Since the inception of the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) programs in 2006, ACF’s Office of Family Assistance (OFA) and OPRE have partnered to support research, evaluation, and other learning activities related to HMRF with the goal of understanding and improving program delivery and participant outcomes.
Examples of major federal HMRF evaluation studies include Supporting Healthy Marriages (SHM), Building Strong Families (BSF), Parents and Children Together (PACT), Strengthening Relationship and Education Services (STREAMS), and Building Bridges and Bonds (B3), along with many other projects that have broadened our understanding of HMRF programs and the participants they serve.
This learning has both informed and been guided by a multi-cohort, multi-year HMRF learning agenda (see a definition of a learning agenda from evaluation.gov) that OFA and OPRE collaboratively developed. The central goal of the learning agenda is to ask and answer questions about how to improve outcomes for the couples, youth, fathers, mothers, and families served by HMRF programs. The learning agenda includes foundational activities such as descriptive studies and data-driven program improvement as well as impact evaluations, and also prioritizes building the capacity of HMRF grantees and others to conduct research and evaluation and to understand and apply lessons learned from research, evaluation, and other learning activities. The learning agenda also prioritizes active engagement with programs, communities, and participants to ensure research processes consider community contexts and participant voices, and to intentionally address equity throughout the research lifecycle. OPRE’s Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Research and Evaluation Snapshot, part of the ACF Research and Evaluation agenda, describes HMRF research activities and plans that are reflected in the learning agenda.
With the current cohort of HMRF grantees (funded 2020-2025), OPRE and OFA initiated Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs (SIRF) and Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR), two projects that have been working closely with a subset of grantee programs to address critical implementation challenges that programs face in recruiting, engaging, and retaining participants. Through this work, we are learning how to strengthen program implementation so that programs can fully serve their intended populations, and so that rigorous research studies can better understand the impact of program services on participants.
Building off of the SIRF and SIMR work (and other work, such as the Parents and Children Together study that have helped identify how RF and HMRE program activities may influence outcomes) to identify effective implementation strategies, OFA and OPRE are next beginning to explore essential elements, or “core components,” of programs that have the potential to improve both program implementation and participant outcomes.
OPRE has increasingly recognized the utility and promise of studying core components in order to grow an evidence base that allows programs to adopt effective or core practices in the context of their existing programs to improve outcomes. The OPRE Methods Meeting in 2020 explored this topic in-depth, and other OPRE projects are actively exploring core components in various program settings. This avenue is particularly attractive for HMRF, given the wide variety of program services and approaches that organizations use in the context of unique community settings and participant populations. Nuanced information on the effectiveness of core components can provide programs with critical information on whether to integrate elements that have demonstrated potential for positive impact in their unique populations and settings.
However, as noted by experts in these recent OPRE meetings, core components studies can be challenging to design and conduct. Therefore, in addition to engagement with other types of experts such as those with strong programmatic and lived expertise, core components projects require involvement of experts with specialized knowledge in the types of research designs and methods that are needed for core components studies to be executed with rigor.
OFA and OPRE are committed to making purposeful investments to leverage innovations and opportunities for studying core components using the most rigorous methodologies to improve both Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) programs. OPRE just awarded a new contract, with funds from OFA, to MDRC and its partners Abt and MEF Associates focused on core components in RF programs. This project will use a multi-faceted approach drawing upon both empirical and theoretical evidence, including a meta-analysis and both qualitative and quantitative data collection, and guided by input from an advisory committee, to identify and test core components in RF programs. OPRE has also forecasted a contract to focus on core components in HMRE programs related to program implementation and outcomes for program participants, and to propose a rigorous study design to assess their impact in a potential future impact evaluation. Through these projects, OPRE will work closely with OFA, current grantees, practitioners, and other experts (including those with lived expertise) to identify promising core components that can be rigorously tested for their ability to improve implementation and impact of HMRF programs.
OFA and OPRE look forward to continuing to pursue our learning agenda in both the areas of Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education, and see the focus on core components as a promising strategy for improving both implementation of programs and outcomes for participants.
Katie Pahigiannis is a Senior Social Science Research Analyst and Team Leader for Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Research at OPRE.
Seth Chamberlain is a Division Director in ACF’s Office of Family Assistance (OFA), with oversight of the Healthy Marriage (HM) and Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs.