FrameWorks Builds Capacity in Research Staff As Three New Scholars Join Interdisciplinary Team
Washington, DC, June 3 — FrameWorks' multi-method, multi-disciplinary approach to communications research takes a giant leap forward this month, as new scholars from anthropology, sociology and public policy create a new internal research division at the Institute, leading investigations into how Americans think about education, child mental health and race relations. These new staff complement a wave of recent additions to the Institute's Field-building division, bringing the total number of staff to 10 and the number of Fellows to 5. The Institute, now in its 9th year, is a nonprofit think tank that designs, conducts, interprets and explains communications research to advance the resolution of social problems. It is supported by many of the nation's leading philanthropies.
"As the nonprofit sector becomes more sophisticated about its use of communications research as a tool for social change, demands on FrameWorks to pioneer methods and to inform new national initiatives have grown exponentially," says FrameWorks President Susan Nall Bales. "We have an opportunity to bridge the worlds of academia and advocacy and to enrich both by insisting that the social science research we use to build campaigns to help Americans solve social problems is of the highest quality. We believe FrameWorks is a necessary institution in the evolution of nonprofit issues campaigning," she added, "and these new researchers ensure that we can help funders help their grantees engage people productively."
"The ability of the Institute to attract scholars of this quality equally attests to the desire within the academy to effect change," explains FrameWorks Board Chair Robert L. Munroe, Research Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College, a member of the Claremont Colleges. "FrameWorks offers a unique place where serious scholars can study how communications can have an impact on organizational behavior, public opinion and public policy. It is a rich and rewarding laboratory for serious social science applications."
Joining the FrameWorks team are three new, full-time researchers:
Tiffany Manuel, Ph.D., becomes Research Director effective June 16. Dr. Manuel is an expert in policy analysis and brings substantial expertise in managing policy related research projects of varying scope and methodological complexity. Just prior to joining Frameworks, Manuel served as a senior policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services where she was responsible for conducting and directing public policy research. She has served as a senior researcher at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and as Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has worked as an economic development consultant in the areas of program evaluation, comparative regional economic analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and social welfare and labor policy analysis. She is the author of several articles, book chapters and reports on these topics. Dr. Manuel holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, a master's degree in Political Science from Purdue University as well as Doctorate and Master's degrees in public policy from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Roxanna Harlow, Ph.D., is a sociologist who will serve as Senior Researcher. Before joining FrameWorks, Dr. Harlow was an associate professor of sociology at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. An expert in the areas of race, gender, education, and social inequality, she created and served as director of the African Studies minor, conducted, supervised, and presented research on campus climate, diversity, and multiculturalism, and served on the editorial board of Teaching Sociology. After graduating from Northwestern University with her B.A., Dr. Harlow worked as a case manager for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metropolitan Chicago. She then enrolled at Indiana University—Bloomington where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology. While there, she supervised other graduate students and conducted observations and interviews as part of a research team examining the transition process for children moving from preschool to kindergarten, and compiled data and produced a written analysis of public school desegregation as part of a research team studying racial and financial inequalities in U.S. education. Noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, she has published research on race and education in various journals and edited volumes. A member of the American Sociological Association and the Association of Black Sociologists, she has also been invited to do numerous presentations on issues of multiculturalism, race, gender, identity, and the classroom.
Nat Kendall-Taylor, Senior Researcher, is a medical anthropologist, earning his B.A. from Emory University and his Master's and Doctoral degrees from the University of California Los Angeles (Ph.D. expected July 2008). He has conducted extensive fieldwork on the coast of Kenya studying the treatment of pediatric epilepsy, the uses of traditional medicine, and the impacts of chronic child illness on family well-being. He has worked as a member of a team of international scientists to design a structural and communication intervention to improve the well-being of children with epilepsy and their families in Kenya and other sites throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. He has also applied social science methods in health research in Azerbaijan and recently served as a consultant at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, and Strategic Research in Almaty. He has also conducted ethnographic research on cultural and psychological theories of motivation in extreme sports athletes. His interests lie in child and family health, well-being, and in understanding the social and cultural factors that create health disparities.
Working together on an iterative method the Institute has called Strategic Frame Analysis™, these three researchers will begin immediately to tackle a new array of sponsored projects at the Institute, including:
- A multi-year inquiry into how Americans think about child mental health, funded by the Endowment for Health (NH) and the Harvard Center on the Developing Child: FrameWorks is a partner with the Center in other ongoing investigations into public thinking about early child development.
- A two-year investigation into how Americans think about education, sponsored by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education.
- A multi-year study of Americans' attitudes to race and race oriented policies, supported by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
These new projects build on the Institute's ongoing corpus of work in public opinion about health, the environment, children's issues, race and government.
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