Statistics and Social Work Collaborative Research Initiative

This project initiates a development of collaborative research between the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and the School of Social Work. Potential involvement includes collaborative work on two projects lead by senior Social Work faculty members, Roger Roffman and David Takeuchi. Roger Roffnam's project is an intervention study that focuses on adults who are both batterers and substance abusers. The primary interest is in developing outcome measures that would allow the assessment of the efficacy of the experimental intervention. The study plan is unique in its focus on a group of people who are both substance abusers and are abusive to their intimate partners. Currently existing measurement and intervention procedures have been developed with the focus on either substance abuse or domestic violence. Studying the co-occurrence of these two behaviors will require new methodological developments in this area. David Takeuchi's research examines how mental illness and medical care are distributed across race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. Takeuchi's current research project is the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) that is intended to investigate the social, cultural, and contextual factors that are associated with mental illness and helpseeking in these large ethnic categories. One facet of NLAAS includes extensive questions of quality of life to better understand how Asian Americans and Latinos cope with stressful conditions of life. Sophisticated statistical analyses have not been typically performed on these quality of life indicators. The goals of this research include determining the psychometric properties of these scale items and assessing the social and cultural factors associated with these different levels of functional status.