Resource Library

Family Strengthening Scholars: 2017 Grantees & Abstracts

Several ACF programs interact with justice-involved parents and youth in an effort to promote economic self-sufficiency and social well-being for the individuals and their families. Across ACF, we are implementing rigorous research and evaluation projects to better understand how to serve this population.

The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation is a random assignment impact study and in-depth process study of five Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) grantees funded by ACF’s Office of Family Assistance (OFA). To maximize its contributions to the evidence base and to inform future program and evaluation design, STREAMS is examining the full range of populations served by HMRE programs, including adult individuals, adult couples...

The report presents four “Pathways-to-Outcomes” models for Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs, each focusing on one outcome domain measured in the Parents and Children Together (PACT) evaluation: (1) healthy relationships between co-parents, (2) father development and well-being, (3) consistent employment; and (4) parenting skills and father involvement.

ACF directed Mathematica to create this set of RF Pathways-to-Outcomes models to depict how RF program activities may contribute to...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common form of interpersonal violence in the United States. Its consequences can be serious: 41% of female IPV survivors and 14% of male survivors experience physical injuries, and other survivors face acute or long-term physical or behavioral health problems and economic consequences...

This report from the Urban Institute provides early implementation findings from a study of six grantees that provide soon-to-be and recently-released fathers and their families with an array of activities and services in responsible fatherhood/parenting, healthy marriage/relationships, and economic stability. The goals of the programs are to help stabilize the fathers and their families, move the fathers toward self-sufficiency, and reduce recidivism.  These OFA grantees began program...

This report represents the final synthesis of the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency project. Overall, the project’s findings demonstrated that applying behavioral insights to challenges facing human services programs can improve program efficiency, operations, and outcomes at a relatively low cost.

Based on qualitative interviews with a group of responsible fatherhood program participants, this brief focuses on fathers’ perspectives on co-parenting, specifically:

1. The nature of their co-parenting relationship;
2. Changes in their co-parenting relationships; and
3. Efforts they made to obtain formal agreements for visitation, custody, or parenting time.

Each interviewee participated in one of these four responsible fatherhood programs...

This report describes program design and implementation of two Healthy Marriage programs that are part of the Parents and Children Together evaluation...

Administrative data have the potential to help us answer pressing social policy questions. Government stakeholders and researchers are exploring the promises of using administrative data for research purposes.

This brief summarizes an Innovative Methods Meeting that was organized by OPRE in the fall of 2015 that considered the potential benefits and pitfalls of using administrative data for research purposes...