This EArly Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award provides funding to study the links between population dynamics, evolving social needs and additional structural elements of a large network of social service providers. The study will examine a number of factors including the evolution of the organizational forms in the number of field units, the resources used and quality and quantity of services provided. Moreover, a systematic understanding of social service delivery systems will be developed from a service science theoretical perspective. That is, acknowledging that services are co-produced by providers and recipients, and are intangible, perishable, heterogeneous, and difficult to standardize among many other unique characteristics that differentiate them from manufacturing processes. This project will make use of a complex systems modeling approach that facilitates incorporating organizational policy in the analysis.
If successful, the results of this research will help establish a theory of how social services networks co-evolve and change responding to changes in the population they serve. Moreover, it will improve the understanding of phenomena uniquely associated with social service systems such as the nonlinear effects of population changes on community needs, organizational policy, and on system performance. It will also help uncover culturally influenced variations of trajectories of the network triggered by causal chains such as value perceptions, intentions, actions, and outcomes exhibited by clients. Thus, this project will demonstrate how the ecology of service organizations can be modeled with paradigms of tempo-spatial relations. The products of this work will be: i) a dynamic model of a network of distributed human services able to track the co-evolution of the operating environment over space; and, ii) theoretical propositions of how population dynamics affect network form and individual unit performance over time. Eventually, it is expected that this exploratory model will enable the proposition of methods for the evaluation of network dynamic performance and the development of decision support systems for social services.
Fair access to essential services for the population as a whole, including health, human services, transportation, etc. should be an outcome that is independent of their race or ethnic origin or income level. Fair access to services can only occur if service system designs start considering population differences, particularly in a highly diverse country. It is expected that by 2050 one fourth of the US population will have been born abroad, and understanding how these potential differences affect service system design decisions is essential. This exploratory study has opened the door for these types of concerns that could bring a more in depth study and subsequent understanding of how these systems should be designed. This project proved that service delivery organizations, particularly human services organizations, can be modeled using the same paradigms of tempo-spatial relations used for modeling and understanding natural systems as complex systems. Particular emphasis was given to the co-evolution of demographic characteristics of service recipients represented in the population (for example race and ethnic origin as a proxy for culture) in relation to service providers. Moreover, a systematic understanding of social service delivery systems and how these are affected by the population they serve was undertaken from a service science theoretical perspective. That is, acknowledging that services are co-produced by providers and recipients, and are different from manufacturing processes. In the future, these findings will allow service system designs to be more attuned to the characteristics of the population they serve to assure coverage and survivability of services. A number of design parameters were derived from the inclusion of population characteristics in these simulations. Mainly, this project proved that it is possible to include these types of factors and that their inclusion is of significant importance.
