EAGER: Co-Evolution of Social Service Delivery Networks and Population Dynamics

EAGER：社会服务提供网络与人口动态的共同演化

• 批准号: 1032262
• 负责人: Viviana Cesani
• 金额: $ 10.62万
• 依托单位: University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-05-01 至 2013-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1032262&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; Co; Evolution; Social; Service

This EArly Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award provides funding to study the links between population dynamics, evolving social needs and additional structural elements of a large network of social service providers. The study will examine a number of factors including the evolution of the organizational forms in the number of field units, the resources used and quality and quantity of services provided. Moreover, a systematic understanding of social service delivery systems will be developed from a service science theoretical perspective. That is, acknowledging that services are co-produced by providers and recipients, and are intangible, perishable, heterogeneous, and difficult to standardize among many other unique characteristics that differentiate them from manufacturing processes. This project will make use of a complex systems modeling approach that facilitates incorporating organizational policy in the analysis. If successful, the results of this research will help establish a theory of how social services networks co-evolve and change responding to changes in the population they serve. Moreover, it will improve the understanding of phenomena uniquely associated with social service systems such as the nonlinear effects of population changes on community needs, organizational policy, and on system performance. It will also help uncover culturally influenced variations of trajectories of the network triggered by causal chains such as value perceptions, intentions, actions, and outcomes exhibited by clients. Thus, this project will demonstrate how the ecology of service organizations can be modeled with paradigms of tempo-spatial relations. The products of this work will be: i) a dynamic model of a network of distributed human services able to track the co-evolution of the operating environment over space; and, ii) theoretical propositions of how population dynamics affect network form and individual unit performance over time. Eventually, it is expected that this exploratory model will enable the proposition of methods for the evaluation of network dynamic performance and the development of decision support systems for social services.

这一早期探索性研究奖助金(EIGER)提供资金，用于研究人口动态、不断发展的社会需求和大型社会服务提供者网络的其他结构要素之间的联系。这项研究将审查若干因素，包括总部外单位数量、所用资源以及所提供服务的质量和数量方面的组织形式的演变。此外，还将从服务科学的理论角度系统地理解社会服务提供系统。也就是说，承认服务是由提供者和接受者共同生产的，并且是无形的、易腐烂的、异质的、很难标准化的，以及许多其他区别于制造过程的独特特征。该项目将利用一种复杂的系统建模方法，便于在分析中纳入组织政策。如果成功，这项研究的结果将有助于建立一种理论，即社会服务网络如何随着所服务人口的变化而共同进化和变化。此外，它还将增进对与社会服务系统独特相关的现象的理解，例如人口变化对社区需求、组织政策和系统绩效的非线性影响。它还将有助于揭示受文化影响的网络轨迹变化，这些变化由客户表现出的价值认知、意图、行动和结果等因果链触发。因此，这个项目将展示如何用时间-空间关系的范式来模拟服务组织的生态。这项工作的成果将是：i)分布式人类服务网络的动态模型，能够跟踪操作环境在空间上的共同演变；以及ii)种群动态如何影响网络形式和个体单位随时间的性能的理论命题。最终，期望该探索性模型能够为网络动态性能评估方法的提出和社会服务决策支持系统的开发提供支持。