Jennifer Clark is Economic Opportunity Studies’ Senior Research Associate and evaluation projects manager.
She specializes in adapting "textbook" approaches to research and evaluation to make them work well in real-life intervention and service delivery settings. She advocates research or program evaluation designs that are created collaboratively by a researcher and an organization’s staff, utilizing the staff members’ expertise and incorporating their wishes while meeting the dictates of their funding source.
She also has developed expertise in locating, analyzing, and synthesizing findings from the areas of the research literature with which she is familiar. Her ongoing project is developing an ever-greater amount of skill at explaining research concepts and findings in the plain-English terms that make research useful for a wide variety of stakeholders and interest groups.
Jennifer merges her passion for research with the insights she gained in an earlier part of adulthood, when she was a line worker in a variety of intervention settings. She especially enjoys working with the staff of human services or advocacy organizations in various research- or data-related ways.
Her doctoral degree is in Human Development and Family Studies, with a concentration in intervention and evaluation research, earned at the Pennsylvania State University where she was a Dean’s Fellow in the College of Health and Human Development.
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