Overview

The purpose of the Supporting Healthy Marriages project is to support the development, implementation and evaluation of interventions designed to sustain healthy marriages among low-income married couples in their child-rearing years. Interventions in this project will focus on enhancing marital relationships, building effective parenting skills, and providing family support opportunities specifically designed for low-income couples, based on theories and evidence that associate these factors with positive child and family outcomes. The specific goal of this evaluation is to analyze and evaluate interventions, programs and service delivery approaches that offer potential to improve child and adult wellbeing by promoting healthy marriages and positive family functioning among low-income couples in their child-rearing years who are married or who plan to marry. The evaluation will utilize a random assignment evaluation design in order to assess the effectiveness of the selected interventions.

The major study questions include: (1) What are the issues and challenges in designing, implementing and operating interventions to build and sustain healthy marriages among low-income couples? (2) What approaches are taken to provide, integrate or add services to promote healthy marriages among the low-income families? What are the characteristics of the interventions and the context within which they are provided? (3) What are the characteristics of couples targeted by interventions? What are the program functions and treatment methods? What are the strategies for outreach and engagement of couples? How do differences in the target populations and their risk factors affect intervention design decisions? (4) What are the net impacts of the interventions on: marital stability and quality of relationships among couples; attitudes and expectations regarding their marriage; parenting attitudes and behaviors among couples; measures of child well-being and development (e.g., cognitive, social, emotional, health), and economic outcomes for families? (5) What are the net impacts for different sub-groups within the research sample? The study will be accomplished though development of eight SHM program demonstrations, provision of technical assistance on program evaluation issues, implementation of pilot tests and close program performance monitoring and feedback, and the conduct of an impact evaluation based on large samples of individuals randomly assigned to treatment and control groups and observational assessments of child wellbeing and quality of couple relationships.

The project period is 9/30/03-9/29/13 and the point of contact is Nancye Campbell. Ask a Question.