Strengthening Families, Healthy Marriage & Responsible Fatherhood View all reports on this topic

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), in collaboration with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has initiated this project to explore...

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency Capstone project, led by MDRC, will produce a final synthesis report on the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project and conduct related dissemination activities. While several reports will be produced under the BIAS contract, including a report describing findings from the knowledge development phase and a site specific report for each of the eight sites where behavioral interventions are tested...

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated that applying behavioral insights to challenges facing human services programs can improve program operations and outcomes at relatively low cost. The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency Next Generation project will continue ACF’s exploration of the application of behavioral science to the programs and target populations of ACF. This next generation project, launched in September 2015...

Many human services programs are designed such that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them — from deciding which programs to apply for, to completing forms, attending meetings, showing proof of eligibility, and arranging travel and child care. Program designers often implicitly assume that individuals will carefully consider options and make decisions that maximize their well-being. But over the past 30 years...

Many human services programs are designed such that individuals must make active decisions and go through a series of steps in order to benefit from them — from deciding which programs to apply for, to completing forms, attending meetings...

Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) is a rigorous evaluation study of responsible fatherhood programs designed to answer multiple practice-relevant research questions. The first year of the contract is a planning period that will involve gathering input...

The National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families generates new research and translates research across three priority areas—poverty reduction and self-sufficiency, healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood, and early care and...

The Ex-Prisoner Reentry Strategies Study, being conducted by The Urban Institute, will document the implementation of selected reentry programs initially funded in FY 2011 under the Responsible Fatherhood grant program...

OPRE’s family strengthening work includes research and evaluation projects related to strengthening relationships within families, supporting fatherhood, nurturing children through their families, reducing teen pregnancy and supporting youth in...

The Family Strengthening Scholars grant program is designed to build research capacity in the healthy marriage/responsible fatherhood field (HM/RF). These grants are to support dissertation research on HM/RF policy issues and are meant to build...

The purpose of the Fatherhood and Marriage Local Evaluation and Cross-Site Project is to support high quality data collection, strengthen local evaluations, and conduct cross-site performance measures analysis for the third cohort (2015-2020) of Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Marriage grantees...

This contract, awarded to Impaq International, is to develop a searchable tool that allows grant applicants and others interested in information about commonly used healthy marriage and relationship education and responsible fatherhood curriculum to...

ACF’s Hispanic Research Work Group brings together experts in a wide range of content areas relevant to ACF’s mission to assist ACF/OPRE in identifying research priorities concerning low-income, Hispanic families.

OPRE plays a central role in advancing understanding and disseminating knowledge about research and evaluation methods and tools that are, or could be, used to enhance knowledge about program and policy effectiveness. The purpose of the Methods...

To learn about the implementation and effects of these programs, ACF awarded a contract in 2011 to Mathematica Policy Research to conduct the Parents and Children Together (PACT) evaluation. The evaluation has multiple components: separate impact and...

The Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) is one of multiple efforts at the Federal level to reduce teen pregnancy through the use of evidence-based programs. The goals of the PREP Evaluation are to document how programs funded...

During the second generation of Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) programming (roughly 2016-2020), the Promising Youth Programs (PYP) project is supporting grantee-led evaluations and developing curricula for underserved youth populations...

This project, launched in September 2015, will investigate how existing work on racial and ethnic disparities could inform more accurate identification and interpretation of ethnic and racial differences in programs administered by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF).

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant problem for women and men in the United States, with one in four women and one in seven men experiencing severe physical violence by an intimate partner in his or her lifetime (Black, et al., 2011)...

OPRE awarded a contract to the Urban Institute (subcontractors are Public Strategies and the Williams Institute) to provide an assessment of the current state of the HMRE practice field, and to identify and promote promising approaches for serving same-sex couples and LGB individuals – whether adult or youth – who may become involved in same-sex relationships. The project includes one services component and two optional services components...

OPRE awarded eight cooperative agreements to fund research to conduct secondary data analysis of archived ACF data, specifically the Building Strong Families (BSF), Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM), and Community Healthy Marriage Initiative (CHMI)...

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation awarded a grant to ICF International to fund the launch and maintenance of the Self-Sufficiency Research Clearinghouse (SSRC) as a strategic part of OPRE's goal...

Research indicates that children and their parents fare better on a range of outcomes when living in stable, low-conflict, two-parent families. The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) provides grants to fund healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs to strengthen and improve the quality of relationships by offering a range of services from relationship education for high school students to marriage and relationship skills building for adult couples...

The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is undertaking a descriptive study to document the approaches and strategies utilized by tribal organizations awarded cooperative agreements under the Coordination of Tribal TANF and Child Welfare...

The Fatherhood Research and Practice Network (FRPN) is a cooperative agreement awarded to Temple University with a subcontract to the Center for Policy Research in Denver, CO. The FRPN will pursue three goals:..

OPRE has commissioned a series of four inter-related reports titled Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress from a team at the Center for Child and Social Policy at Duke University. The team is also preparing a brief focused on implications of these reports for adolescence and young adulthood. The first report, Foundations for Understanding Self-Regulation from an Applied Developmental Perspective provides a comprehensive framework for understanding...