Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, 1996 - 2001: Constructs

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of early head start programs in response to the 1994 Head Start reauthorization which established a special initiative for services to families with infants and toddlers. The study was a program evaluation with 1500 families in Early Head Start programs and 1500 in a control group with no program participation. The participants included 3000 low-income and poor families (child, mother, and some fathers). The participants were 34% African American, 24% Latino (a), 37% White, and 5% other ethnicities. The children were between 0-12 months at the time of enrollment. The mothers averaged 23 years of age, with over 1/3 of the mothers under the age of 18. Assessments with children and interviews with parents were conducted when children were 14, 24, and 36 months. Parents and children were also assessed at 6, 15, and 24 months after enrollment to ensure that information for comparison group families was comparable to program data on Early Head Start families. Early Head Start program directors and key staff working with children and families were also interviewed. Program evaluations occurred at 17 sites with matching numbers of participating and control families at each site. The study encompassed five major components: 1) An implementation study which examined service needs and use for low-income families with infants and toddlers, including assessment of program implementation, illuminating pathways to achieving quality, examining program contributions to community change, and identifying and exploring variations across sites; 2) An impact evaluation to analyze the effects of Early Head Start programs on children, parents and families in depth, while assessing outcomes for program staff and communities; 3) Local research studies by researchers to learn more about the pathways to desired outcomes for everyone involved in Early Head Start; 4) Policy studies to respond to information needs in areas of emerging policy-relevant issues, including welfare reform, fatherhood, child care, and children with disabilities; and 5) Formats for continuous program improvements. Multiple data collection method were employed including intensive site visits to the research programs, program documents, parent services follow-up interviews, child care observations, staff surveys, parent reports, direct assessment of children, observations by trained observers, and coding of videotaped parent-child interactions in problem solving and free-play situations. Variable assessed include variations across the programs, pathways to service quality, service needs and use for low income families with infants and toddlers, program contributions to community change, child and family outcomes, differential effects for families with certain characteristics living in particular contexts, differential impacts related to differences in program implementation, professional development, continuity, and health of staff, relationship building among families and service providers and building collaborative service networks, child-care arrangements available to low-income families over the entire period of the study, children's environments and their relationship with caregivers, child's socioemotional functioning, child's cognitive and language development, parenting and the home environment, parental characteristics, and relationships with fathers and other adults. The Murray Research Archive also holds video and audiotape data for this study. The Murray also holds consortium use only files that are restricted to Early Head Start consortium members