Project Index

The Consortium of Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN) consists of five study sites and a coordinating center...

This project provided a descriptive study of the dynamics of county versus state administered TANF programs. The project gathered detailed information from a sample of county and state administered TANF programs identified as having promising TANF-WIA coordination practices...

The National Domestic Violence Hotline Visit disclaimer page (The Hotline) and loveisrespect Visit disclaimer page (LIR; the help line targeted towards young people) are supported by the Division of Family Violence Prevention and Services within ACF’s Family and Youth Services Bureau. They are critical partners in the intervention, prevention, and resource assistance efforts of the network of family violence, domestic violence, and dating violence service providers. They provide:

OPRE launched the Youth Demonstration Development Project (YDD) in 2009 to systematically review the current field of research on youth development and successful transition to adulthood. The primary objective of YDD, which is being conducted for OPRE...

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is responsible for federal programs that address the needs of vulnerable children and families throughout our society, including Native Americans, individuals with developmental disabilities, and refugees.

These are ACF briefs addressing administrative data sharing among particular systems.

The purpose of this initiative was to evaluate services to promote responsible fatherhood through encouraging and supporting healthy marriages between low-income parents...

The goal of the I-HMRF project is to enhance the cultural relevance and responsiveness of HMRF grant programs for Native communities and to develop resources for federal staff and technical assistance providers to promote equitable engagement and service delivery for Native participants, 

The first component of the Family Self-Sufficiency and Stability Research Consortium is the Advancing Welfare and Family Self-Sufficiency Research project (also known as Project AWESOME). Led by Mathematica Policy Research, this contract provides research support and a flexible research and evaluation mechanism for responding to rapidly emerging policy priorities and research opportunities...

The Advancing Welfare and Family Self-Sufficiency Research follow-on contract provided timely and flexible research and evaluation support to ACF and its stakeholders and a flexible research and evaluation mechanism for responding to rapidly emerging policy priorities and research opportunities.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services is required by section 649(g)(1) of Public Law 92-463 to convene an expert advisory committee to review and make recommendations on the design of the study or studies that provide national analysis of the...

The purpose of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program Evaluation ("the Committee") was to advise the Secretary of Health and Human Services on the design, plan, and progress of the evaluation, and to comment on the MIHOPE Report to Congress (PDF)... 

This grant cooperative agreement supported a Head Start American Indian - Alaska Native Research Center at the University of Colorado at Denver — Health Sciences Center. The purpose of the Center was to provide leadership and offer support in the...

In 2001, the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, began a two-year initiative to review existing information, collect new data, and explore research needs for American Indian-Alaska Native Head Start...

The American Indian and Alaska Native Early Childhood Needs Assessment Project (AI/AN EC Needs Assessment) seeks to lay the foundation for understanding the need for early childhood services in American Indian and Alaska Native communities.  The project outlines a series of designs for future studies that will inform a national assessment of the unmet need for early childhood care, education, and home visiting services (prenatal to age 5) in tribal communities...

In 1997, the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) was launched to provide descriptive, nationally representative information on the characteristics, experiences, and development of Head Start children and families, and the characteristics of the Head Start programs and staff who serve them. FACES has historically not included Region XI, whose programs are designed to serve predominantly AI/AN children and families. AI/AN FACES, designed to fill this information gap, was first fielded in 2015. A second cohort was fielded in 2019.

In 1997, the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) was launched to provide descriptive, nationally representative information on the characteristics, experiences, and development of Head Start children and families, and the characteristics of the Head Start programs and staff who serve them. FACES has historically not included Region XI, whose programs are designed to serve predominantly American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) children and families.

Young adults and children who are involved in the child welfare (CW) system or who are considered to be runaway and homeless youth (RHY) are particularly vulnerable to domestic human trafficking, though the full extent of the problem is not yet known. Labor trafficking of minors in the United States is particularly understudied.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), in collaboration with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has initiated this project to explore...

OPRE regularly archives research and evaluation data for secondary analysis, consistent with the ACF evaluation policy, which promotes rigor, relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics in the conduct of evaluation and research. One practice that OPRE implements to support these principles is the responsible archiving of data for secondary analysis. Archiving evaluation data for appropriate secondary use by researchers promotes rigor and transparency by encouraging the external validation and reproducibility of published results or findings.

This contract supported the development of a literature review, conceptual model, and  tool designed to measure teachers’ use of child assessments for individualizing instruction to support optimal development in early childhood settings...

Descriptive study of the range of existing state and local approaches to coordinating early care and education services with other health and human services for children and families with low incomes.

Linking administrative data sets to program evaluation records is a promising and potentially low-cost means of tracking long-term impacts of social interventions. For the purposes of this project, long-term is defined as greater than five years.

Explore the HomVEE review of the evidence of effectiveness for early childhood home visiting models that serve families with pregnant women and children from birth to kindergarten entry.

Discover this project’s work that led to the identification of methods showing promise for evaluating community-level initiatives. Additionally, learn about the kinds of methodological expertise grantees might need to conduct evaluations of community-change efforts and what data collection methods and strategies are likely to yield useful information.

Developing measures of implementation and cost of center-based early care and education.

The AMC-HV project worked to identify and apply innovative methods to better understand the community-level systems and networks in which the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program operates, including referral networks and community resources.

This evaluation examines Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) under the largest federally funded IDA program: the Assets for Independence (AFI) program administered by ACF. IDAs are personal savings accounts targeted to low-income persons that...

The Assets for Independence (AFI) Program Experiment assessed the impacts of this ACF program on the savings, asset ownership, and economic well-being outcomes of the low-income individuals and families participating in the program.

Learn about the Baby’s First Years study and the extent to which income plays a causal role in determining early child cognitive, socio-emotional, and brain development among families with a low-income.

Learn more about the Behavioral Interventions Scholars (BIS) grant program, supported dissertation research by graduate students applying a behavioral science lens to research relevant to social services programs, policies, and other issues facing low-income families in the United States.

Many human services programs are designed such that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them — from deciding which programs to apply for, to completing forms, attending meetings, showing proof of eligibility, and arranging travel and child care...

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency Capstone project, led by MDRC, synthesized the work of the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project and conducted dissemination activities to ensure the results from BIAS were shared with a broad audience of research, policy, and practice stakeholders. BIAS Capstone furthered the dissemination work conducted for BIAS through a range of diverse activities and products...

OPRE's Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency-Next Generation (BIAS-NG) project continues ACF’s exploration of the application of behavioral science to the programs and target populations of ACF.

Explore OPRE's portfolio of work on the application of behavioral science to challenges faced by programs that provide social services to individuals and families with low incomes by reviewing relevant reports, infographics, newsletters, and more.

The Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study identified and tested new, interactive, skill-building approaches that address two of the three required Responsible Fatherhood grant program areas, parenting and economic stability, within the context of six existing fatherhood programs.

This project supports the Children’s Bureau's effort to build capacity to evaluate community-level mobilization around the development of multi-system collaboratives that provide a continuum of activities and services designed to prevent child abuse and neglect through two primary components. This includes evaluation-related technical assistance to grantees to conduct site-specific outcome evaluations and cross-site process evaluation of each cohort of grantees to develop and implement integrated approaches to preventing child maltreatment.  

Phase III (2019-2028) Phase III of YARH (YARH-3) will continue to provide important information to the field by supporting organizations from Phase II in evidence-building activities, including providing evaluation-related TA; assessing sites’ readiness for summative evaluation; designing and conducting a federally led evaluation of at least one comprehensive service model, including an implementation study and an impact study; and disseminating knowledge gained through project activities. The evaluation team will work closely with ACF, a broad range of stakeholders, and selected experts so that the TA activities and evaluation will yield timely findings that inform policy and practice.