By Stephen M. Gavazzi, Ph.D.

The Latest News, Views, and Announcements

What’s New at CHRR

Year Two of the Gavazzi Era at CHRR officially begins tomorrow (May 16, 2023). What’s ahead? For starters, CHRR will be doing more address-based sampling (ABS) surveys in the months and years to come. We learned much from our work on the Ohio Gambling Survey and so we wish to apply this emerging expertise accordingly. On a related note, CHRR has been invited to participate in the drafting of two proposals that seek to implement ABS methods within large-scale data collection efforts. As well, CHRR personnel are pulling materials together to train our first group of Ohio State beta testers in the use of Survey Suite, the end-to-end survey and data management software our IT Team has built and refined over the years. Our hope is to make these tools available to increasing numbers of Ohio State researchers who are conducting both small and large-scale surveys in their scholarship activities. Finally, over the next year there is the expectation of significant advancements in our data management activities. Perhaps most important in this regard will be our development of controlled access repositories with discovery capabilities, an opportunity to place CHRR squarely inside of our university’s need to build research infrastructure in response to new compliance demands coming online for several federal funding agencies. The future indeed is lookingvery bright for CHRR!

CHRR's Leadership Team

Readers of previous newsletters will be familiar with the Leadership Team’s desire to move toward a more performance-based culture inside of the CHRR work environment. My own on-boarding activities last year contained a heavy emphasis on this sort of effort, in large part because there was widespread recognition that CHRR staff represented a group of dedicated and highly skilled individuals who were engaged in meaningful work-related activities.

Recently, a conversation among Leadership Team members on the topic of performance review processes was extended to all CHRR supervisors. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, a thoughtful and robust conversation ensued. As a direct result, a memo went out to all CHRR employees this past Friday that explained our efforts to align the annual performance review process with performance-based cultural principles. One particularly important component of this alignment process seeks to “bridge the gap” between the self-evaluations written by employees and the performance evaluations written by supervisors. The lack of alignment between these documents has been glaring in previous years, and has contributed to a disjointed understanding of past, present, and future goals and objectives for individuals, program areas, and the center at the enterprise level.

These and other areas of emphasis will continue to be monitored by supervisors across the performance review period. Notably, CHRR supervisors expressed gratitude for the opportunity to come together and discuss these issues, so much so that we are planning to participate in a debriefing meeting after all performance reviews have been conducted. This underscores both the sense of collaborative teamwork involved in our continued move towards a more performance-based culture, as well as the notion that this is meant to be part of an ongoing and evolving processwithin CHRR.

Things You Might Want to Know

Chapters on Family Development Theory and Family Systems Theory Published by Springer Press

Readers of the September 2022 newsletter will remember the introductory remarks that were shared about Ji-Young Lim, who joined CHRR as a J-1 Visiting Scholar for the 2022-2023 academic year. Dr. Lim and I have been working diligently to complete our manuscript for the second edition of Families with Adolescents: Bridging the Gaps Between Theory, Research, and Practice, which will be published in 2024 by Springer Press. As a warm-up exercise, Dr. Lim and I were asked to update two contributions to a different Springer Press publication known as the Encyclopedia of Adolescence.

Both revised chapters have been completed and published as of this month. Thecitations and links for these two chapters are as follows:

• Gavazzi, S.M., & Lim, J.Y. (2023). Family Development Theory. In: Levesque, R.J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_456-3
• Gavazzi, S.M., & Lim, J.Y. (2023). Family Systems Theory. In: Levesque, R.J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_455-3