Using Data to Guide Improvement in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Services

This brief presents four tips for using data to guide efforts to improve services. The tips are drawn from the experiences of HMRE grant recipients in SIMR. Grant recipients co-created, tested, and refined promising strategies to address their pressing implementation challenges.

This brief shares four tips to support grant recipients interested in enhancing their CQI approaches by using data more effectively: 

• Develop learning questions to clarify what you hope to learn. Grant recipients should define what they hope to learn from testing their improvement strategy before they begin testing. Developing learning questions helped HMRE grant recipients in SIMR shape their plans for collecting data.
• Gather data to assess progress towards your goals. Grant recipients should explore opportunities to use existing data and ensure new data collection efforts are feasible and minimally burdensome.
• Gather feedback from staff, participants, and partners to inform refinements. Grant recipients in SIMR collected feedback from various groups of people to learn about why strategies did or didn’t work. Collecting feedback from diverse perspectives promotes inclusive and equitable program improvement.
• Interpret findings with your team. Assessing an improvement strategy often involves collecting data from multiple sources. Synthesizing the data collected across sources enables grant recipients to draw conclusions about tested strategies. After concluding a rapid learning cycle, the CQI team should meet to reflect on the data collected and strategize about next steps.

As part of the SIMR study, Mathematica and Public Strategies worked with HMRE grant recipients to test and refine strategies to address key implementation challenges using rapid cycle learning. Rapid cycle learning is a method for quickly and iteratively testing strategies to strengthen implementation of programming. It often involves successive cycles to pilot strategies, collect feedback from staff and participants on how these strategies are working, and gather data to demonstrate whether the strategies are supporting improvement. Based on what grant recipients learn, staff can refine and test strategies again in a subsequent learning cycle.

This brief provides examples of measures and data collection methods that HMRE grant recipients in SIMR used to learn about their strategies in rapid learning cycles. HMRE service providers and evaluators can consider using these examples to develop their own indicators and tools to strengthen their CQI efforts. Grant recipients are encouraged to implement the strategies and tools in this brief and refine them to work in their own services and contexts. It is worth noting that these strategies and tools are promising but not proven.

Piatt, R.D., A. Buonaspina, C. O’Callahan, and S. Baumgartner. “Using Data to Guide Program Improvement in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Services.” OPRE Report #2023-073, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.