedule control and change the culture to be more supportive, and ultimately improve health and effectiveness of workers, companies, and families. When the studies are done, interdisciplinary research teams will have collaborated over a decade to conduct studies with workers, families, and managers spanning retail, corporate headquarter professional, IT, healthcare, and hotel environments. Some of the studies are using clinical trial methodology where workgroups and organizations are randomized to receive work–family interventions as a treatment and then compared to control workplace groups. As supportive supervisors and work–family cultures are so critical to the effective implementation of work–family policies, this interdisciplinary practitioner, scholarly, and government partnership is an important innovation and hopefully one that can be replicated ( http://www.kpchr.org/workfamilyhealthnet work/public/default.aspx ).

Contributor Information

Ellen Ernst Kossek, Michigan State University.

Boris B. Baltes, Wayne State University.

Russell A. Matthews, Louisiana State University.

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Using research to solve societal problems starts with building connections and making space for young people

by Zoey England, Jennifer Forbey and Michael Muszynski, The Conversation

Often, when scientists do research around a specific societal challenge, they hope their work will help solve that larger problem. Yet translating findings into long-lasting, community-driven solutions is much harder than most expect.

It seems intuitive that scientists studying living organisms, microbes, and ecosystems could apply their findings to tackle food shortages, help keep environments healthy, and improve human and animal health . But it's not always that easy. Issues like climate change , renewable energy, public health, and migration are complex , making direct solutions challenging to develop and implement.

As a group of researchers invested in helping scientists create meaningful impact with their work, we understand problems like these will need experts from different fields and industries to work together.

This means we might need to reevaluate certain aspects of the inquiry process and embrace fresh perspectives if we, as members of the scientific community, want to improve our capacity for producing solutions-oriented research.

Defining use-inspired research

Science does not occur in a vacuum. Factors including funding availability, access to advanced technologies and political or social contexts can influence the kinds of studies that get done. A framework called use-inspired research and engagement, or UIRE, acknowledges this fact.

In use-inspired research , the potential applications of findings for society shape the directions of exploration.

In UIRE, researchers work with members of a community to figure out what questions they should look into. They form partnerships with other stakeholders, including governments, businesses of all scales and nonprofits, to form a collaborative foundation. This way, researchers can tailor investigations from the outset to be useful to and usable by decision-makers.

Translational research , or intentionally grounding scientific exploration in practical applications, isn't new . Use-inspired research expands on translational research, prioritizing building connections between practitioners and communities.

In the U.S., the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022 further codified use-inspired research. The act directed US$280 billion over the next 10 years toward funding scientific inquiry to boost domestic competitiveness, innovation and national security.

This legislation also authorized the establishment of the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, called NSF TIP . TIP marks the agency's first new directorate in over three decades, created with the aim of sparking the growth of diverse innovation and technology landscapes.

Producing science in partnership

In use-inspired research and engagement, collaboration is a big part of each project from the start, when the researchers are first deciding what to study. These cooperative partnerships continue throughout data collection and analysis. Together, these teams apply the results and develop products, implement behavior changes, or further inform community decision-making.

For example, a large hospital, an academic organization and several nonprofits may partner together to explore issues affecting health care accessibility in the region. Researchers collect data through surveys and interviews, and interpret the findings within the community's specific circumstances. They can then coordinate data evaluation with the health care and nonprofit partners, which helps take socioeconomic status, cultural beliefs and built infrastructure like grocery stores and public transportation into account.

This approach brings together the broad perspectives of a large hospital network, academic expertise around survey creation and data analysis, and specialized knowledge held by nonprofits. These groups can then collaborate further to develop specific programs, such as educational initiatives and enhanced health care services. They can tailor these to the needs of the community they serve.

Use-inspired research matters because it looks at all the different issues facing a community holistically and keeps them in mind when investigating potential solutions. UIRE is not a substitute for basic, foundational research, which explores new questions to fundamentally understand a topic. Rather, it's an approach centered around selecting questions and developing methods based on real-world importance.

UIRE creates a foundation for long-term, inclusive partnerships—and not just within academia. Government, community organizations, large companies and startups can all use the same principles of UIRE to share ideas and craft solutions to issues facing their communities. Individuals from all sorts of backgrounds are equally integral to the entire process, further amplifying the viewpoints present.

Use-inspired methods are not only relevant to improving research outcomes. A use-inspired approach drives innovation and technological advancements across sectors . When used in K-12 classrooms , UIRE leads to well-rounded students .

This approach can also improve learning in workforce development spaces, creating employees trained to build connections.

UIRE provides platforms for the general public to participate in conversations about issues impacting their lives that they may not have otherwise been a part of.

Harnessing early-career engagement

Use-inspired methods challenge not only how, but who contributes to and benefits from scientific inquiry. They also focus on making the findings accessible to those outside academia.

To craft necessary solutions for complex societal problems, institutions will need to continue backing traditional scholars who excel at pure basic research. At the same time, they can support training in use-inspired domains.

Early-career professionals across sectors will continue to play an important role in spreading and sustaining the cultural shifts necessary to embrace use-inspired research at a wider scale. These early-career professionals can bring fresh ideas to the table and craft innovative approaches to problems.

To support translational research long term, institutions and supervisors can support students in hands-on learning opportunities from the first year of undergraduate coursework to postgraduate fellowships. These opportunities can help students learn about UIRE and equip them with the skills needed to build cross-sector partnerships before entering the workforce.

By receiving mentorship from individuals outside academia, students and trainees can gain exposure to different career paths and find motivation to pursue opportunities outside traditional academic roles. This mentorship fosters creative problem-solving and adaptability.

UIRE provides a potential framework to addressing complex societal challenges. Creating opportunities for the ongoing involvement of young people will seed a vibrant future for use-inspired research and engagement.

Provided by The Conversation

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• ParentPowered, formerly Ready4K, is going to high school! Explore the new curriculum

• 4 Best Practices for Connecting Families to Community Resources

Written by the ParentPowered Team; edited by Maren Madalyn

Sign up to get Everyday Learning Moments delivered straight to your inbox.

You may also like, lessons from the field about connecting families to community resources, 1. build your resource web first, start with the fundamentals, look beyond your community, make it a group effort, check every link and phone number, 2. think about the whole caregiver, 3. messaging matters, 4. make it easy, share resources at the right time, keep your message short, access to the right resources benefits everyone.

When it comes to connecting families to community resources, organizations are constantly innovating. Whether it’s a nationally provided mental health crisis center or a local parent support group, these groups are moving beyond bulletin boards and community rooms to put the right resources into the right hands, at the right time.

Finding the right combination of relevance and timing is the key to support families with actually engaging with and using available resources.

Through our custom work, ParentPowered has done quite a bit of resource hunting with our community partners across the United States. We are always struck by each partner tailored their community resources to their families’ specific landscape, culture, and experiences.

This observation became a cornerstone principle to designing a complementary tool to our  Trauma-Informed family engagement curriculum called Community Support Stream. Together, the program and tool connect families through text messages to something new from our partner’s curated set of community resources every week. Every resource and message shared feels personal and reflects the importance of providing both the family and their children support from community organizations around them. After all, family engagement is essential to both student and community thriving.

In this article, the ParentPowered team shares the lessons we’ve learned from our community-based partnerships, lessons that you can apply to get family resources into the right hands at the right time.

Our first key takeaway from working with so many community agencies and family resource centers is that supports are incredibly varied. Some programs provide early head start services to families of young children, while others specialize in vocational services for adults. Even among like programs, resources look different.

Complicating matters is the fact that resources may be scattered or live in multiple places. When we ask new partners for the 25 family resources they want sent to their community, some say “no problem.” However, others may heave a big sigh. For every partner brainstorming their family resource list from scratch, another sends us a 32-page booklet of services.

There are three categories of community resources that partners share with their families. All three have an important role to play, and together they make a powerful pyramid of concrete and important resources that your families will find useful.

• ParentPowered-vetted resources.  These offerings include federal government programs, parenting supports, and national crisis supports. They are the sturdy foundation in your organization’s resource guide.
• Evergreen local resources.  You know your families and community best. These resources help family members get the specific and unique support they need in their locale, with their community context in mind.
• Timely resources . These offerings include information, activities, and services needed in the moment. They may be seasonal, such as summer learning to reduce summer slide, or connected to specific events happening around parents, such as early care for a newly pregnant mother.

Now it’s time to put your list of family resources together. Our partners have found the following guidelines make the process smoother when compiling their guide for children and adults alike – whether they’re hunting for new services or whittling down a longer list.

The most common resources shared by our partners focus on the basic needs of families. That means connecting families to community resources that can provide food, clothing, housing, utilities, transportation, and even child care. Focusing on these fundamentals is a great place to start your core list of essential community resources as opportunities to deliver immediate and direct benefits to families.

Fundamentals also includes knowing and respecting your families’ cultural backgrounds. Explore our recent article to unpack culturally responsive family engagement .

Just as there can be food deserts throughout the United States, there can also be  resource deserts . Areas lacking local supports make it difficult for families to get the help they need, when they need it. This is where many programs turn toward a national center or state provider for help to bring services into the community.

If you don’t have a local option for certain community or family support services, research state, regional, and national resources. There are many great options that your organization can take advantage of or that you can share directly with parents.

The  Community Asset Mapping process  can become quite the project for our partners. It takes time and often needs multiple team members to build a full resource guide – one person may not be the expert in every category! Connect with and tap into your community network. Someone you know may have just the information you need to round out your community services and family offerings.

“We were able to gather family advocates, supervisors and other specialists in our program to connect resources we found most needed for our families. [ParentPowered’s] support has allowed us as a program to provide quality resources to our families throughout our region.”  – Aubrey Cooper, Education Coordinator at Kawerak Head Start

We’ve all had the experience of calling a phone number for something we need, only to hear a dial tone or worse, “This number is no longer in service.” It’s a frustrating experience for anyone, but roadblocks like these create bigger challenges for families trying to get help for their child or themselves. A disconnected number or broken website link may even discourage community members from reaching out to family resource centers in the future.

This is why we guide our partners to test the contact information for each family support service and community organization listed in their offerings  before  we fold that option in their Community Support Stream — including the phone number, email address, and website link for each online resource cited. A dead link is a dead end!

While it takes some time, it’s worth it to provide a good experience for connecting families to community resources. It also helps ensure families can access family resource centers or other community based services on their first attempt.

Yes, building your basic resource guide can require additional work. But once it’s complete, you’ll feel great knowing that you’re connecting families to community partners and resources at the right time and place. One of our favorite things to see is how many families click on our partner’s shared resources each week. This data tells us and our partners that families are connected with the right support at the right time!

Most of the children and families our partners serve are in a state of need, even in a state of crisis. Of our U.S. partners where we have household income data,  64% of children we served in June 2020  qualified as economically disadvantaged, historically referred to as ‘low-income families’. However, this doesn’t mean that families only seek community services that meet basic needs or only need help while in crisis.

On our partners’ ParentPowered dashboards, we can see which of a community’s resources are most often clicked by their families. By collecting this feedback, we’ve learned that caregivers also want:

• Activities that help them engage with and support children at home
• Self-care resources for their own health and well being

“The ParentPowered Community Support Stream is so important to our program. It provides a way for families to have access to supports they may have not known about before and have a way to reach out easier for help.” – Aubrey Cooper, Education Coordinator at Kawerak Head Start

Some of the most-accessed community resources are those that empower parents to nurture their relationship with their child. As you craft your resource web, add ones that inspire your families to feel great about themselves and their parenting.

Cataloging existing assets and identifying which are the right ones to send to families are only the first two steps. Next comes crafting your message around an asset, a critical part of encouraging your audience to explore that opportunity and other resources shared in the future.

Think about the difference between these two messages for families to highlight available self-care services and resources:

It is evident that Version 2 provides both a personal touch and important context needed for this resource to educate families about the national center providing it and why it matters. Contextualizing your family resources does several important things:

• It helps families self-identify needs.  The language you provide around the message will help the family to determine which of their needs this resource would meet. When families receive messages referring to specific agencies they know or locations they’re familiar with, it feels personal, like this resource is intended especially for them. The more specific the family resource feels, the more likely it is that the family will use it.
• It quickly explains the value of a resource.  A short explanation of why your organization sees this resource as important enough to share can transform a family’s response from “why am I getting this message?” to one that sparks curiosity to learn more about the highlighted services.
• It normalizes the need.  Many people have complex feelings about accessing community or family resources. They range from fear of stigma to a sense that others need it more than they do. Assuring families that they’re not alone if they want support can nudge them to learn more and use critical services.

Crafting a targeted and succinct message helps families engage with the right family resource centers or community partners that meet their specific needs. Which brings us to our last insight…

Wherever possible, make any and every attempt to connect families to a support system as easy as possible. Minimizing the barriers that families face just increases their opportunity to actually use community based services. There are two ways to keep access easy for families.

An important lesson we’ve learned is that it’s critical for partners to reflect on what their community needs most right now. Building a laundry list of every possible resource drains your team and makes it challenging for families to take advantage of the information.

Does your organization or its community partners offer educational programs that help students transition back-to-school? Send messages to families in early summer, not the middle of winter! Are there local food pantries and other food assistance organizations with programs to support families during the winter holidays? Let families know about them throughout fall and during the weeks leading up to them.

Connecting families to community resources at the appropriate time makes them more relevant for families and increases families’ chances of engaging with them.

We know that many families are often busy and stressed. And we’re all experiencing the information overload that comes with living in the 21st century! All of this means that if there are  too many words  in your family messages, it may result in few to no messages read.

Of course, if you know   ParentPowered , you probably can guess what we’re going to say next:  text it!  

We strongly encourage you to reach families by text message because:

• Text messages offer a structured way to ensure your note must be short and sweet
• Text is the most universally used technology – 98% of US adults under 50 use text! (Pew Research Center, 2021)
• Text is 400% more likely to be read than an email (Pew Research Center, 2021)

The easier it is for families to learn about family resource centers, programs, or community services, the better the chances are that they will actually use them!

For more innovative approaches to family and community engagement, explore this research round-up .

Connecting families to community resources is key to supporting their engagement in their students’ learning and fueling equity in education . Putting these lessons into practice can help families access the support they need, when they need it. Whether through direct services, comprehensive family resource centers, or just-in-time school programs, we know that when families thrive, communities thrive! 

Every week you'll receive new resources for families, insights from research, and direct feedback from families about what they want from you, their educational partners.

7 Strategies for Supporting Student Mental Health via Family Engagement

Supporting student mental health takes the whole village, from educators to families to community organizations. ParentPowered’s family engagement programs can uplift caregiver engagement here.

Unlocking Success Together: 4 Insights into the Importance of Family Engagement in Education

The importance of family engagement in education cannot be understated. Explore four key reasons why family-school partnerships cultivate student success, and how ParentPowered programs bolster these relationships.

Educational Equity Starts ith A Full Stomach

Educational equity relies largely on leveling the playing field for students. ParentPowered reflects on what caregivers share make the biggest differences to their students’ success.

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Relationships Articles & More

How often do couples express compassion to each other, according to new research, partners show compassion about twice an hour—but our reasons for doing so can sometimes be counterintuitive..

Imagine you’re coming home from work at the end of a long day. You feel tired and distracted, and you might be looking forward to an evening of relaxing on the couch—but you also know you need to put dinner on the table, care for children or pets, and complete household tasks.

In situations like this, during the hustle and bustle of everyday life with our families, how much compassion do couples express? A recent study sought to test out this question—and found that expressions of compassion are surprisingly common, but the patterns behind when we express compassion are somewhat unexpected.

How often do people express compassion?

In the paper, published recently in the Journal of Family Psychology , researchers examined how often married couples express compassion to each other in their daily lives. As part of a larger study on family life, trained videographers recorded families interacting over four days. The results were drawn from 29 families with children from the greater Los Angeles area.

The researchers collected over 1,200 hours of recordings, including morning and evening routines, as well as full days on the weekends. To identify potential instances of compassion, the research team first identified words that might indicate compassion and searched through the transcripts of the recordings for each time couples used these words. This included words more directly related to helping (such as the words “help” or “care” or the phrase “you OK?”) as well as words that might come up in the expression of compassion (such as “good” or “wrong”). Then, they looked at these interactions more closely to determine whether an expression of compassion had occurred.

Focusing on the parents, the researchers found that expressions of compassion were quite common—when interacting, couples expressed compassion to each other about twice per hour on average. These expressions of compassion included a range of actions, such as offering an apology when someone noticed their partner feeling stressed, or asking, “What’s wrong?” after hearing their partner take a potentially stressful work call.

The researchers also found that there weren’t gender differences here—husbands and wives expressed compassion to each other about equally often.

Compassion Meditation

Strengthen feelings of concern for the suffering of others

Given the wide-ranging benefits of compassion , the fact that couples express compassion to each other readily is good news. And, importantly, these expressions of compassion didn’t occur in the research lab (where you might expect couples to be especially attuned to their partner’s behavior), but in everyday life. Galen McNeil, staff psychologist and research scientist at UCLA and lead author of the study, explains that it’s one thing to express compassion in the relatively distraction-free environment of a research lab. But that might not be reflective of how much compassion couples actually express at home, when lots of other things—such as household tasks or an influx of notifications from our phones—are also competing for our attention.

Who expresses more compassion?

In addition to measuring how much compassion partners expressed on average, the researchers looked at what might explain the differences in how often particular individuals showed compassion. Participants had filled out surveys measuring their depressive symptoms and neuroticism (the tendency to experience negative emotions), as well as how they perceived the quality of their relationship. The researchers found that, when wives felt more depressed, their husbands expressed more compassion, suggesting that husbands extended more support when their wives were in need.

However, some of the other findings were more counterintuitive. When husbands perceived their relationship to be lower-quality , they showed more compassion toward their wives. Similarly, when husbands were more neurotic, they also engaged in more compassion. For women, their perception of the relationship, neuroticism, and depression were not related to how much compassion they expressed to their partners.

Given the wide range of benefits compassion has, it might seem surprising that men who were expressing more compassion were more neurotic and thought their relationships were in worse shape. One explanation, according to the researchers, is that these men might be especially vigilant for signs of potential problems in their relationships, and that expressing compassion might be a response to their worries about how the relationship is going.

Interestingly, this interpretation suggests that, when people express compassion, it may sometimes have more to do with their own levels of stress. One implication of this, McNeil explains, is that if your partner is expressing a lot of compassion to you, it might be worthwhile to also check in with them : Showing compassion to others could be a sign that someone also needs support for themselves.

The researchers suggest that one direction for future studies could be to look at the context in which compassion occurs. Since partners who expressed more compassion weren’t more satisfied with their relationships in the current study, McNeil wants to investigate why. Perhaps, for example, there are some contexts in which expressing compassion is more beneficial, and others where it is less so. Additionally, the authors point out that compassion can also be expressed nonverbally, and one potential direction for future research could be to analyze nonverbal behaviors in addition to the words people use.

Overall, the research finds that people express compassion relatively frequently—about twice an hour when interacting with their spouse. However, it also suggests that our reasons for expressing compassion aren’t always as straightforward and other-focused as we might think.

About the Author

Elizabeth Hopper

Elizabeth Hopper, Ph.D. , received her Ph.D. in psychology from UC Santa Barbara and currently works as a freelance science writer specializing in psychology and mental health.

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“Why can’t you help?” Developing research infrastructure in Nigeria

March/april 2024 | volume 23 number 2.

By Susan Scutti

A handful of forthright words spurred Dr. Echezona Ezeanolue to reconsider his career. In 2010, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow in the office of Kathleen Sebelius, then U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. “They were talking about how, despite all the money spent in Nigeria by the U.S., it was one of four countries where HIV testing among pregnant women was less than 20%. So, the secretary turned to me and said, ‘You're from Nigeria—why can't you help?’”

At that time Ezeanolue’s appointment was at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and all his research was U.S.-based. Yet he left Sibelius’ office determined to work in Nigeria. Soon after, he applied for and received a grant jointly funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Fogarty and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) studying mother-to-child HIV transmission in 2012.

“I went back to Nigeria, and saw Harvard was there, University of Maryland was there, Vanderbilt was there—many U. S. institutions were there. So, I thought, This isn’t a problem of expertise, but one of culture .” He called all of them and asked, What’s the issue? “They told me they couldn’t find pregnant women.” He smiled ruefully as he recalled thinking, How can you not find pregnant women?  Turns out, they’d set up their programs in health institutions as they would do in the U.S. Yet, unlike the U.S., only about a third of Nigerian women deliver in health facilities. The number of women willing to participate in each program was insufficient for creating study cohorts.

Community orientation

To work with women on their own terms, Ezeanolue started a community-based intervention in 40 neighborhoods and villages. He decided to offer additional services since he knew HIV/AIDS was highly stigmatized. This way, he’d attract more participants. “We called the pregnant women and asked them what else could we offer them. The first thing they mentioned was nutrition during pregnancy, what could they eat if they couldn’t afford multivitamins?” (Ripe plantains can provide iron during pregnancy.) 

“The second thing [the mothers asked about] was sickle cell checkups,” said Ezeanolue, noting Nigeria has the highest number of people in the world born with sickle cell disease. “Then we asked the men what they wanted, since they drive the women to (and pay for) health care.” The men wanted anemia check-ups. “So we added hemoglobin testing. And, in Nigeria, the number one cause of disability is stroke from undiagnosed and uncontrolled hypertension, so we added blood pressure to our list. Finally, we included depression screening.”

Ezeanolue’s first project in Nigeria yielded 25 publications. “We had data on HIV, anemia, sickle cell, hypertension, and depression. We found out 35% of the people diagnosed with hypertension didn't even know they had hypertension.” Since this project, he’s acquired an additional role at University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) and conducted several NIH-funded studies in Nigeria, including Strengthening Research Administration Infrastructure for HIV Research , a Fogarty G-11 project that is still underway.

Laying the groundwork for research infrastructure

One of the world’s largest HIV epidemics exists in Nigeria; 1.8 million people there live with HIV. The U.S. government has made substantial investments in HIV care and research in Nigeria, and UNN College of Medicine has implemented multiple projects, but only as a sub-awardee. While 93% of researchers at UNN expressed interest in submitting grant applications, only 28% knew where to get research administration support, a needs assessment found. Ezeanolue’s project, a partnership between UNN and University of California, San Diego (UCSD), aims to further develop, professionalize, and reinforce research administration and management infrastructure at UNN so that it can become a primary grant recipient.

Dr. Gregory Aarons, a professor at UCSD, is a principal investigator (PI) on this G-11 project. “I was doing training on implementation science for Fogarty in sub-Saharan Africa and I got to meet many researchers, including Eche Ezeanolue,” recalled Aarons.    (Ezeanolue made the most of this first encounter, immediately asking Aarons to work with him on the “ baby shower initiative ,” a study evaluating delivery of HIV services at churches.)   “I became very interested in Eche’s community-based research approach for implementing HIV prevention and treatment for pregnant women.”

Ezeanolue developed his singular research approach following a network meeting organized by Fogarty’s Dr. Rachel Sturke and NICHD’s Dr. George Siberry. Sturke and Siberry had asked the HIV investigators a meeting in South Africa to bring along one of their collaborators; Ezeanolue arrived with a church bishop and Nigeria’s CDC director. “When I saw how that meeting was organized—how it was a platform to share—I recognized that there’s a gap in Nigeria,” said Ezeanolue. In his experience, Nigerian scientists had to go outside the country to learn what’s happening inside the country. Returning to Nigeria, he immediately called all the PEPFAR-funded investigators there to discuss forming a platform—an alliance for implementation research.

NISA, an engine for growth

The Nigerian Implementation Science Alliance (NISA) has three main focuses, he explained. First, NISA develops infrastructure to conduct clinical trials and implementation science. Second, it builds a cadre of well-educated research staff. Third, NISA brings together investigators, policymakers, NGO staff, and others to share ideas and learn what researchers have already done, so they can avoid repeating what hadn’t worked, while adopting and scaling up what had.

“We decided not to ask NIH for funding because we wanted to build something sustainable,” he said. “That made everybody laugh.” Seemingly, only Sturke and Siberry took him seriously. “They promised to support us informally (since we weren’t funded by them), and we organized our first meeting in 2015. Both came and that was the start of NISA.”

Today, NISA rests on four pillars: weekly research-in-progress meetings; monthly webinars; quarterly research sharing weeks; and a yearly conference. Aarons, a NISA conference keynote speaker over multiple yeas, said, “I was really impressed with the ability of Eche and the UNN team to bring people from across Nigeria and other West African countries to NISA, where people could learn about implementation science and how it can accelerate adoption of evidence-based treatments and prevention approaches.” Aarons also saw how the first-of-its-kind practice-based research network developed from NISA could build on the G-11-funded program in developing research capacity.

Ezeanolue explained, “We selected two sites from each of the country’s six regions and made them what we call ‘implementation laboratories.’ If we implement something in two sites in every region and it works, then each of those sites will become model innovation centers to help scale-up regionally.” Ezeanolue is director of UNN’s Center for Translation and Implementation Science (CTAIR) , the network’s organizing hub. His and Aaron’s G-11 grant, then, aims to strengthen the research administration infrastructure of UNN and CTAIR.

The grant requires training of 12 people in research administration. Aarons said, “We cast a wide net to look for who was really poised to be in those administration roles. We didn't want to train people if they weren't going to actually go back and practice.” Then they brought in an additional 12 people, doubling the number of trainees. "Remember the 12 network sites, two in each region?” Ezeanolue asked. “We’re also training one community research engagement officer from each of those sites. These are the people who go to the church, the mosque, the community, and talk about the research we're about to do, why it's important and why people should participate.”

Focus: Fogarty’s G-11 program builds support infrastructure

• Building infrastructure so scientists can focus on research
• Fortifying research ethics at Kinshasa University
• Developing research infrastructure in Nigeria

Integrating administration and research training

Nicole Joyce, a UCSD research administrator, had never met Aarons before receiving an email from him in 2020, requesting information about her program. “In our first meeting, it slowly dawned on me that he didn’t want to just send staff to my training—he was asking me to co-develop a capacity building program with UNN.” She immediately felt intimidated. “Administrators don’t cross over to the research side very often.” However, Joyce’s infectious enthusiasm for research administration was clear to Aarons, who believed this could be a great opportunity for her to make a difference in global health.

Joyce’s training strategy is anchored to the research administration life cycle: “So we look pre-award activities, post-award activities, compliance activities, and the systems, tools and resources researchers need to perform those activities.” Though Joyce began her UNN training in the usual way, she quickly learned to adapt to the realities of Nigeria’s infrastructure. “They commonly have power outages and unreliable Internet. Some trainees didn't have laptops, software, or tech skills.” When they trained on-site in Enugu, Nigeria, the team encountered unexpected hurdles when SAM (the U.S. government system for awards management) couldn’t “talk to” another system. “A little technical challenge around an address character limitation ended up costing us nine months and not being able to pay a sub-awardee.”

Nevertheless, the team scored undeniable triumphs. Notably, a National Cancer Institute research grant awarded to Aarons and Ezeanolue alongside the G-11 project helped provide the trainees with much needed real-world experience. Aarons said, “We're developing a sense of collaboration. The administrators feel they're part of something important… because they are.   ”Hands-on coaching and mentoring continue during the project’s second year via weekly, sometimes daily calls." He added, “Through everyone's enthusiasm, it’s going way beyond what we proposed—it’s building not just UNN’s infrastructure but a nation's infrastructure.”

More Information

• Related Fogarty grant: Strengthening Research Administration Infrastructure for HIV Research in Nigeria
• Echezona Ezeanolue, MD, MPH, biography via Center for Translation and Implementation Science (CTAIR)
• Greg Aarons, PhD, biography via the  University of California San Diego
• Profile of Nicole Joyce, MBA , director of sponsored research administration, Business Intelligence Systems and Innovation Strategies at UCSD
• The baby shower initiative , Annals of Global Health , September 25, 2014

Updated April 16, 2024

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How Libraries Help Job Seekers Get Hired

The current state of the U.S. workforce is marked by a significant worker shortage . Despite there being 8.9 million open jobs, only 6.5 million unemployed workers are available to fill them. This gap between job openings and available workers persists across various industries and states. Pandemic-induced early retirements, childcare constraints, and financial support during the crisis have left the nation with a deficit of workers . In addition, the pandemic has accelerated automation, requiring many workers to adapt. More displaced workers will need different skills to remain employed.

Public libraries can play a crucial role in supporting workforce development by offering free job and career services. These include upskilling programs, résumé development, computer access, interview preparation, workshops and seminars. Libraries looking to augment their collections to address the needs of today’s job seekers and career changers should consider the following five activities:

1. Exploring New Career Options and Entrepreneurship

The economic turmoil created by COVID-19 led some workers to reassess their careers . Using resources such as Job & Career Accelerator , patrons can research growth industries, take skills and interests assessments to find ideal career paths, and explore more than 1,000 occupations ― including civilian jobs for those transitioning out of the military. They can also conduct real-time searches in a database of more than five million job postings.

Some patrons might consider pursuing a skilled trade given today’s skilled trade workforce shortage. BlueCareer is a workforce development platform that serves as a one-stop show for patrons to explore skilled trade industries, start their careers, connect with employers and more. Users can take personality and experience assessments to see which trade profession might be a good fit. They can also access up-to-date pay and career growth data and explore trade schools.

Other patrons might wish to explore the possibility of starting a small business, one that fills a need created by our post-pandemic world. EBSCO’s Entrepreneurial Mindset Training Course enables prospective entrepreneurs to learn the underlying beliefs and behaviors that empower ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things. The eight-module, self-paced course can help them develop the mindset they need to succeed in today’s rapidly changing world ― whether that means starting a business, pursuing a new career or becoming a better employee.

2. Boosting Job Skills

It’s never too late to develop new knowledge and skills. In doing so, individuals can make themselves stand out in the vast sea of job candidates. Encourage job seekers to brush up on their computer, internet and social media skills. LearningExpress Computer Skills Center offers dozens of video courses for those interested in learning popular software applications, such as Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop. LearningExpress Library Complete also offers Amazon Web Services (AWS) training courses in a wide array of leading-edge technology topics. LearningExpress Library Complete also offers tutorials and practice sets to help job seekers build their math, writing and grammar skills. They’ll also find tutorials, e-books and practice tests to help them prepare for the GED® test, college admissions exams and occupational certification tests. They’ll even find a keyboarding tutorial to help them brush up on their typing skills. For those interested in pursuing a skilled trade, BlueCareer offers a variety of video and virtual training opportunities.

3. Creating a Stand-Out Resume and Cover Letter

To secure an interview, job seekers must create a resume and cover letter that will stand out among the competition. Not only should candidates be sure to format these documents properly, but they should also use dynamic and engaging keywords relevant to the position they’re seeking. Job & Career Accelerator ’s step-by-step resume and cover letter builders help job seekers create and publish the most effective resumes and cover letters possible. As they build these documents, users will find expert advice, easy-to-follow instructions, recommended keywords, and helpful samples to guide them through each step of the process.

4. Getting Comfortable with Virtual Job Interviews

The pandemic has led many employers to conduct initial interviews virtually. According to Forbes Contributor Joseph Liu , “You have to be able to bring the same level of enthusiasm, professionalism, and communication that you would to an in-person interview.” Remind job seekers to test out their videoconferencing software in advance of the scheduled interview. In 

addition, Job & Career Accelerator offers an “Interview with Confidence” tutorial which walks job seekers through the stages of the interview process and provides strategies to help them prepare.

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According to 2018 research, the average job search takes about five months . In some industries, it could take longer, so job seekers need to expand their professional networks. Job & Career Accelerator offers a number of e-books with networking advice, “Networking and Informational Sample Letters,” “Social Networking for Business Success” and “Social Networking for Career Success.” In addition, users will find a helpful tutorial called, “Social Networking with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”

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What to do if you get an alert that an AirTag, Find My network accessory, or set of AirPods is with you

AirTag lets you easily track things like your keys, wallet, purse, backpack, luggage, and more. Simply set it up with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and attach it to your item, and your AirTag shows up in the Items tab in the Find My app.

AirTag and devices that are part of the Find My network accessory program , and some AirPod models—AirPods (3rd generation), AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max—use the Find My network to help you keep track of and find your belongings.* After you set up a compatible item, it shows up in the Devices or Items tab in the Find My app.

AirTag, AirPods, and other Find My network accessories include features to guard against unwanted tracking. They should not be used to track people, and should not be used to track property that does not belong to you. Using these products to track people without their consent is a crime in many countries and regions around the world. If an AirTag, set of AirPods, or Find My network accessory is discovered to be unlawfully tracking a person, law enforcement can request any available information from Apple to support their investigation.

AirTag, AirPods, and Find My network accessories are designed to protect your privacy when you're using them to keep track of important items. They have unique Bluetooth identifiers that change frequently. The Find My network uses end-to-end encryption and is built with privacy in mind.

Learn more about Find My and Privacy

Unwanted tracking

If any AirTag, AirPods, or other Find My network accessory separated from its owner is seen moving with you over time, you'll be notified in one of two ways. These features were created specifically to discourage people from trying to track you without your knowledge.

If you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, Find My will send a notification to your Apple device. This feature is available on iOS or iPadOS 14.5 or later. To receive alerts, make sure that you:

Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services, and turn Location Services on.

Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > System Services. Turn Find My iPhone on.

Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > System Services. Turn Significant Locations on to be notified when you arrive at a significant location, such as your home.

Go to Settings > Bluetooth, and turn Bluetooth on.

Go to the Find My app, tap the Me tab, and turn Tracking Notifications on.

Turn off airplane mode. If your device is in airplane mode, you won't receive tracking notifications.

An AirTag, AirPods Pro (2nd generation) charging case, or Find My network accessory that isn't with its owner for a period of time will emit a sound when it's moved.

If you detect an unknown AirTag, Find My network accessory, or AirPods, use the steps below to learn about it, find it, and disable it. If you're using an Android device, you can download the Tracker Detect app to find an AirTag or Find My network accessory that's separated from its owner and might be traveling with you.

If you see an alert

If you see one of the following alerts on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, an item compatible with the Find My network could be traveling with you, and the owner might be able to see its location. This could be an AirTag, AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, or a Find My network accessory from manufacturers other than Apple .

It's possible that the AirTag or Find My network accessory might be attached to an item you're borrowing, or you might get this alert if you’re borrowing someone else’s AirPods. If you're borrowing an AirTag or another item compatible with the Find My network from a member of your Family Sharing group, you can turn off alerts for that item for one day, or indefinitely.

If an AirTag that's separated from its owner is seen moving with you over time, or if your iPhone is awake and an AirTag that isn't with its owner for a period of time emits a sound to indicate that it has moved, this alert is displayed: AirTag Found Moving With You.

Find My displays a map of where the AirTag, Find My network accessory, or set of AirPods has been observed with you. The red dots show where the unknown item was detected near your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The dashed lines connecting the red dots help indicate the sequence where the item was detected with you. The red dots do not indicate when the item's owner is viewing the item's location.

If AirPods that are separated from their owner are seen moving with you over time, one of these alerts is displayed: AirPods Detected, AirPods Pro Detected, or AirPods Max Detected.

If a Find My network accessory that's separated from its owner is seen moving with you over time, this alert is displayed: "Product Name" Detected (where "Product Name" is the name of the Find My network accessory that has been detected).

If AirPods or a Find My network accessory is detected but the Find My app has issues connecting to them or to the server at that time, this alert is displayed: Unknown Accessory Detected. This alert will display only if a set of AirPods or a Find My network accessory is detected near you, not an AirTag. These could be borrowed AirPods, or AirPods inadvertently left behind by a friend or family member.

Find the unknown AirTag, AirPods, or Find My network accessory

If you get an alert that an AirTag, AirPods, or another Find My network accessory is traveling with you, follow these steps to find it. First, check on the Find My app if you're able to play a sound on the unknown accessory:

Tap the alert.

Tap Continue and then tap Play Sound.

Listen for the sound. You can play it again if you need more time to find the item.

If the option to play a sound isn't available, the item might not be with you anymore. Or if it was with you overnight, its identifier might have changed. Find My uses the identifier to determine that it's the same item moving with you. If the item is within range of its owner, you also won't be able to play a sound.

If the unknown accessory is an AirTag and you have a supported iPhone model with Ultra Wideband , you can also tap Find Nearby to use Precision Finding to help you locate the unknown AirTag.

Tap Continue, then tap Find Nearby.

Follow the onscreen instructions and move around the space until your iPhone connects to the unknown AirTag.

Your iPhone displays the distance and direction to the unknown AirTag. Use that information to get closer to the unknown AirTag until you find it.

If the option to play a sound isn't available or you're unable to hear the sound, or if you can't locate the item with Precision Finding, and you believe the item is still with you, look through your belongings to try to find it. Check on your person, or in anything in your possession that could contain this device. It could be in an item that you don’t check often, like a jacket pocket, the outer compartment of a bag, or your vehicle. If you can't find the device and if you feel your safety is at risk, go to a safe public location and contact law enforcement.

If you hear an AirTag emitting a sound

To alert people nearby, any AirTag separated for a period of time from its owner will emit a sound when it's moved. If you find an AirTag after hearing it make a sound, you can use any device that has NFC, such as an iPhone or Android phone, to see if its owner marked it as lost and if you can help return it. If you feel that this AirTag or Find My network accessory might be tracking people without their consent, you can get instructions on how to disable it.

Get information about or disable an AirTag, Find My network accessory, or set of AirPods

If you have found an unknown AirTag, you can follow these steps to see information about it, or to disable it:

If you have found an AirTag, hold the top of your iPhone or NFC-capable smartphone near the white side of the AirTag until a notification appears.

Tap the notification. This opens a website that provides information about the AirTag, including its serial number and the last four digits of the phone number of the person who registered it. This can help you identify the owner, if you know them. You might want to take a screenshot to make sure that you can document the information.

If the owner marked the AirTag as lost, you might see a message with information about how to contact the owner.

To learn more about a set of AirPods, or Find My network accessory that’s been separated from its owner, scroll to the bottom of the Items tab, then tap Identify Found Item.

If you need to see a list of all AirTag and Find My Network accessories about which you have been notified, launch the Find My app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Tap Items. Scroll to the bottom and tap Items Detected With You. Items that have recently triggered an unwanted tracking alert will be listed. If the option to play a sound isn't available, the item might not be with you anymore, might be near its owner, or if it was with you overnight, its identifier might have changed.

To disable the AirTag, AirPods, or Find My network accessory and stop it from sharing its location, tap Instructions to Disable and follow the onscreen steps. After the AirTag, AirPods, or Find My network accessory is disabled, the owner can no longer get updates on its current location. You will also no longer receive any unwanted tracking alerts for this item.

If you feel your safety is at risk, contact your local law enforcement, who can work with Apple to request information related to the item . You might need to provide the AirTag, AirPods, Find My network accessory, and the device's serial number.

Disabling the Find My network on your device, turning off Bluetooth, or turning off Location Services on your iPhone will not prevent the owner of the AirTag, AirPods, or Find My network accessory from being able to see the location of that AirTag or accessory. You must disable the item by following the instructions above.

Check for nearby AirTag or Find My network accessories with an Android device

If you use an Android device, you can download the Tracker Detect app from the Google Play Store. Tracker Detect looks for item trackers within Bluetooth range that are separated from their owner and that are compatible with Apple's Find My network. These include AirTag and compatible item trackers that use the Find My network. If you think someone is using an AirTag or another item tracker to track your location, you can scan to try to find it. If the app detects an AirTag or compatible item tracker near you for at least 10 minutes, you can play a sound to help find it.

Go to Google Play to download the Tracker Detect app

Additional resources

If you feel that your safety is at risk, these additional resources might be helpful:

In the United States: The Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the National Center for Victims of Crime

In the United Kingdom: Refuge UK

In Australia: WESNET Safety Net Australia

* The Find My network isn't supported in South Korea.

Information about products not manufactured by Apple, or independent websites not controlled or tested by Apple, is provided without recommendation or endorsement. Apple assumes no responsibility with regard to the selection, performance, or use of third-party websites or products. Apple makes no representations regarding third-party website accuracy or reliability. Contact the vendor for additional information.

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