Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE), United States, 2012-2017

Résumé 0

In 2010, the United States Congress authorized the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, which started a major expansion of evidence-based home visiting programs for families living in at-risk communities. MIECHV is administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The authorizing legislation required an evaluation of the program, which became the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE). The evaluation is being conducted for HHS by MDRC with James Bell Associates, Johns Hopkins University, Mathematica, the University of Georgia, and Columbia University. MIHOPE was designed to learn whether families benefit from MIECHV-funded early childhood home visiting programs, and if so, how. The study included the four evidence-based models that 10 or more states chose in their initial MIECHV plans in fiscal year 2010-2011: Early Head Start - Home-based option, Healthy Families America, Nurse-Family Partnership, and Parents as Teachers. MIHOPE was the first study to include all of these four evidence-based models. To provide rigorous evidence on the MIECHV-funded programs' effects, the study randomly assigned more than 4,200 families to receive either MIECHV-funded home visiting or information on community services. As is the standard method in studies that use random assignment, the primary analytical strategy in MIHOPE was to compare the outcomes of the entire program group with those of the entire control group. As per the authorizing legislation, the study measured early effects on family and child outcomes in the areas listed below, with the exception of school readiness and academic achievement (which were not included at this point because children were too young to measure those outcomes): Prenatal, maternal, and newborn health Child health and development, including child maltreatment Parenting skills School readiness and child academic achievement Crime and domestic violence Family economic self-sufficiency Referrals and service coordination Videos and Video Metadata: Two sets of videos are included in the MIHOPE restricted access files. They include: Mother-home visitor interactions at 387 home visits and Interactions between child and mother using the "Three Bags" and "Clean-Up" tasks with 2,832 families. The mother-home visitor interaction videos were recorded only for treatment group families at two points in time: the first was, on average, about eight weeks after the family's first home visit and the second was about eight months after the family's first home visit. Overall, 264 families are included in the mother-home visitor interaction videos in total, with 123 of these families recorded at both points in time. The mother-child interaction videos, during which the child and mother play with toys contained in three bags and place the toys back in the bags (the "Three Bags" and "Clean-Up" tasks), were recorded when the 15-month in-home assessments were conducted and are available for 2,832 families in the treatment and control groups. The videos are only linkable to a few pieces of metadata (home visiting model, video ID, treatment status, and variables indicating whether the family appears in the home visit videos, the three-bag task videos, or both). The videos in the restricted access data are not linkable to any other data included in the restricted access files. Additionally, the videos may only be viewed at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's on-site Physical Data Enclave in Ann Arbor, Michigan.