Translating staff and resident insights into responsive public services.
My work sits at the intersection of behavioral science, service design, and public policy.
About
I am a Research and Evaluation Specialist with the City of Philadelphia's Office of the Chief Administrative Officer. Much of my work focuses on strengthening the “evidence-utilization pipeline” — the processes through which agencies gather resident input, translate it into operationally meaningful recommendations, and use those recommendations to inform service improvements.
In my current role, I support the City of Philadelphia's Better Services PHL initiative, which aims to improve how residents experience City services. My work has focused on developing a Citywide framework for diagnosing common service challenges, understanding behavioral bottlenecks through engagements with residents and frontline staff, and translating those findings into actionable service recommendations.
Before joining the City, I was an Associate Fellow with the Office of Evaluation Sciences at the U.S. General Services Administration, supporting projects in their Labor, Education, and Social Policy portfolio. Before that, I earned a joint doctorate from the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. My dissertation used surveys and behavioral experiments to understand “gaming” behaviors under non-monetary incentives — specifically, incentives targeting “high virtue” behaviors like academic honesty.
Selected Work
I consider myself a mixed-methods researcher. Working in an applied research setting, this often means making the best use of whatever data is available to me at any given time. Over my somewhat meandering professional career, this approach has exposed me to a pretty wide range of research methods including behavioral experiments (graduate school), experimental and quasi-experimental studies leveraging large administrative datasets (OES), and now convergent qualitative designs — e.g., surveys + semi-structured interviews + some very, very basic natural language processing (not that serious).
Below are a few recent projects showcasing my work:
Designing service standards to inform Citywide service improvements
I helped develop a set of Citywide service standards — shared benchmarks that define what residents can expect from City services — and designed and validated the service assessment framework used to measure services against them.
phila.gov ↗Evaluating the City's approach to building trust by engaging residents
I am a Co-PI on a research program funded by a $200,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation. This work seeks to understand how residents experience the City's resident engagement initiatives. Ideally, we will be able to identify practices that build residents' confidence in the City's responsiveness and recommend improvements grounded in resident input.
Curriculum Vitae
I am famously bad at maintaining an up-to-date CV, but I'll try to post one shortly. Coming soon
Contact
You can reach me at my City email address →
stephanie.permut@phila.govPhiladelphia, PA — © 2026 Stephanie Setton