• Graduate Programs
  • Mission Statement
  • M.Ed. in Human Development Counseling
  • M.Ed. Community Development and Action
  • Ph.D. in Community Research and Action
    • Community Research and Action Program
    • CRA Faculty
    • CRA Curriculum
    • CRA Application
    • Community Research and Action Student Handbook
    • CRA Graduate Students
    • CRA Graduate Placements
    • Past Visiting Scholars
• HOD Undergraduate Program
• Faculty and Staff
• Center for Community Studies
• Fieldschool in Intercultural Education
• Newbrough Graduate Award

CRA Faculty

Most of the core and affiliated faculty in the program have a background in applied psychological research (community, clinical, social), however, core faculty members include a sociologist and affiliated faculty span a wide variety of disciplines. All core and affiliated faculty are engaged in a variety of interdisciplinary teaching and professional activities. Faculty members are actively involved with many different interdisciplinary professional organizations (e.g., Society for Community Research and Action, Community Development Society, American Evaluation Association, Environmental Design Research Association, Urban Affairs Association), and publish in, and have done editorial work for, scholarly journals that attract authors and readers from a wide variety of disciplines. Courses, theses, research and consulting projects by faculty and students involve work that is practical and inherently interdisciplinary with local (primarily urban) public and private agencies.

Core Faculty

Sandra Barnes focuses on race, class, and gender dynamics, the relationship between structural constraints and individual agency, and how these dynamics influence the experiences of residents in poor urban spaces. She is also interested in the role of religion as a change agent among the poor.

Kimberly Bess focuses on second-order community change, sense of community theory, empowerment theory, prevention, strength-based practice, learning communities, institutional theory, multi-level/systemic interventions. As well, she studies role of human service organizations as mediators of community change, non-profit organizational learning and learning organizations, organizational adaptation and transformation, organizational identity, professional identity, human service practice, role of change agent.

Len Bickman, Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement, is a nationally recognized leader in program evaluation and mental health services research on children and adolescents. He has completed the evaluation of the largest mental health services demonstration project ever conducted on children and adolescents. He also collaborated with state and local officials in Ohio on a multi-year randomized experiment that focused on an innovative mental health system for children and adolescents in the public sector. He is currently conducting research for the Department of Education on two projects, the evaluation of a character education program, and using systematic feedback to improve principal leadership. In addition, he is examining the post-deployment related continuum of care for returning soldiers. His other major interests include the development of a web-based measurement system for outcomes, and research on therapeutic alliance.

Vera Chatman focuses on career development over the life span and cultural competency for health care organizations, particularly within the context of partnerships between profits and nonprofits and between nonprofits with different histories and cultures. She has used the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance as a primary case-study model.

Joseph Cunningham is currently focusing on enhancing the capacity of inner city schools to prepare and encourage students to pursue post-secondary education. Through developing the instructional capacity of schools, coordinating and expanding family and student social support services, and engaging the community in the social and educational development of children, the project is designed to enhance the probability that students will aspire to and be ready for a college education.

Paul Dokecki's scholarly interests include the philosophy of science, human science methodology, values and ethics, public policy, early childhood intervention for children with handicaps and their families, community psychology intervention, community development in the context of the church, religion and politics, and spirituality.

James Fraser 's primary interests focus on urban environment, revitalization and public policy, governance, and expressions of community; social inequality and poverty; human-environment studies; organizational culture and behavior; and research methods. Virtually all of his research entails an examination of social inequality using mixed-method approaches, including ethnography and other qualitative approaches, quantitative modeling, and, more recently, quantitative spatial analysis. He is particularly interested in the ways in which people make claims on space.

Craig Anne Heflinger conducts research to improve service delivery to children and adolescents with mental health and substance abuse problems and their families. Trained as a clinical psychologist, she now focuses on community-based research, working with health advocacy groups of consumers and family members, provider groups, and state and federal agencies that plan and administer physical and behavioral health services. Much of her work is descriptive, helping to provide information needed by community groups to influence change. She and her students and colleagues work using mixed methods, both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Carolyn Hughes, also in the Department of Special Education, has three primary research interests. First, she is investigating factors relating to success of students attending high poverty, high dropout high schools. What accounts for why some students persevere through their senior year and graduate when half of their classmates drop out? Second, she is evaluating the effects of a service-learning mentoring program designed to increase high school completion and college enrollment of youth from high poverty high schools. What are the benefits to both youth and mentors participating in the mentoring program? Third, she is examining perspectives of youth who have dropped out of high school and are enrolled in GED programs. What factors do these youth identify as related to their dropping out of school and what recommendations do they have to prevent other youth from dropping out?

Mark Lipsey's professional interests are in the areas of public policy, program evaluation research, social intervention, field research methodology, and research synthesis (meta-analysis). His recent research interests have been in the areas of risk and intervention for juvenile delinquency and substance use, early childhood education programs, and issues of methodological quality in program evaluation research. He is the Director of the Vanderbilt Peabody Research Institute.

Velma McBride Murry's work has focused on the significance of context in studies of African-American families and youth. Her investigation of the impact of racism on family functioning has elucidated the dynamics of this contextual stressor in the everyday life of African Americans. Her research on the ways in which family members buffer each other from the impact of the external stressors that cascade through African-American lives was one important stimulus for her subsequent focus on family intervention as a potential protection against the development of risky adolescent behavior. She has identified many protective factors, ranging from personality characteristics and coping behaviors to dynamic contextual interactions among personality dispositions, social support and family processes. The results of this research support her premise that individual and family attributes can ameliorate the impact of multiple risk factors on children and adolescents. These two areas of research have informed the development of the Strong African American Families (SAAF) intervention program that targets the prevention of early onset sexual behavior and substance abuse.

Torin Monahan's main theoretical interests are in social control and institutional transformations with new technologies. Additional interests include globalization, urban studies, social inequality, and contemporary social and cultural theory. His current research is on the social implications of surveillance and security systems. Projects include (1) an ethnographic study of the effects of RFID technologies on organizational dynamics in hospitals, (2) collaborative research on the surveillance modalities and ethical dimensions of human implants, (3) inquiry into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in the USA, and (4) research on activist counter-surveillance movements.

Maury Nation's research interests focus on understanding and developing school and community settings that promote positive youth development, with a specific focus on preventing violence and substance abuse. He approaches this by examining neighborhood effects on child development, examining the relative contribution of neighborhood and school characteristics to children's social, emotional, academic well-being, and by developing and evaluating school- and community-based interventions that affect children and their environments.

J.R. Newbrough, professor emeritus, organizes his thinking in terms of the local community as a social structure through which daily life is organized. He brings together ecology and systems theory as ways to think about "the contextualized (or environmentalized) human person." He is particularly interested in solving the paradox of the individual and the collectivity.

Douglas Perkins' research links community, environmental, and applied social psychology to other disciplines in focusing on participation and empowerment in grassroots organizations and the advancement and use of ecological research methods and analytical strategics to improve public policy making. Problems his projects address include neighborhood revitalization, housing, youth violence, crime, and social cohesion and disorder in urban community settings in the U.S., Europe, and China.

Susan Saegert has been active on the steering committee of the Nashville Shared Equity Housing Pilot Project since joining the Peabody faculty in 2008.  With her colleagues at the City University of New York's Center for Human Environments, where she served as director, she has since 1990 worked in partnership with community organizations and coalitions to understand how to improve distressed housing and neighborhoods in New York City.  Her national work includes researcher for the team that provided the plan for the redevelopment of downtown Denver; a national survey of low- and moderate-income homebuyers for Neighborworks America; a national focus group study of low-income homeowners threatened with foreclosure; and a national survey of how community-building efforts develop civic capacity.  Her research interests include women and the environment, crowding, urban stress and the role of housing in health.  One of her main theoretical focuses has been the development and use of social capital in poor communities.

Sharon Shields interests focus on community health and human issues. Sharon teaches courses that move students into strong university/campus service-learning partnerships that foster movement toward civic engagement and active citizenship. Sharon has worked on various national curriculums, has published articles related to service-learning teaching, and has been deeply engaged in the Community Outreach Partnership Center Grant at VIPPS. Currently, Sharon is the President of the National Association of Girls and Women in Sport and in that capacity has begun a national community organizing initiative directed at Title IX advocacy.

Beth Shinn studies how social settings influence individual well-being, and how settings can be changed to foster individual welfare. Because understanding the characteristics of settings also involves measuring them, she is also interested in techniques for ecological assessment. Much of her work focuses on individuals who face social exclusion due to poverty, homelessness, and/or mental illness. She studies interventions to end homelessness for families and individuals, and characteristics of social settings that foster capabilities for homeless individuals with mental illness. Beth is interested in using research to influence public policy.

Paul Speer's interests are in the areas of community organizing, social power and community change. His research is currently focused on civic engagement, the intersection of religion and politics, violence prevention and affordable housing. Additionally, he is developing a community data archive to integrate diverse datasets throughout the Nashville community. This is a longitudinal, parcel-level database that can be aggregated up to broader geographies to understand housing and neighborhood dynamics over time. With the Vanderbilt Center for the Study of Religion and Culture he is conducting fieldwork in several Tennessee communities to study the intersection of religion and politics.

William Turner's  interests are: 1) the development, implementation and evaluation of evidence-based, family focused prevention and intervention programs in community settings using community-based participatory methods; 2) the development of culturally sensitive and appropriate family therapy intervention strategies in clinical and community settings; and 3) the translation of clinical and basic research to health policy related to finding solutions to mental and physical health disparities in America's poor and minority families in both rural and urban settings.

Ken Wallston, Professor of Psychology in Nursing, focuses on health psychology/behavioral medicine; adaptation to chronic illness; emotional expression and health; health promotion/disease prevention/rehabilitation; and perceived control and health.

Affiliated Faculty

Kathy Anderson, Economics: labor and economic development

Bruce Barry, Owen Graduate School of Management: workplace power and conflict, interpersonal behavior, management of social issues, business ethics, workplace rights, and social impact of technology

Tony Brown, Sociology: demography, quantitative methods

Monica Casper, Director of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, Women's Studies: women's health, feminist studies of science, technology, and medicine, gender, bodies, and sexuality, environmental health and justice, public health aspects of security and war, reproductive technologies, and bioethics

Daniel Cornfield, Sociology: labor movements, immigrant communities

James Foster, Economics: international economic development

Gina Frieden, Human and Organizational Development: adult development, life transitions and counselor training

Brian Griffith, Human and Organizational Development: human development counseling, character development

Stephen Heyneman, Leadership, Policy and Organizations: community economic development, social capital, and education

Richard Lloyd, Sociology: urban sociology, sociology of culture, social change, new media technology, and social theory

Melissa Snarr, Graduate Department of Religion: intersection of religion, social change and social/political ethics

Lynn Walker, Pediatrics, Psychology and Human Development: children's coping with pain and disability