Carol Hafford is a Principal Research Scientist in NORC's Economics, Labor, and Population Studies department. She is an applied anthropologist with 20 years’ experience designing and conducting research and evaluations on human service programs and evidence-based interventions that address the social and economic well-being of children, youth, and families. Areas of expertise are evaluation design, evaluability assessment, process and outcome evaluations, implementation science, qualitative research and analysis, and survey and questionnaire design. She also provides evaluation technical assistance to community-based organizations and tribal programs. With a research focus on vulnerable populations, she has conducted ethnographic research on children of immigrants and their integration into transnational family support networks and the experience of runaway/homeless youth in transitional living programs.
Hafford leads several projects addressing a range of socio-economic issues and special populations. She is the project director for an ASPE-sponsored evaluation of Elder Abuse Prevention programs for the Administration on Community Living/Administration on Aging. She is NORC’s project director for the Assessment of Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Housing Needs, a congressionally mandated study for HUD, and the Study of the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations for USDA, working in partnership with the Urban Institute on both projects. For ACF’s Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, she is a team leader for the Descriptive Study of Tribal TANF-Child Welfare Coordination and the co-task leader for the Evaluation of Tribal Health Professions Opportunities Grants (HPOG). Hafford is also the task leader of the process assessment for the Impact and Process Evaluation of the Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC) Program, Phases I and II and serves as a senior advisor for the AmeriCorps Grantee Evaluation Monitoring and Guidance Project. She is NORC’s project director for the National Evaluation of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) Grants Program for the Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office.
Prior to joining NORC in 2010, Hafford was a senior research associate at James Bell Associates where she conducted studies on child maltreatment prevention, family preservation and support, court-child welfare-community collaborations for infants and toddlers in foster care, youth independent living, Indian child welfare, cross-system reforms, state and tribal child welfare agencies' implementation of legislation, and monitoring of state child welfare systems. As an evaluation specialist at the Corporation for National and Community Service, she managed national studies on community service, nonprofit capacity building, and service learning. While with Computer Sciences Corporation, Hafford conducted performance measurement analyses for housing and community development grantees and monitored data quality.
She is the author of Sibling caretaking in immigrant families: Understanding cultural practices to inform child welfare practice and evaluation.
Hafford is a fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies Committee on Child Maltreatment Research, Policy, and Practice for the Next Decade.