Research

Canvas conducts independent workforce research focused on how work is structured, experienced, and sustained in practice.

The research examines how compensation, supervision, organizational design, and policy shape working conditions — and how those conditions impact workforce outcomes such as retention, stability, and care delivery, as well as lived conditions beyond the workplace.

Research Areas

  • Lived experience of work and workforce conditions

  • Compensation, economic insecurity, and job quality

  • Workforce stability: turnover and retention

  • Supervision and day-to-day work design

  • Organizational and structural conditions in frontline work

Approach

The research combines large-scale survey research, statistical analysis, administrative data analysis, and qualitative methods to examine workforce dynamics in real-world organizational contexts.

It is conducted in partnership with professional associations, nonprofit organizations, and state agencies, supporting large-scale data collection and analysis with frontline workers.

Recent work includes survey-based research with over 4,500 direct support professionals and interview-based research with nurses and frontline staff.

Key Findings

  • Working conditions, including compensation, shape living conditions and, in turn, workforce outcomes

  • Workforce instability is primarily driven by structural conditions, not individual factors

  • Economic insecurity is an occupational hazard of many care jobs, not an exception

  • Organizational design decisions shape day-to-day working conditions that are often invisible to leadership

  • Workforce outcomes emerge from how decisions are made and experienced, not from policy design alone

Selected Projects

  • Direct Support Professional Workforce Study
    Large-scale workforce study with over 4,500 direct support professionals examining compensation, turnover, and economic insecurity.

  • Healthcare Workforce Stressor Study
    Mixed-methods research with hospital-based nurses examining workplace stress, distress, and intervention points.

  • Public Sector Internship Evaluation
    Independent evaluation of a citywide internship initiative assessing job readiness, supervision, and employment pathways.

Selected Publications

Cohen J. & Rodgers Y. Prevalence of Food and Housing Insecurity among Direct Support Professionals in New York, Disability and Health.

Cohen J. & Rodgers Y. Contributing factors to personal protective equipment shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic, Preventive Medicine.

Cohen J. & Rodgers Y. An Intersectional Analysis of Long COVID Prevalence, International Journal for Equity in Health.

Cohen J. & Venter WDF. The integration of occupational- and household-based chronic stress among South African women employed as public hospital nurses, PLoS One.

Cohen J. The Values of the Care Economy, International Journal of Health Policy and Management.

  • On the role of care work within political economy and its implications for compensation and workforce conditions.

Cohen J., Pepperrell T., & Venter WDF. The same lesson over and over: Drugs alone will not get us to 90-90-90, AIDS.

  • On the role of social determinants of health and economic precarity in shaping treatment outcomes.

A full list of research projects and publications is available upon request or via my academic profiles (personal website, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar).

From Research to Practice

This research informs how organizations understand workforce conditions and make decisions about compensation, supervision, and organizational design.

The leadership framework and workshops are ways this research is translated into decision-making in practice.