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Melissa L. Abell

Melissa L. Abell

Associate Professor
Phone: (804) 828-2007
E-mail: mlabell@vcu.edu

Making university-community partnerships through research

“I’m really interested in this notion of university-community partnerships and how the university can work with community agencies to facilitate their needs in a way that makes it real. It’s fine to do research and publish it in academic journals but if our practitioners, agencies, clinicians and program directors are not reading what we are writing, we’re not really helping them.

“Social work is very practice driven and if we can’t get our ideas out into the community and into the agencies, we aren’t doing what we need to do. So that is really becoming my passion; how to make that happen, how to translate what’s going on in the world of academics to the world of the community, to the life of the client and the practitioner.”

Education

  • Ph.D. – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N.C.
  • M.S.W. – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N.C.
  • B.A. – University of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky.

Research interests

  • At-risk children and families

Courses taught

  • Foundations of Social Research
  • Research for Clinical Social Work Practice
  • Quantitative Research Methods and Analysis II

Selected publications

  • Abell, M.L. (2008). The Guatemalan stove project. In D. Fauri, S. Wernet, & F.E. Netting (Eds.). Cases in macro social work practice. (3rd edition). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

  • Abell, M.L., Davey, T.L., & Clark, P. Community case management intervention for hard-to-place homeless families leaving emergency shelter. Social Work (revise and resubmit).

  • Abell, M.L. (2004). Women creating change: Once social worker’s retirement. Affilia, 19(2), 211-215.

  • Abell, J.D., & Abell, M.L. (2004). Poverty reduction: Government transfer spending vs. macroeconomic change. Journal of Poverty, 8(2).

  • Davey, T.L., & Abell, M.L. (2004). A community-based multiple family group intervention for sheltered families: Impact of the weekend retreat. Journal of Human Behavior and the Social Environment, 9(1/2), 129-146.