Resource Library

Child care and early education (CCEE) licensing systems establish regulations that must be met to legally operate a child care program. Licensing systems also monitor and enforce these regulations. This collection of short resources from The Role of Licensing in Early Care and Education (TRLECE) project highlights characteristics of frontline licensing staff roles and approaches to implementing some licensing functions.

The Behavioral Interventions Scholars (BIS) grant program supports dissertation research by advanced graduate students who are applying a behavioral science lens to specific research questions relevant to social services programs and policies and other issues facing low-income and vulnerable families in the United States. The sixth round of BIS grants was awarded in 2022.

This fact sheet summarizes Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) grant recipients’ experiences related to their work environments, communication, technology use, staffing, implementation, and data collection as they navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

On October 19—20, 2022, the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) hosted the 2022 Methods Meeting, entitled Applying Mixed Methods and Qualitative Approaches to Social Policy Questions. The convening covered qualitative and mixed method approaches in social policy research and evaluation. This document provides a list of resources for readers who wish to learn more about these topics. Resources were compiled from the meeting topic memorandum, speakers’ presentations, question-and-answer sessions at the meeting, and a literature review conducted by Insight Policy Research. Each section in the document lists relevant resources categorized around frequently asked questions.

Home visiting services are inherently in-person, built on the concept that visiting families in their homes provides unique opportunities to support caregivers and children. However, some eligible families may not receive the benefits of evidence-based home visiting programs due to a variety of barriers, including scheduling, geographic distance, and family disengagement. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, some home visiting models and programs were using virtual methods to help connect and work with families. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of home visiting programs needed to make an abrupt shift to delivering services virtually, rather than in person.

This webinar is designed to support CCDF Lead Agency staff and their partners in using existing administrative data to address policy questions posed by state legislators, agency heads, local child care providers, and other stakeholders.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families. For such programs to be effective, it is critical that clients attend regularly, yet studies have found that HMRE program providers sometimes struggle to maintain high rates of participation. Identifying and exploring typical participation patterns in HMRE programming can help us better understand this challenge and point to ways in which programs can promote and support regular participation.

This study investigates participation patterns in three HMRE programs that were included in the Strengthening Relationships and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation: (1) MotherWise, which served pregnant and new mothers in Denver, Colorado; (2) Career STREAMS, which served young adults seeking job training and employment services in St. Louis, Missouri; and (3) Empowering Families, which served couples with low incomes raising children together in Fort Worth, Texas. These three programs represent a range of HMRE program services and populations and offer opportunities to develop deeper insights into participation patterns in HMRE programs.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families by teaching them skills to improve communication and conflict management, how to recognize the characteristics of healthy romantic relationships, and how to strengthen existing relationships. HMRE programs may pair a relationship skills curriculum with other services, such as individualized job development or instruction on financial planning, that aim to promote economic stability or content on parenting skills.

The NSCAW Adoption Study examines the extent to which children who exit foster care to adoption experience instability, the risk and protective factors for several types of formal (e.g., foster care reentry) and informal (e.g., child runs away or experiences homelessness) instability, and services and supports received by families who have adopted children who exited foster care.

Early childhood home visiting is a service delivery strategy that supports a range of positive outcomes, including improved child and maternal health, children’s development and school readiness, family economic self-sufficiency, and the reduction of child abuse and neglect. Evidence-based home visiting programs reached about 278,000 families in 2021, according to the National Home Visiting Resource Center, but many more families are eligible and could benefit from these programs. This literature synthesis aims to deepen understanding of the facilitators of and barriers to family engagement in home visiting, the strategies programs use to support engagement, and topics that would benefit from further research.