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BUILDING STRONG FAMILIES
Purpose
The Building Strong Families evaluation will assess the effectiveness of interventions targeting low-income unwed parents at or near the birth of their child. Programs and services will focus on providing to interested unwed parents the skills and knowledge necessary to enter into and sustain healthy marriages, improve relationships and family functioning, and increase child and family well-being. Evaluators will work with state and local officials in up to six sites. The evaluation will include a process and implementation study as well as a random assignment impact study. The goals of the evaluation are to increase knowledge about policies, services and programs, and service delivery approaches that offer promise for improving child and parental well-being by increasing healthy marriage.
The study will address the following questions:
- What are the issues and challenges in designing, implementing, and operating programs to increase permanence and healthy marriages and thereby improve child well-being and family functioning among low-income unwed parents? What approaches are taken to provide, integrate, or add services to promote healthy marriages and build strong families? What are the characteristics of the program models and the context within which they are provided?
- What are the characteristics of couples targeted by programs? What are the strategies for outreach and engagement of participants? How do program designs relate to the characteristics of those targeted (i.e., how do targeting decisions affect program design decisions)?
- What are the net impacts on the attitudes and expectations of low-income parents regarding marriage?
- What are the net impacts on the rate of marriage, the level of relationship stability, and the quality of relationships among parents?
- What are the net impacts on measures of child well-being (e.g., cognitive, social, emotional, health) and parental well-being (e.g., emotional, health, economic)?
- What program designs work best? Do program effects vary for couples and families with different characteristics?
- In what ways can the experimental design be exploited to answer additional questions through non-experimental methods (e.g., what is the role of marriage in relation to other factors in the outcomes observed)?
For more information:
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/index.html
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2002). Building Strong Families statement of work. Washington, DC: Author.
http://www.buildingstrongfamilies.info
Agencies/Institutions
Building Strong Families is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, and is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and its subcontractors: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation; The Urban Institute; Decision Information Resources, Inc.; and Public Strategies, Inc.
Research/Survey Design
The evaluation will be longitudinal and will include a process and implementation study and an impact study. The impact study will randomly assign couples to treatment and control groups in each site.
For more information:
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/index.html
Date(s)/Periodicity
The Building Strong Families evaluation began in September 2002 and is scheduled to end in September 2011. The team is currently building the program model and taking initial steps toward recruiting sites for the evaluation.
Population/Sample
The primary focus of the program intervention will be on low-income, unwed couples at or near the birth of their child. To most accurately measure the effects of different interventions and services, the evaluation will use randomization to assign couples to treatment and control groups. It is expected that programs to be evaluated will be comprehensive in the range of services provided; the services to be evaluated will be available to enrolled families over an extended period (perhaps 12–30 months). It is also expected that programs selected for the study will be able to enroll about1,000 mother-father pairs into the research sample (i.e., approximately 500 in the experimental group and 500 in the control group) over an 18-to-24-month period.
For more information:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2002). Building Strong Families statement of work. Washington, DC: Author.
Content Covered
Measures have not yet been selected, but relationship quality will be included as a construct.
Availability of Data for Public Use
Data for public use is not yet available.
Reference List for Users’ Guide, Codebooks, Methodology Report(s)
Users’ Guides, Codebooks, and Reports are not yet available.
Updated information on the Building Strong Families evaluation can be found at: http://www.buildingstrongfamilies.info
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