Workplace Policies and Practices Coordinating Center

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application describes RTI's plan to serve as a Coordinating Center (CC) for the Workplace Policies and Practices multisite collaborative described in RFA-HD-04-017, Developing Study Designs to Evaluate Health Benefits of Workplace Policies and Practices. We have assembled a seasoned, multidisciplinary team of investigators and consultants who will both lead and support the collaborative in achieving its overarching aim of developing improved designs for evaluating workplace-based interventions (Phase 1) and then using those designs to enhance our knowledge of the efficacy of selected specific interventions (Phase 2). Our team includes investigators who: (1) have an extensive history of working together; (2) in-depth experience in designing and implementing studies of workplace-based health and psychosocial interventions; and (3) extensive experience in serving as CC for diverse, multidisciplinary, multisite collaboratives. We begin our application with brief summaries of the literature on workplace-based interventions, and then identify three important categories of issues that the collaborative will face: issues related to the use of quasi-experimental designs, issues associated with study implementation (e.g., low participation rates), and issues associated with data analysis (e.g., use of suboptimal analytic techniques). We then summarize our thinking about the role of the CC in the collaborative, with particular focus on the shift of emphasis in the role from Phase 1 to Phase 2. We then describe our administrative and collaborative plans, emphasizing both expert methodological and practical experience input to the collaborative's deliberations about model designs and logistical support to facilitate that work for Phase 1, and the more traditional coordinating center role of protocol development, implementation quality control, and data analysis for Phase 2. Finally, we describe briefly some of the many strengths our team brings to both phases of the CC effort.