The Market for Youth Services in Phoenix

Overview

The Marketization of Children's Services Project is an innovative research project from the Sociology Department of the University of Arizona, funded by the National Science Foundation and in partnership with the Arizona State University Survey Research Lab. Our goal is to understand the market of children's services in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Marketization of Children's Services project will provide data on the organizations that provide services to children and the consumers of those establishments. We are interested in identifying gaps in the service delivery and improving the quality of services to children in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The research will be conducted in three phases. The first phase will be random phone interviews of households in the Phoenix metropolitan area with children between the ages of 5 and 12. These will provide us with data on the households in the Phoenix area and information from the parent on the organizations. The second phase of the research will be in-person interviews with households in Phoenix to give a more in depth assessment of the households. The third phase of research will be interviews of children's service providers collected in the first phase of the research. From the sample of businesses, nonprofits, faith-based providers and government agencies, we will have a dataset of the children's services market in the Phoenix metropolitan area. This work will be conducted in partnership with the Arizona State University Survey Research Lab.

Principal Investigator

Joseph Galaskiewicz is Professor of Sociology and has a courtesy appointment in the School of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Arizona. Prior to coming to Arizona he was Professor of Sociology in the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Strategic Management & Organization in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Exchange Networks and Community Politics (Sage, 1979), Social Organization of an Urban Grants Economy: A Study of Business Philanthropy and Nonprofit Organizations (Academic Press, 1985), Advances in Social Network Analysis: Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (co-edited with Stanley Wasserman) (Sage, 1994), and Nonprofit Organizations in an Age of Uncertainty: A Study of Organizational Change (co-authored with Wolfgang Bielefeld) (Aldine de Gruyter, 1998). The last book won the Best Book Award for 1999 from the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management, was awarded the 1999 Virginia Hodgkinson Research Prize from the Independent Sector, and was named co-winner of the 2001 Association for Research on Nonprofit and Voluntary Action’s Award for the Outstanding Book in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research. Professor Galaskiewicz has also published in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Administrative Science Quarterly, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Science Research, NVSQ, American Behavioral Scientist, Sociological Research and Methods, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Management Science, Urban Affairs Quarterly, and Sociological Quarterly among other places. His ASR article in 2004 and ASQ article in 2006 won the Best Article Published Award from the Public and Nonprofit Division of the Academy of Management. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Program on Nonprofit Organizations at Yale University, the Northwest Area Foundation, and the Nonprofit Sector Research Fund. He was deputy editor of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and co-edited a special issue on Building Effective Networks for the Academy of Management Journal. Recently he served on the advisory board of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He currently serves as a senior editor of the Management and Organization Review. In August, 2008 he will be chair of the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association. He is also past President of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action and a former Fulbright Scholar in Japan.