Families and Communities Research Group

The Families and Communities Research Group was formed in 1995 as an outgrowth of several research studies focused on urban children and families that were the collaborations of Patrick Tolan, Deborah Gorman-Smith, David Henry, and their colleagues and research assistants.

The Research Group provides an administrative umbrella and organization for these studies that are aimed at developing and articulating scientific knowledge about families living in poor urban communities. This program of research is focused on advancing our knowledge about development, risk, and prevention with children, youth, and families, and the settings of their development. Our intent is to articulate and refine a developmental-ecological model of psychosocial functioning through longitudinal studies that can help direct prevention and related policies (Gorman-Smith, Tolan, & Henry, 1999; Tolan, Guerra, & Kendall, 1995).

We are interested in understanding how parenting and family relationship characteristics are affected by the social contexts in which families live (e.g., exposure to violence, neighborhood conditions, the schools the children attend, the peer groups they affiliate with).

In particular, we are interested in describing variation within low socioeconomic status urban communities. We want to investigate the ways in which such community variation can affect families and alter their influence on children’s development. Finally, we investigate the implications these relations for prevention design and competence-promoting policies.

Much of our work focuses on prevention of delinquency and violence. In addition, we engage in evaluation collaborations and scientific reviews to aid practice of community and preventive interventions to reduce youth risk. Our goal is to provide reliable scientific information that can aid in directing policy.

Chicago Project for Violence Prevention

The majority of the CPVP has been community mobilization to stop gun violence in Chicago neighborhoods. Working with key members of the community and by encouraging community involvement of all members of the neighborhood, CPVP organizes communities to become active in the fight against violence. Project leaders act as technical consultants, and each community remains responsible for its own decision-making. In each neighborhood, a lead organization assumes responsibility for forming a community coalition to develop and implement the plans the members decide upon. The initiatives, which take into account what has worked in other areas, are based on what is most needed in each community and what approaches are most suited to having a sustainable impact locally.

In addition, outreach intervention is directed at those young people who are most at risk of being perpetrators or victims of violence. This mobilization focus grew out of consultations with developers of similar efforts in Boston and overall evidence of effective strategies with experts residing in Chicago. The intent was to apply a set of strategies that had shown evidence of effects are positive. For example, shootings were down by 67 percent in one community-- from 43 to 14. In another, between 2000 and 2002 shootings were down 67 percent from 88 to 29. Evaluation is on-going.

Illinois Center for Violence Prevention

ICVP has been involved in research and evaluation through several different activities. First is the evaluation Institute. Founded in 1999, the Evaluation Resource Institute (ERI) has been providing Illinois' violence prevention community with the education, tools, resources and expertise to design and implement effective program evaluations. The ERI was initiated as a collaboration between: ICVP, the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority, the Chicago Community Trust, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This collaborative effort was born from the recognition of the need to ensure effective programming in the newly emerging violence prevention field.

Over time, the ERI has taken a more prominent role in evaluating the organization's services, and had developed evaluation instruments for ICVP's annual conference, regional meetings, and for its own workshops and evaluation coaching services to other agencies. Through ICVP's strategic plan, the ERI is in the year of an in-depth, three year evaluation of YouthPeace and SisterNet with the goal of developing a replicable model of youth-led violence prevention programming.

Community Partners

Coming Soon!