IPR News-Summer 1997-Two Academic Societies To Honor Thomas Cook

Institute for Policy Reserach News, Northwestern University

Two Academic Societies To Honor Thomas Cook

Summer 1997, Volume 18, Number 2

Two of the nation's largest social science organizations will bestow back-to-back honors this summer on Thomas D. Cook (IPR-Sociology) one of Northwestern's most diverse and prolific social scientists.

On Sunday, August 10, Cook will deliver the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association's (ASA) 400-member Methodology Section in Toronto. Seven days later, he will receive the 1997 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Division of Evaluation, Measurement, and Statistics (Division 5). The award and a special lecture by Cook will be presented at APA's annual meeting in Chicago.

APA's lifetime achievement award is based on Cook's "outstanding contributions in research methodology and program evaluation," according to Division 5 president Ronald K. Hambleton, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Cook is the second recipient of the new award. The first honoree was Peter Bentler, a psychologist at UCLA best known for his work on structural equation modeling. The award considers the contributions of scholars from the fields of statistics, measurement, evaluation, and assessment.

Lee J. Cronbach of Stanford, a leading figure in the field of evaluation who supported Cook for the award, said Cook is "the outstanding figure among those now writing on methodology for program evaluation." He cited the social scientist's originality, ability to think deeply, and "excellent command of the logic of inference from data."

Over nearly three decades, Cook has written five books (with two more in progress), edited three others, and written well over 100 scholarly articles and chapters, a body of work that has been translated into five languages. He is perhaps best known for his senior authorship (with the late psychologist, Donald T. Campbell) of Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings (1979), considered by many to be a classic in the field of methodology.

"Even today, 17 years after its publication, it still sells thousands of copies per year and is cited more than a hundred times per year in journal articles alone," said Cook collaborator William Shadish, professor of psychology at the University of Memphis, who nominated Cook for the award. In addition to Cook's scholarly writings on the nature and logic of experimental design, he was honored for his contributions to the field of program evaluation, particularly for the overviews laid out in his 1991 book, The Foundations of Program Evaluation, which he co-authored with Shadish and Laura Leviton.

Cook is noted for his theoretical and empirical work in developing concepts and methods for doing meta-evaluation and more recently, for his analyses of both the theory and practice of meta-analysis.

"He is one of the leading contributors to the methodology of evaluation research, especially the evaluation of important social programs, " according to Stephen G. West, professor of psychology at Arizona State University and Chair of the Division 5 Awards Committee.

Colleagues also paid tribute to Cook's leadership in merging qualitative and quantitative methods in field research, a subject he addressed as keynote speaker at an international evaluation conference in Vancouver in 1995.

The APA award is the third major honor for Cook. In 1982, he was awarded the Myrdal Prize for Science from the Evaluation Research Society and in 1988 he received the Donald Campbell Prize for Innovative Methodology from the Policy Sciences Organization.

"I am honored to get this award," said Cook. "But it is also a tribute to all those scholars from the psychology department at Northwestern who collaborated in the social psychology and methodology and evaluation programs we had here during the 1970s and 80s."

Cook and his former colleagues, Lee Sechrest, Robert Boruch, Paul Wortman, and Campbell, comprised a social science methodology group at Northwestern "unparalleled in the country," concurs West.

In recent years, Cook has turned his attention to school reform and to understanding how social contexts relate to adolescent development. He is currently engaged in large-scale evaluations in Chicago, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit, and Prince George's County, Maryland of the experimental school reform program developed by Yale social psychiatrist James Comer (see story, p. 1).

Cook's latest book, Urban Families and Adolescent Success (in press, University of Chicago Press), is co-authored with Frank Furstenberg, Glenn Elder, Jacquelynne Eccles, and Arnold Sameroff. It deals with how families in high-risk settings manage the local environment to promote the welfare of their early adolescent children. Cook is currently completing another book with several postdoctoral students on how neighborhood, school, peer, and family processes work together--or sometimes at cross purposes--to influence how adolescents develop.