Project Index

This project developed a framework to provide marriage educators with a set of concepts to help them better understand their craft and discover unseen possibilities. It is designed to help marriage educators think more thoroughly, systematically...

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...

This webpage serves as a resource center for links to data pages in ACF program offices, data reports pages (e.g., annual statistical reports, reports to Congress, online tabular data), and ACF data catalogs and archives (e.g., national surveys, administrative data, evaluation data).

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:

Achieving Change for Texans: Statewide, the following were key program provisions: (1) time limit of 12 to 36 months for able-bodied adults, depending on work experience and education, with exemptions for severe local economic conditions and personal...

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.

The purpose of this project is to provide information gathering, analysis, consultation, and technical support to OPRE and its partners to strengthen data governance practices within ACF offices, and between ACF and its partners at the federal, state, local, and Tribal levels.

Explore the Evidence Capacity Support project’s work to strengthen evidence culture, evidence infrastructure, data access, knowledge and skills, and dissemination, while incorporating principles of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018.

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 Indigenous communities and to develop resources for federal staff and technical assistance providers to promote equitable engagement and service delivery for Indigenous 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.

An Exploration of Options for the Collection of Marriage and Divorce Statistics at the National, State and Local Levels project explored options for the collection of marriage and divorce statistics at the national, state and local levels...

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...

The Approaching Time Limits study explored what States have done with clients as they approached or already reached Federal and/or State TANF time limits....

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...

The Assessing Enhanced Transitional Employment Programs (ETE) project identified and described operating employment-focused programs that helped individuals who faced significant employment challenges by providing transitional employment or work...

Assessing Medicaid and Food Stamps Access and Participation project, with the cooperation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation helped participating States create and analyze performance data on how their Medicaid, SCHIP, and Food stamps enrollment...

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.