Local Evaluation Highlights from the 2015 Cohort of Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Grantees Serving Adults

Publication Date: August 26, 2022
The first page of the brief, entitled "Local Evaluation Highlights from the 2015 Cohort of Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Grantees Serving Adults"

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  • Published: 2022

Introduction

Research Questions

  1. What strategies were associated with improved client attendance and retention in HMRE program services?
  2. On which outcomes did programs have (1) favorable effects, (2) unfavorable effects, and (3) no effects?

Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) grantees seek to support and strengthen families for the well-being and long-term success of children. Evaluations can help grantees improve services and better support families by examining what is working well and what is not. In the 2015 HMRE grantee cohort, funded by the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Family Assistance (OFA), 37 HMRE grantees served adults, and 13 of those grantees conducted local evaluations. In a local evaluation, a grantee works with an independent evaluator to design and execute a study to address questions of interest about grantees’ programs and clients. Even though the questions were about each grantee’s particular program, the results from the evaluations can be helpful to other organizations that serve similar populations, provide similar services, or plan to do so. This brief highlights selected results from the local evaluations of HMRE grantees serving adults.

This brief was developed as part of Building Usage, Improvement, and Learning with Data in Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (BUILD HMRF) Programs project, led by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation in collaboration with OFA. ACF has contracted with Mathematica to conduct the BUILD HMRF project.

Purpose

Although the local impact and descriptive evaluations discussed in this brief were not representative of the 2015 HMRE cohort or HMRE programs in general, they provide useful information for HMRE programs as they seek to engage participants in services and support healthy families. By summarizing key results, the brief makes the findings easily accessible to current grantees and other interested readers.

Key Findings and Highlights

  • Although the evaluations could not definitively determine whether a strategy improved client attendance at services, they identified several promising strategies such as:
    • Offering longer workshop sessions over a shorter period of time
    • Emphasizing make-up sessions for any missed regular workshop sessions
    • Allowing clients to attend any workshop that fit their schedule throughout their participation in the program
    • Reflecting the clients’ language and culture in services
    • Teaching approaches to communicating and connecting with extended family because of the family’s influence on a couple’s relationship.
  • The impact evaluations found some favorable results as well as some areas in which the program goals were not achieved. Favorable effects were common though not universal for outcomes about relationships, such as conflict management skills and relationship satisfaction. For other domains, such as parenting and mental health, findings with no effects were as or more common than favorable outcomes.

Methods

To address the research question on strategies linked with client attendance, we summarized the results from descriptive local evaluations that examined participation. Although these evaluations focused on several topics, this brief focused on strategies to strengthen attendance because low participation is a common implementation challenged faced by grantees.

To summarize the findings of the HMRE impact evaluations, we grouped the impact estimates by domain (such as healthy relationship outcomes or mental health outcomes). We placed all impact estimates on a similar standardized scale so we could make comparisons across outcomes originally measured on different scales. We then characterized the findings within each domain based on whether there was at least one favorable, statistically significant finding.

Citation

Ross, Christine and Avellar, Sarah. (2022). Local Evaluation Highlights from the 2015 Cohort of Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Grantees Serving Adults (OPRE Report 2022-132). Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.