Youth Services View all reports on this topic

The American Indian and Alaska Native Early Childhood Needs Assessment Project (AI/AN EC Needs Assessment) seeks to lay the foundation for understanding the need for early childhood services in American Indian and Alaska Native communities.  The project outlines a series of designs for future studies that will inform a national assessment of the unmet need for early childhood care, education, and home visiting services (prenatal to age 5) in tribal communities...

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...

Phase I (2013-2017)

Phase I of this project provided evaluation-related technical assistance to organizations awarded planning grants for the development of interventions for youth with child welfare involvement who are most likely to experience homelessness...

Career pathways programs connect education, training, and related supports in a pathway that leads to employment in a specific sector or occupation or to further training. The approach is gaining attention as a promising strategy to improve...

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...

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...

This project will help the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Children’s Bureau to identify and better assist children and youth served by its programs who are victims of, or are at risk of, domestic human trafficking. The project will summarize current understanding of human trafficking and resources addressing human trafficking in the child welfare population

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:...

The overall purpose of this project is to inform the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) on its efforts to improve services for domestic victims of human trafficking.

Building off of the previous Demonstration Grants for Domestic Victims of Human Trafficking, in 2016 ACF’s Office on Trafficking in Persons (OTIP) in conjunction with ACF’s Family and Youth Services... 

The primary objective of this project is to develop and execute an evaluation of the National Human Trafficking Hotline (NHTH), a 24-hour toll-free line which provides assistance and service referrals to potential victims, service providers, law enforcement officials, and other individuals who contact the NHTH, and also provides time-sensitive tips...

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...

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.

This contract will produce a series of research briefs on issues related to the well-being and economic self-sufficiency of families and children experiencing homelessness. The briefs will be based on data collected as part of the U.S. Department of...

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

The goal of this project is to develop conceptual and program models to assist sexually-experienced youth in avoiding sexual risk for the prevention of teen pregnancy and other associated risks related to teen sex...

The goal of this project is to develop a conceptual model to understand the pathways to sexual risk avoidance for prevention of teen pregnancy. The model is intended to be foundational for considering how to empower youth...

The National Domestic Violence Hotline (“The Hotline”) and loveisrespect (LIR; the helpline targeted towards young people) provide a confidential 24-hour national, toll-free telephone hotline as well as digital services including chats, texts and website resources to provide information and assistance to victims of family violence, domestic violence or dating violence...

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...

The John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood (Chafee program; formerly the John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program) was created following the passage of the Foster Care Independence Act (FCIA) of 1999 (Public Law 106-169). The program provides assistance to help youth currently and formerly in foster care achieve self-sufficiency by providing grants to States and eligible Tribes that submit an approvable plan.

The Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) Studies of Performance Measures and Adulthood Preparation Subjects project is composed of two key components – one related to performance measures for PREP, and one related to adulthood preparation subjects.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a widespread problem in the United States and among the vulnerable populations served by Administration for Children and Families programs. However, little is known about IPV experienced and perpetrated by fathers served by the Office of Family Assistance’s Responsible Fatherhood (RF) grantees or about how RF programs address IPV in practice.

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...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant problem for women and men in the United States, with 23% of women and 14% of men experiencing severe physical violence by an intimate partner in his or her lifetime (Smith et al., 2017). Given the goal of healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs (which are administered by the Office of Family Assistance at the Administration for Children and Families) to strengthen and improve the quality of marriages and relationships, addressing IPV for healthy relationship program participants is of critical concern.

The goal of this project is to identify the economic savings associated with teens’ delay of sex. The project will engage key stakeholders to identify targeted research questions and to operationalize core variables. Prior work that assessed costs associated with teen pregnancy and births will be considered...

The Savings from Sexual Avoidance and Empowerment over Risks (SSAvER) project consists of two studies focused on economic savings. Both studies will engage key stakeholders to identify targeted...

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.’ 

Research highlights self-regulation as a critical set of life skills linked to individual and collective success across the lifespan. Self-regulation is the act of managing thoughts and feelings to enable goal-directed actions like setting goals, delaying gratification, exerting willpower, exercising compassion, coping with intense emotions, and solving complex problems...

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...

The goal of the Touchpoints for Addressing Substance Use Issues in Home Visiting project is to generate knowledge about how home visiting programs, including those funded through HRSA’s and ACF's Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, engage and support families around prevention, treatment, and recovery from substance use issues. The project will identify evidence-informed practices for working with families, supporting frontline staff, and building collaborations with referral sources. The project will also identify gaps in knowledge on preventing or addressing substance use issues within the context of home visiting.

The 2003 Reauthorization of the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act called for a study of long-term outcomes for youth who are served through the Transitional Living Program (TLP). In response, OPRE and ACF’s Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) are sponsoring a study that will capture data from youth at program entry and up to 12 months...

The purpose of this project is to provide guidance and support to Tribal TANF Child Welfare Coordination Grantees that promotes excellence in performance measurement, continuous quality improvement, and grantee-led collaborations between child welfare and TANF agencies in their tribal communities. The project is intended to (1) provide guidance to grantees in revising project logic models to align project activities with intended outcomes; (2) provide support for grantees’ identification and collection of performance measures to track project activities and outcomes; (3) provide support to grantees in using data for quality assurance and continuous quality improvement; (4) provide programmatic guidance on ways to strengthen Tribal TANF and Child Welfare coordination in order to strengthen outcomes specified by grantees in their applications; and (5) document these activities and lessons learned. This project will provide universal guidance and peer learning opportunities, as well as grantee specific guidance on a variety of topics which may include identification of measurable goals and objectives, data systems and data privacy, data analysis and interpretation, continuous quality improvement, and dissemination of program successes.