Introduction
Diapers are essential to the health and wellbeing of babies, toddlers, and their families. They are also expensive, and many families struggle to buy enough diapers to fully address their children’s needs. In 2022, the Office of Community Services (OCS) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) began the Diaper Distribution Demonstration and Research Pilot (Diaper Distribution Pilot). OCS designed the pilot to help address diaper need and increase economic security for families with low incomes. This is the first federally funded diaper distribution program. In addition to providing diapers, this initiative seeks to connect families with other services they need (e.g., housing, early childhood education and childcare, food and nutrition, training services). The Diaper Distribution Pilot funded 21 grant recipients to implement diaper distribution programs in their communities.
OCS and the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) partnered to support an evaluation of the Diaper Distribution Pilot. The study team (made up of Westat, Public Profit, and Dr. Jennifer Randles) will assess the Diaper Distribution Pilot. This evaluation will lead to a better understanding of how grant recipients serve participants. It will deepen understanding of diaper distribution operations and establish the foundation for rigorously measuring the potential impacts of diaper distribution programs. Ultimately, the evaluation will help inform future policy decisions at national, state, and local levels to serve families with diaper need. This document describes the proposed approach of the study team for conducting the evaluation.
Primary Research Questions
The study design has three main components, each with specific research questions:
- The process evaluation: How do Diaper Distribution Pilot grant recipients implement their programs?
- The participant experience and outcomes assessment: What are the experiences of the caregivers who participate in the program?
- The feasibility assessment: How could we best design a credible and reliable future impact study for the Diaper Distribution Pilot?
The process evaluation will document grant recipient approaches, structures, activities, and reach to systematically understand how each grant recipient executed the Diaper Distribution Pilot initiative across all grant recipients. Our research questions focus on understanding the implementation contexts for each grant, implementation strategies, and the strength of implementation at the grant recipient, cohort, and program-wide level.
The participant experience and outcome assessment will document how Diaper Distribution Pilot participants experienced grant services, barriers and facilitators related to their participation, their perceptions of program benefits and drawbacks, and the extent to which participants experienced changes in hypothesized outcomes after participation in the Diaper Distribution Pilot.
The feasibility assessment will inform the design of a reliable and credible impact evaluation for the Diaper Distribution Pilot. Specially, our evaluation will focus on understanding the feasibility of different measurement approaches and designs and understanding what technical assistance may be needed to increase feasibility.
Purpose
The purpose of this report is to outline the design of the evaluation. The report details the design of each study component, including the research questions, the data measures, and how the study team plans to collect data.
Key Findings and Highlights
We will examine how each grant recipient structures and runs its program and serves the caregivers in its population. We will also look across grants to draw broader conclusions about implementation and determine implications for a potential impact study in the future.
We have designed the evaluation to be practical to respond to real-world constraints and to minimize burden to grant recipients and their participants when possible. As a result, our approach to answering each research question will vary by grant cohort and sometimes within cohorts. This will help us accommodate changes over the course of the Diaper Distribution Pilot and grant-led data collection efforts.
Ultimately, this study is designed to lay the groundwork for a potential rigorous impact evaluation that will measure causal impact in the future. This current evaluation is an exploratory analysis, with limited ability in scope, time, and reach. As of publication, we are developing an impact study design.
Methods
The evaluation components will use the following data sources to answer our research questions:
- Interviews with grant recipient and subrecipient staff
- Focus groups with caregivers who have received diapers from the Diaper Distribution Pilot
- Grant-collected data on participant demographics, services received, and outcomes of interest
- Grant materials, such as quarterly progress reports, participant recruitment materials, and staff training materials
- Secondary data sources describing the communities where the grants operate
Please note this report describes our plan and methods, but we have not yet conducted the study.
After collecting these data, the study team will first analyze data within each data source (e.g., grant recipient staff interviews, focus groups, secondary data) and will then synthesize these data across sources to address our research questions. We will conduct analysis at the individual level, the grant recipient level (as case studies), and across multiple grant recipients to better understand trends among cohorts (in a multiple case study design) and at the program-wide level.