Chicago Public-Private Experimental Partnerships to Reduce Youth Violence

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal requests support to select, launch, and evaluate randomized pilot interventions to reduce youth violence. These interventions will be conducted as part of a unique collaboration between our University of Chicago-based research team and city government in Chicago. Emphasis is placed on implementing randomized field experiments that change the incentives youth perceive for involvement with pro- as well as anti-social activities, with the hope of preventing youth violence by promoting human capital accumulation and positive youth development. The project has two major goals. First, to combine local resources to field novel interventions that can reduce youth violence; second, to generate useful knowledge to help prevent youth violence in Chicago and elsewhere. To meet these goals we have four main aims: 1. Conduct a design competition to identify and select city agencies, non-profits, or private firms to receive up to $1.5 million in private funding to carry out promising programs in Chicago to prevent youth violence, which will use random assignment to allocate eligible youth to program services. Our research team will work with the office of Mayor Richard M. Daley to raise the resources necessary to implement these interventions from private philanthropists. 2. Provide technical assistance to the selected program administrators to determine adequate sample sizes, carry out randomization, maintain human subject protections, and secure our research team's access to the administrative records and other data required for the evaluation. 3. Conduct a process evaluation of the interventions implemented through this project. 4. Conduct a short-term impact evaluation of the intervention, focusing on measures of youth violence victimization and offending as well as positive outcomes like graduation. At the end of the two-year project period, we hope to have generated new and unusually rigorous scientific evidence about the effects of a specific pilot program to prevent youth violence, and to have developed the infrastructure required to carry out additional randomized interventions in the future in collaboration with city government in Chicago and elsewhere. Because interventions are designed and implemented by existing community organizations and public agencies, the proposed project is well-equipped to provide realistic management and policy guidance to guide future interventions. NIH funding is crucial for enabling our research team to carry out these initial planning and design and subsequent evaluation activities. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Through a unique collaboration between our University of Chicago-based research team and city government in Chicago, this project seeks to identify effective ways of preventing youth violence through implementation and evaluation of randomized experimental interventions. Emphasis will be placed on interventions that try to prevent youth violence by promoting positive youth development and human capital accumulation by at-risk youth.