Youth Villages is dedicated to expanding the knowledge base in the fields of child welfare and children's mental health. We are eager to utilize our data resources to answer important questions in these areas. Listed below are current and recent projects that are the result of collaboration with university-based researchers. 

• "Effectiveness of Juvenile Sexual Offender Programs: A Meta-Analysis" by Dr. Lorraine Reitzel. Winning the 2005 Graduate Student Research Award from the Association for Treatment of Sexual Abusers, Dr. Reitzel's dissertation examined program effectiveness and made recommendations for program improvements. Youth Villages provided data on client characteristics and long-term outcomes for Dr. Reitzel's research.
• Working with Dr. Mark Vander Weg (formerly of University of Memphis, now at The Mayo Clinc), Dr. Marie Sell, Dr. Debbie Mittleman, and George Relyea (all of University of Memphis), an evaluation of The Prevention Project was recently completed. A clinical trial involving random assignment to treatment conditions, funded through the generous support of The Urban Child Institute, sought to determine the efficacy of using intensive in-home services to prevent the removal of children from their home into state custody. To date, two presentations have been made at national conferences concerning various aspects of the project.
• "Parental Efficacy and Juvenile Delinquency: Longitudinal Analysis of At-Risk Adolescents after treatment" - working with Dr. George Lord (Indiana University Northwest) and Dr. Shanhe Jiang (University of Toledo) on data generated from The Prevention Project (described above), issues of social support and social control as they relate to parental efficacy were examined to determine the impact on juvenile delinquency. The first manuscript of this work was presented at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Annual Meeting earlier this year.
• Dr. Susan Popham and Dr. Sage Graham, both from The University of Memphis, are examining issues of medical communications.  With more than 4 million clinical notes in our electronic medical records database system, Youth Villages provides an immensely rich data resource for Dr. Popham (a rhetoritician by training) and Dr. Graham (a linguist). Their work is expected to yield important insight into the communication processes at work and may have immediate application in the areas of clinician training and quality assurance.