Youth Services View all reports on this topic

Phase I

Phase I of this project provides 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...

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

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...

The Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation-Strong Start (MIHOPE-Strong Start) is evaluating the effectiveness of home visiting for improving prenatal and birth outcomes for families enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)...

In 2007, ACF initiated the Pathways for Advancing Careers and Education project, a multi-site, random assignment evaluation of promising strategies for increasing employment and self-sufficiency among low-income families. During the project’s development, consensus emerged that the evaluation should...

The Permanency Innovations Initiative (PII) is a multi-site federal demonstration project designed to improve permanency outcomes among children in foster care who have the most serious barriers to permanency. This 5-year, $100 million initiative...

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...

The John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program (CFCIP) 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. Activities and programs allowable under the CFCIP include help with education, employment financial management, housing, emotional support and assured connections to caring adults for older youth in foster care. In addition, the FCIA required that funding be set aside for evaluations of promising independent living programs. In response to this statutory requirement, the Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF) conducted the Multi-Site Evaluation of Foster Youth Programs, a rigorous, random assignment evaluation of four programs funded under the CFIP. This study was completed in 2011.

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...

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...

Project Overview

SRAENE is five-year project designed to address congressionally-mandated Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) research...

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...