About Us

The Center for Research and Evaluation on Abstinence Education (“the Center”) is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistance Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) and the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). The Center is operated by The Lewin Group.

The Center’s mission is to improve the quality of abstinence education (AE) research and evaluation by building capacity to conduct scientifically sound evaluations in the field. To achieve this mission, ASPE articulated four specific goals to guide the Center’s work:

1. Improve the quality of abstinence education evaluation;
2. Foster relationships between evaluators and practitioners;
3. Develop a cadre of abstinence education evaluators; and
4. Strengthen the connections between research and abstinence education practice.

The Center is serving the abstinence education field in the following ways:

1. Offering a website for written and visual evaluation resources for the AE community—including, evaluators providers, researchers and policy makers;
2. Providing a web-based Evaluation Tutorial to educate evaluators and providers on key evaluation topics and inform them about the decisions that must be made during each stage of evaluation;
3. Sponsoring a training conference for evaluators working or interested in abstinence education;
4. Facilitating effective partnerships between evaluators and AE providers through web-based resources; and
5. Attracting talented evaluators to the field of abstinence education.