Introduction
The overarching goal of the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE) is to provide information about whether families and children benefit from Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program-funded early childhood home visiting programs as they operated from 2012 to 2017, and if so, how. The MIECHV Program is administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
Given that previous long-term studies of home visiting found positive effects, ACF and HRSA initiated plans in 2016 to design long-term follow-ups with the families who are participating in the MIHOPE randomized controlled trial to examine the potential long-term effects of the MIECHV Program on children and families. A follow-up when children were in kindergarten, approximately five to six years after women enrolled in MIHOPE, was planned in part because measuring children’s cognitive, behavioral, self-regulatory, and social-emotional skills at the outset of formal schooling could provide important data on the longer-term effects of home visiting.
Purpose
This analysis plan describes the intended kindergarten design, including the planned timing of the kindergarten data collection and the data sources the team planned to obtain (see the Methods section of this page for additional detail on data sources). The analysis plan also discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the planned data collection and how the study responded to the pandemic.
The analysis plan describes the study team’s plans for the kindergarten analyses, which include impact and mediation analyses.
Key Findings and Highlights
The study team planned to conduct data collection for the kindergarten follow-up during the four school years in which children in the sample were slated to attend kindergarten: 2018-2019 (Cohort 1); 2019-2020 (Cohort 2); 2020-2021 (Cohort 3); and 2021-2022 (Cohort 4).
Kindergarten data collection paused during the 2020-2021 school year and resumed during the 2021-2022 school year, when children in Cohort 3 were slated to attend first grade and children in Cohort 4 were slated to attend kindergarten. In light of the ongoing pandemic at that time, the study team adapted the kindergarten data collection to conduct all in-home assessments virtually for Cohorts 3 and 4. The study team also designed and implemented a brief web survey and qualitative interviews from late 2020 to early 2021 to enhance understanding of how MIHOPE families were experiencing the pandemic and gather information to contextualize the study’s kindergarten findings.
For the kindergarten impact analysis, the study team will examine the effects of home visiting on 66 child and family outcomes in five outcome areas and show estimated effects for these individual outcomes in the kindergarten report. To focus the impact analyses and aid in the interpretation of the results, the study team will answer several topical research questions, using omnibus tests to interpret the pattern of effects across the outcomes relevant to each research question. The study team will draw on the answers to these multiple questions to interpret the effects of home visiting at the kindergarten follow-up. The study team will also analyze whether effects differ across prespecified populations, defined using family characteristics.
In addition, the study team will conduct mediation analyses to shed light on the pathways or mechanisms that might explain how home visiting influenced kindergarten outcomes, using information about children’s development and families’ well-being measured at earlier waves of MIHOPE. Though the results will not allow for causal interpretation of the estimates, these exploratory analyses can help identify intermediate outcomes from earlier waves that are most likely to have contributed to impacts on outcomes at the kindergarten follow-up.
Methods
Because home visiting aims to affect a wide range of outcomes, the study team collected a wide range of data for the kindergarten follow-up, from the following data sources:
A structured interview with the children’s mothers to measure a broad set of constructs that are mostly not available from other data sources
Direct assessments of children’s language, math, and executive functioning skills conducted by trained field interviewers
Observations of parental warmth and children’s self-regulation conducted by trained field interviewers during the direct assessment
Observations of mother-child interactions, such as parental sensitivity and child engagement of parent, by trained independent observers during a video-recorded semi-structured play interaction
A direct assessment of mothers’ working memory conducted by trained field interviewers
A teacher survey to measure children’s social and emotional development, approaches to learning, disciplinary incidents, receipt of special services, and school attendance
Federal administrative data on healthcare use via Medicaid
Federal administrative data on employment covered by the unemployment insurance system (National Directory of New Hires)
State child welfare records
School records, from state and local education agencies
Two additional data sources collected information about families’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) a brief web survey was administered to families in all cohorts in September and October 2020, and (2) qualitative interviews were conducted with a subsample of 100 families who responded to the web survey between October 2020 and January 2021.
Citation
Faucetta, Kristen, and Ximena A. Portilla 2025. Analysis Plan for the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE) Kindergarten Follow-up. OPRE Report 2025-024. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.