This project, awarded in 2021, is supporting OPRE in integrating empirical findings from the literature on child development and family well-being into its welfare and family self-sufficiency research agenda. This project will lay the groundwork for building the knowledge base around child and family well-being in the context of parents’ participation in and completion of welfare and family self-sufficiency programs or interventions. Activities will advance ACF’s understanding of how to support and foster the health and well-being of children and their families.
Goals of this project include:
- Assess past and ongoing efforts to measure child- and family-level well-being in OPRE’s welfare and family self-sufficiency research and evaluation portfolio, and identify measurement gaps and opportunities for future work;
- Create a conceptual framework informed by empirical findings from the literature on child and family development that will enable OPRE to generate hypotheses and test short-term, intermediate, and long-term outcomes of child and family-level well-being that are most appropriate to measure in the context of welfare and family self-sufficiency research; and
- Create a compendium of constructs and associated measures of child- and family well-being that are aligned with the conceptual framework and appropriate for inclusion in welfare and family self-sufficiency research.
OPRE has contracted with Mathematica to conduct this work.
Points of contact: Erin Cannon, Emily Ross, and Amelia Popham.