Measuring Child Well-Being in Evaluations of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Programs

Publication Date: April 15, 2022
The first page of the report, entitled "Measuring Child Well-Being in Evaluations of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Programs"

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  • Published: 2022

Introduction

Research Questions

  1. How can HMRE and RF evaluators measure child well-being?

Improving children’s well-being is a central motivation of healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) and responsible fatherhood (RF) programming. These programs offer relationship, parenting, and economic supports that have the long-term goal of improving children’s well-being by increasing the likelihood that children grow up in married and/or stable, two-parent families (in the case of HMRE programs) and that they grow up with engaged and supportive fathers (in the case of RF programs). Providing services designed to promote relationship and economic stability has the potential to improve co-parenting, parenting skills, financial outcomes, and parental well-being, which may in turn improve children’s well-being (Berger and McLanahan 2015; Shelton and Harold 2008; Sandstrom and Huerta 2013). Given the potential of these services to affect the well-being of children, it is important to examine child well-being when studying these programs.

In this paper, we describe how recent HMRE and RF evaluations have measured child well-being and offer recommendations for evaluators who are interested in incorporating child well-being measures into future evaluations.

Note. This paper was updated in August 2022 to correct an error in Figure 1. Please see Figure 1 in the full paper for an explanation of the update.

Purpose

This white paper provides an overview of the ways that evaluations of HMRE and RF programs have measured child well-being and offers recommendations for HMRE and RF evaluators who are interested in including child well-being measures in their studies. The paper includes a definition of child well-being and a discussion of how the content in HMRE and RF programs might affect it. We then summarize how recent evaluations of HMRE and RF programs have measured child well-being and provide recommendations for evaluators who wish to measure child well-being in future evaluations.

Key Findings and Highlights

We describe findings from our review of 32 HMRE evaluations and 23 RF evaluations conducted since 2000. We find that:

  • Of the 32 HMRE evaluations we reviewed, 12 included a child well-being measure. Among HMRE evaluations that included a child well-being measure, evaluators typically measured children’s psychological health. Some evaluations also measured social interactions and economic circumstances. Very few measured cognitive skills or physical health. Evaluators primarily gathered information about children’s well-being through parent surveys.
  • Of the 23 RF evaluations we reviewed, 15 included a child well-being measure. These studies primarily examine children’s economic circumstances and typically focus on nonresident fathers’ financial support of their children. Some evaluations also measured children’s psychological health and a few measured children’s social interactions. None of the evaluations we reviewed measured children’s cognitive skills or physical health. As with the HMRE evaluations, evaluators primarily measured child well-being with surveys of parents (usually fathers, but sometimes fathers and co-parents).

We offer three recommendations for evaluators of HMRE or RF programs who want to measure child well-being:

  • We recommend that evaluators measure multiple aspects of child well-being, with a particular focus on the domains of children’s psychological health, their social interactions, and their economic circumstances. These three domains are relatively straightforward to measure with parent surveys, offering an accessible data collection option for evaluators. In addition, they align well with the focus of HMRE programs on relationships and RF programs’ focus on parenting and economic supports. Research has shown that better family relationships and family economic circumstances are associated with better children’s outcomes in these domains (Conger et al. 2010; Mistry et al. 2002; Berger and McLanahan 2015). Therefore, HMRE and RF services could lead to improvements in these aspects of child well-being.
  • In addition, evaluators should consider including measures of parenting and parent well-being in their studies to better understand the pathways between HMRE and RF content and child well-being outcomes. Specifically, we recommend measuring co-parenting, parenting behaviors, and parent psychological well-being.
  • Finally, evaluators should consider the cultural validity and cultural relevance of the child well-being measures they select. It is important for HMRE and RF evaluators to consider whether the child well-being measures they select are appropriate for the people who will be served by the programs they are evaluating. Evaluators can take initial steps toward this goal by determining whether the measures they want to use have been used with populations that are similar to those who will be included in their study or pretesting the measure with groups similar to those who will be included in the study.

Methods

We reviewed HMRE and RF studies published since 2000, that were conducted in the U.S. and in which most study participants were parents. We included studies that were designed either to measure the effects of these programs (that is, randomized controlled trials or quasi-experimental designs) or to describe how the outcomes of program participants change over time (that is, pre-post studies). We drew upon four sources to identify studies for review: 1) two recent reviews, one focused on outcomes in HMRE evaluation studies and the other a meta-analysis of RF programs (Briggs et al. 2020 and Holmes et al. 2018); 2) local impact evaluations from the 2015-2020 cohort of HMRE and RF grantees funded by the Office of Family Assistance within the Administration for Children and Families; 3) two literature reviews completed as part of the FRAMING project (Alamillo et al., 2020; Wood et al., 2019); and 4) suggestions from two experts consulted as part of this work. These sources yielded 32 unique HMRE evaluations and 23 unique RF evaluations.

Recommendations

We offer three recommendations for evaluators of HMRE or RF programs who want to measure child well-being:

  • We recommend that evaluators measure multiple aspects of child well-being, with a particular focus on the domains of children’s psychological health, their social interactions, and their economic circumstances. These three domains are relatively straightforward to measure with parent surveys, offering an accessible data collection option for evaluators. In addition, they align well with the focus of HMRE programs on relationships and RF programs’ focus on parenting and economic supports. Research has shown that better family relationships and family economic circumstances are associated with better children’s outcomes in these domains (Conger et al. 2010; Mistry et al. 2002; Berger and McLanahan 2015). Therefore, HMRE and RF services could lead to improvements in these aspects of child well-being.
  • In addition, evaluators should consider including measures of parenting and parent well-being in their studies to better understand the pathways between HMRE and RF content and child well-being outcomes. Specifically, we recommend measuring co-parenting, parenting behaviors, and parent psychological well-being.
  • Finally, evaluators should consider the cultural validity and cultural relevance of the child well-being measures they select. It is important for HMRE and RF evaluators to consider whether the child well-being measures they select are appropriate for the people who will be served by the programs they are evaluating. Evaluators can take initial steps toward this goal by determining whether the measures they want to use have been used with populations that are similar to those who will be included in their study or pretesting the measure with groups similar to those who will be included in the study.

Citation

Cavadel, E., Hennigar, A., Wood, R., Ritchie, L, and Hunter, K. (2022). Measuring Child Well-Being in Evaluations of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Programs. OPRE Report 2022-80. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.