Course Syllabus: PPOL-G 742 Community-Based Operations Research

This elective course in the Public Policy PhD program provides an introduction to a wide range of decision models, methods and applications that help practitioners and researchers better understand how to represent common services and systems, and how to design practical solutions that can help people and organizations do their jobs better. Examples of public sector applications we will address include: emergency and post-disaster planning, human services, energy and natural resources and housing and community development. This course emphasizes special challenges in community-based public-sector decision-making. Communities of interest may be defined by geography, population, or a particular type of service or product to be provided, and tend to be localized. Problems in community-based operations research (CBOR) tend to be complicated: they feature multiple decision-makers and stakeholders; mission-driven but resource-challenged organizations, disagreements about the ‘real’ problem or the potential for solutions that can have impacts on individual lives; diverse, sometimes contradictory performance measures that guide decision-making; and social concerns such as equity and underserved populations. Solution methods for community-focused problems require a deep understanding of problems and systems, intuition regarding how and when to apply qualitative and quantitative methods, and a critical perspective regarding the role of external analysts who claim special insight into issues of primary concern especially to underserved, under-resourced or marginalized communities