CORE--MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION

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The Center for Research to Reduce Oral Health Disparities (CRROHD) involves projects ranging from focus groups to clinical and behavioral intervention trials and health services research. The Measurement and Evaluation (M&E) Core will tailor support for each study, since each project has specific instrument development, research design and analysis needs. The M&e Core will provide advice, education, consulting and qualitative and quantitative analysis to all CRROHD projects and investigators. The M&E Core will continue to work with main project, pilot project, and affiliated project investigators to refine protocols and data collection instruments; will finalize plans for randomization schedules, data management, monitoring, quality control and reliability; coordinate, integrating databases from different projects to enable more powerful, unique multivariable analyses; centralize and coordinate program evaluation activities; promote the development of quality research studies based on pilot projects on intermediate results on major studies, and on related endeavors from residents, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty; and report study information to the scientific advisory board and the data safety monitoring board. The M&E Core will play a major role in bringing projects together, particularly noting their commonalities and distinctions, and in building upon current projects to work with investigators develop subsequent projects. Sufficient time and effort will be given to the qualitative and quantitative analytic aspects of research, as with any other step in the research process. The M&E Core personnel have a wealth of multidisciplinary collaborative research experience in instrument and scale development, evaluation, epidemiology, biostatistics, data management, health psychology, and medical anthropology, and medical geography to adequately fulfill those needs.