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In 1997, the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) was launched to provide descriptive, nationally representative information on the characteristics, experiences, and development of Head Start children and families, and the characteristics of the Head Start programs and staff who serve them. FACES has historically not included Region XI, whose programs are designed to serve predominantly AI/AN...

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...

Project Overview

Through this project, awarded to Mathematica Policy Research, ACF seeks to learn more about how states and communities coordinate early care and education, family economic security, and/or other health and human services to most efficiently and effectively serve the needs...

The goal of the Assessing the Implementation and Cost of High Quality Early Care and Education (ECE-ICHQ) project is to:

• Produce technically sound, systematic measures of the implementation and costs of education and care in center-based settings that serve children birth to age 5
• Produce implementation and cost measures that can be used with existing measures of quality to examine the variation in ECE center capacities and resources that can make a difference in the experiences of children...

Project Overview

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. As part of OPRE’s Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency research portfolio...

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated that applying insights from behavioral science 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 (BIAS-NG) project continues ACF’s exploration...

Many human services programs are designed such that individuals must make a series of decisions and take a number of active steps in order to realize a benefit. 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 assume that individuals make decisions about how to proceed based on careful consideration of their options and best interests...

The National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families leads and supports investigation of the needs of Hispanic populations served by ACF and of promising approaches to promote social and economic well-being among low-income Hispanic families. The Center’s research focuses on early care and education; poverty reduction and economic self-sufficiency; and fatherhood, family structure, and family dynamics. In addition to generating new research to inform ACF programs and policies to better serve Hispanic children and families, the Center aims to build research capacity by providing tools, resources, and support for the research community and emerging scholars.

Project Overview

The Center for Supporting Research on Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Implementation supports the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in learning from The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Implementation Research and Evaluation Grants program...

OPRE’s child and family development work includes research and evaluation projects primarily concerned with child care and child welfare. This portfolio additionally examines the culturally diverse experiences of children and families served by ACF programs.

Research focuses on five major areas, including: Child Care, Head Start and Early Head Start, Child Welfare, Cultural Diversity, Cross-Cutting Early Childhood Research...

The overall purpose of the Child Care Administrative Data Analysis Cooperative Agreements is to support Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) Lead Agencies in conducting rigorous, policy-relevant research that primarily involves the analysis of child care...

The CCDF Policies Database is a source of information on the detailed policies used to operate child care subsidy programs under the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). Since 2008, The Urban Institute has collected, coded, and disseminated the CCDF policies in effect across the 50 states, the District of Columbia...

The Child Care and Early Education Policy and Research Analysis Project is a contract awarded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation to Child Trends...

Child Care & Early Education Research Connections promotes use of high quality early childhood research to inform policy and practice. This project offers a free, comprehensive, and up-to-date collection of scholarly research, policy briefs, state and federal government reports, datasets, and instruments from a wide range of disciplines and sources. Interactive tools allow...

Project Overview

The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Implementation Research and Evaluation Grants program provides CCDF Lead Agencies the opportunity to (1) plan for and (2) evaluate initiatives and policies related to the CCDBG Act of 2014.

The Child Care Interstate Background Checks (CC-IBaCs) project seeks to fill gaps in knowledge to inform states’ and territories’ implementation of interstate background checks mandated by the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014. The project will identify...

The Child Care Policy Research Partnership (CCPRP) Grant Program supports active collaborations between Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) Lead Agencies and researchers to investigate questions of immediate relevance to local and national child care policies and practices. The overarching goals of this grant program are to...

The purpose of this project is to explore how child care and Head Start programs can improve the quality of services received by young children, while institutionalizing continuous quality improvement activities. The project will design and assess the feasibility of implementing a specific approach to continuous quality improvement (CQI), the Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC),...

ACF supports the development and operation of fully integrated systems to support person-centric service delivery.  Integration implies alignment of legal, policy, program, and technology factors that impact our ability to share information.  If we are successful as a community, interoperability will drive progress in...

The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has awarded a contract to MEF Associates and its subcontractor, Child Trends, to conduct a study to better understand the range of child welfare services and benefits provided through the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (URM) Program. The URM Program serves refugees and...

The Design Options for Home Visiting Evaluation (DOHVE 2) project provides technical assistance related to data, research, and evaluation to Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program awardees...

The goal of this project was to develop a new measure that will assess the quality of child care settings, specifically the quality of caregiver-child interactions for infants and toddlers in non-parental care. The new measure is sensitive to the...

Project Overview

The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) within the Administration of Children and Families (ACF) funds numerous data collection efforts through research studies on a wide-range...

Project Overview

Leadership is widely recognized as an essential driver of organizational performance and improvement, but little is known about its role in driving quality of early childhood programs and outcomes for staff and children. In launching the Early Care and Education Leadership Study (ExCELS), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) seeks to fill the definitional and measurement gaps to help the early childhood field understand how effective leaders can improve quality experiences for families in early care and education (ECE) settings.

OPRE contracted...

Funds for Child Care Research Scholars grants are available to support dissertation research on child care policy issues in partnership with State Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) lead agencies.

Since 2000, CCDF discretionary funds for child care research and evaluation have supported projects that add to our knowledge about the efficacy of child care subsidy policies and programs in supporting employment and self-sufficiency outcomes for parents, and providing positive learning and school readiness outcomes for children. Previously funded Child Care Research Scholars have made significant contributions to the child care policy research field.

The Head Start Graduate Student Research grant program is designed to build research capacity in and knowledge of effective early childhood interventions with low-income children and families. The grant program does this by providing support for dissertation research conducted by graduate students working in partnership with local Head Start or Early Head Start programs. Many former grantees have become leading researchers who continue to conduct research that informs and improves Head Start/Early Head Start, other early childhood intervention practices, and our understanding of low-income populations.

The purpose of this project was to expand the knowledge base on early childhood development and programming by supporting secondary data analysis of archived datasets funded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE). Key project tasks included:...

Building on a history of successful partnerships, ACF’s Office of Head Start and Office of Child Care strengthened coordination in 2015 between offices and among training and technical assistance (T/TA) partners to build capacity at the regional, state and local levels to support high quality services for children and families. ACF established the Early Childhood T/TA Cross-System Evaluation Project to answer ACF’s questions about the processes and effectiveness of ACF’s Early Childhood T/TA system, while simultaneously promoting the use of data and evaluation tools for continuous quality improvement of the T/TA System.

The overall goal the Early Head Start University Partnerships research grant program is to contribute to the knowledge base regarding how Early Head Start (EHS) and other early care and education programs can promote and improve early child development by supporting both parenting and caregiving. Researchers are working in partnership with one or more EHS center-based programs and/or EHS-Child Care Partnership programs...

In 1997, the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) was launched to provide descriptive, nationally representative information on the characteristics, experiences, and development of Head Start children and families, and the characteristics of the Head Start programs and staff who serve them...

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.

The Home Visiting Career Trajectories project examines the state of home visiting careers to understand how people enter the field, the perceived and actual pathways for professional advancement and tenure, and reasons for field attrition. It aims to address the lack of data on the home visiting workforce that can inform how to best recruit and retain high quality staff. 

Though significant evaluative work has been carried out to improve our understanding of how human services programs meet their goals of improving family economic self-sufficiency, financial security, and overall wellbeing, there are gaps in knowledge of how programs can best serve rural communities. Rural contexts present unique opportunities and challenges for administering human services programs, and the Administration for Children & Families (ACF) seeks to better understand these contexts through several programs

In this project, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is exploring the application of human-centered design (HCD) across its service delivery programs at the federal, state, and local levels. To date, little is known regarding what HCD looks like in the context of human services, the requirements for implementation across a range of programs; the measurable outcomes and effectiveness of HCD approaches; the evaluability of HCD approaches; or the sustainability of HCD approaches.

Identifying the competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics) essential to a given profession may help to provide a common language and lens for assessing job performance and provide a clear structure for professional growth and development. The Infant and Toddler Teacher and Caregiver Competencies (ITTCC) project is examining existing efforts...

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 Inquiries project is to organize...

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation worked in conjunction with the Office of Head Start and the Employment and Training Administration to develop, pilot and implement a Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) Supplement to the National Agricultural Workers’ Survey (NAWS).

The Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) Study is a four-year study that will examine the MSHS programs and practices, and the children and families served by the MSHS program. MSHS provides early childhood support for migrant and seasonal farmworkers. The study will examine program practices in multiple domains, including enrollment, recruitment and dual language support. The study will also explore the wellbeing of children and families receiving services...

The National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) is a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of children and families who have been the subjects of investigation by Child Protective Services. There have been two cohorts of children enrolled in the survey, which makes available data drawn from first-hand reports from children, parents, and other caregivers, as well as reports from caseworkers, teachers, and data from administrative records.

The National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) documented the nation's utilization and availability of early care and education (including school-age care) in 2012...

The National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) 2019 builds on the data collected in the 2012 NSECE...

The Network of infant/toddler Researchers (NitR) consortium brings together leading applied researchers with policymakers and technical assistance providers responsible for overseeing and supporting early childhood programs...

The Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT) observation tool was developed between 2010-2014 to assess the quality of early care and education (ECE) settings for infants and toddlers in non-parental care—specifically, the support that caregivers provide for the social-emotional, language and literacy, and cognitive development of infants and toddlers. The Professional Development Tools to Improve the Quality of Infant and Toddler Care...

This project builds on the earlier OPRE Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Human Services (RED) project. RED helped build a base of knowledge to inform the Administration for Children and Families (ACF)’s identification and understanding of ethnic and racial differences across the service delivery system... 

The eighteen projects funded under the grant program for Secondary Analyses of Data on Child Care and Early Education are conducting  analyses of existing data sets  to answer critical research questions that will inform both policymakers and future research. Topics include associations between subsidy receipt and long-term child achievement, access to early care and education for low-income families, and links between subsidy rates and child care quality...

In 2013, OPRE commissioned four interrelated reports on self-regulation and toxic stress from a team at the Center for Child and Social Policy at Duke University. That team and other experts have since created multiple practice-oriented resources grounded in the initial reports. Together, these reports and resources comprise the ‘Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress Series.’ 

Project Overview

This project will identify promising and innovative employment and training programs for low-income individuals that include TANF recipients and produce case studies of the selected programs. The programs...

The study will explore

• how coaching practices are implemented in early care and education (ECE) classrooms serving children supported by Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) subsidies or Head Start grants.
• how core features of coaching vary by key contextual factors
• which core features are ripe for more rigorous evaluation.

The Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT) observation tool is a reliable and valid research-based observational tool that measures the quality of interactions between infants and toddlers...

The purpose of the Study of Early Head Start-Child Care (EHS-child care) Partnerships is to gain a better understanding of EHS‐child care partnerships aimed at supporting quality improvement, child development...

The Tribal Early Childhood Research Center (TRC) seeks to address gaps in early childhood research with American Indian and Alaska Natives through partnerships with tribal Head Start, Early Head Start, child care, and home visiting programs. The goals of the research are:...

This project will

1. Identify and address gaps in knowledge about how key features of the licensing system in early care and education (ECE) are related to ECE quality and outcomes for children, families, and key stakeholders (e.g., child care providers, licensing agencies, and state administrators); and
2. Develop resources to support states and territories in evaluating and strengthening their licensing systems.