Defining, Measuring, and Supporting Economic Well-Being in Early Childhood Home Visiting: A Review of Research and Practices

This report describes findings from literature and document reviews exploring how to define, measure, and support family economic well-being in ECHV. The findings can provide useful insights to policymakers, researchers, and ECHV practitioners, who can learn about potential avenues to support family economic well-being, and who might be interested in different sections based on their work:

• Researchers might be most interested in the discussion of factors related to family economic well-being in Chapter II and the measures identified in Chapter III.
• ECHV practitioners might be most interested in the broad definition of family economic well-being at the beginning of Chapter II and the potential applicability to ECHV of practices that support family economic well-being in Chapter IV, which could help guide ECHV programs to adopt the practices.
• Policymakers might be most interested in the findings overview and implications in Chapter V, which offers ideas for filling gaps in research and practice identified through the literature and document reviews. This can encourage progress toward incorporating strategies that address family economic well-being in ECHV.

• The HomeEc project’s definition of family economic well-being is multi-faceted in that it focuses on economics and the related socio-emotional implications that families face. Specifically, a family is defined as having economic well-being when its self-defined needs and goals match its resources across four key constructs: basic needs, financial control, financial security and shock absorption, and employment security and satisfaction. A family’s ability to achieve economic well-being can be influenced by structural conditions that create inequity (such as historic and systemic racism, and gender inequity) and by external economic forces, which can directly and strongly impact a family’s economic resources.
• Many structural (such as the economic context), household (such as family relationships), and individual (such as physical and mental health) factors relate to family economic well-being and families’ experiences of the four constructs. Changes in family economic well-being may—in part—either be caused by such factors or influence the factors, although the directionality of these relationships is not well understood.
• To measure family economic well-being, researchers and agency staff generally use data from surveys or participant questionnaires to assess aspects of the four constructs. However, there is a lack of consistent definitions of measures and how and when to assess the way outcomes change over time, and over what time horizon.
• The literature and document reviews revealed 10 practices designed to support family economic well-being that could potentially be implemented or expanded upon by ECHV agencies and build on the strengths of existing service offerings. The most common activities across practices were case management, coaching, and financial education.
• The literature and document reviews highlighted future research directions that will fill gaps in understanding and measuring economic well-being, such as disentangling the relationships among factors related to family economic well-being, defining measures of economic well-being and the appropriate time horizons for measurement, and identifying appropriate strategies for collecting data on sensitive topics such as poor housing conditions or material hardship.
• The reviews also highlighted future directions for research on practices to support family economic well-being, such as assessing the replicability or feasibility of the 10 identified practices in other ECHV agencies, evaluating the effectiveness of the identified practices, and studying the associations between practices that aim to support family economic well-being with the federal, state, and local policies within which families and ECHV agencies operate. Changes to policies or structural factors might be more impactful for supporting families’ economic well-being than practices implemented by ECHV agencies. However, changing policies or influencing structural factors is likely outside the scope or capacity of individual ECHV practitioners. 
• The findings from this report will inform future HomeEc project activities including a conceptual model of how ECHV can improve family economic well-being, consultations with ECHV agencies and parent participants to learn about how ECHV addresses family economic well-being, and a literature review and interviews about how the COVID-19 pandemic affected family economic well-being and ECHV agencies’ pandemic responses.

This report presents findings from targeted literature and document reviews designed to identify key research and practices, with the goal of informing project tasks and research going forward. Both the literature and document reviews included research on and practices within ECHV, as well as research and practices from related fields. We included research from social work, child welfare, public policy, and economics; we included practices from early childhood education, employment- and income-related support services, and broad anti-poverty initiatives. Both reviews were focused to balance effort and relevance.

The literature review process began with a foundational list of research derived from our team’s expertise and our consultation with experts in the field. To fill gaps in this list, we conducted targeted database searches and found additional studies. We screened the literature and extracted information that could help us address the four research questions.

The document review process began with a call for nominations of practices. We screened and prioritized nominations using predetermined criteria to select practices. We then held phone calls with organizations implementing selected practices to learn more about them. Finally, we reviewed at least two documents per practice, using a rubric to extract relevant information.

Eddins, Katie, Emily Sama-Miller, Emily Forrester, Josefina Gemignani, Jamie Manzer, Leah Childress, and Sarah Avellar (2023). Defining, Measuring, and Supporting Family Economic Well-Being in Early Childhood Home Visiting: A Review of Research and Practices, OPRE Report #2023-117, Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.