Welcome to New York State Promise - Emerging Voices. Today's topic is the Control Group of PROMISE. There are more than 2,000 youth enrolled in New York State PROMISE, which is a research project. Half of the students and their families are enrolled in an intervention group and receive a coordinated set of services and supports aimed at promoting a successful transition to adulthood. The other half are in a control group. While students in the control group don't receive the same enhanced supports, their participation is critical to gathering accurate data to help bring about future systems change for students with disabilities who receive Supplemental Security Income, or SSI.
The point of the control group is to be that comparative entity for which, you know, the intervention group will be compared to.
Control group in tradition sense means treatment as usual group. These students when they are in school, they are entitled to receive services under the IDEA and they are eligible to receive those services and they are receiving those services in their school environments. If they quality for other services outside of school or their families, they continue to receive those services.
Chris Coyle is a PROMISE Control Group Transition Specialist.
While, again, they are not receiving services directly from us, data is being collected. I mean, every phone call that I have, I'm filling out my information in the system and it's imperative that I do that, again, for the fidelity of the study but also for my own knowledge because the next time I call them six months down the road, you know, I have an idea of where they were the last time we spoke, which is then a nice foundation for that next conversation.
Our interest is to really understand that the enhanced type of services that we are providing in PROMISE project which starts early on in the lives of students compared to services business as usual group where the services start typically later on in their high school setting. We want to see whether that that matters. And the research allows us to be able to draw the causal conclusions saying that it was only our intervention and nothing other than our intervention that actually led to the outcomes that we will observe for our intervention group. And in that way control group serves a very important purpose for our study.
The New York State Promise Project produced this video under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education.