Research & Evaluation

Current Projects:

Title:  Evaluation Technical Assistance for Child Abuse Prevention & Foster Care Grantees
Investigators:  Beth Green (Co-PI), Anna Rockhill (Co-PI), Thuan Duong
Funder:  Portland Children’s Levy
Project Period:  March 2010-February 2012
 
The Center, in partnership with NPC Research, is providing evaluation training and technical assistance to the 22 child abuse prevention and foster care grantees funded by the Portland Children’s Levy (PCL). The Portland Children’s Levy, a voter approved initiative, provides  funding to non-profit organizations providing a variety of services designed to prevent or ameliorate the effects of child abuse and neglect on children and families.   The Center is working with grantee programs to assist them in developing or improving their data collection and evaluation systems.  Assistance includes such activities as working to identify appropriate performance measures, creating and selecting evaluation tools, and creating data collection and management systems.

Title:  Oregon Healthy Start~Healthy Families Statewide Evaluation

Investigators: Beth Green (PI)
Funder: Oregon Commission on Children and Families
Project Period: 2001-2013

This ongoing statewide evaluation examines the effectiveness of Healthy State~Healthy Families, Oregon’s largest child abuse prevention program. Aproximately 10,000 first-time parents are screened annually for risk factors, and high-risk parents are offered intensive  home visiting services using the Healthy Families America program model. The evaluation supports continuous program improvement by measuring key process and outcome indicators such as child development, parent-child interactions, social support, and child wellness.  Regular reports on performance measures and key outcomes, including rates of child maltreatment, are provided to each of the 34 programs statewide. This program is also currently involved in a separately-funded randomized effectiveness trial.

Title: Testing the Effectiveness of Healthy Start-Healthy Families Oregon: Outcomes and Cost-Benefits.
Investigators: Beth Green (PI)
Funder: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau
Project Period: 2009-2014

This project is a large-scale randomized study of Oregon’s Healthy Start (ORHS) program, designed to examine the effects of Healthy Start on substantiated maltreatment rates. In addition, the project includes detailed cost-benefit analysis of ORHS to examine program and child welfare system costs. This project will involve developing and disseminating a framework and tool for supporting cost-benefit studies of child abuse and neglect prevention programs.  Healthy Start is a home visiting program based on the Healthy Families America program model, providing services to first time parents at higher risk for child welfare involvement.  The project involves random assignment of eligible families in 7 counties to either receive ORHS services (1,000 families) or community services as usual (1,000 families). Each family will be tracked for two years, and data sources include administrative maltreatment records; measures collected by ORHS home visitors on parenting stress, home environment, child development, and family risk; and data on ORHS dosage and fidelity.

Title: Retrospective Collection of Child Protective Service Reports Among National Head Start Research and Evaluation Project
Investigators: Beth Green (PI)
Funder: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Project Period: August 2010-August 2012

In 1996, the federal Head Start Bureau funded a large-scale (17 site) randomized controlled trial of Early Head Start, an early education and family support program for high risk families with children ages birth to 3 years. Since then, families in the original research trial have been tracked through the fifth grade, and results have shown positive parenting and child development outcomes for participating families. To-date, however, there has not been an investigation of whether the EHS program is effective in helping to prevent child maltreatment. The current study is gather child maltreatment data on the Early Head Start and control samples at four research and program sites (California, Kansas, Vermont, Washington).

In collaboration with NPC Research and Harvard University’s Brazelton Touchpoints Center, Dr. Green and her colleagues are collecting and analyzing state administrative child welfare data at five study sites in order to answer the following questions:

• How many parents in the sample have been involved in the child welfare system (report, substantiated report, out-of-home placement)?
• Does the percentage of parents involved in the child welfare system significantly differ between EHS participants and the control sample?
• Was EHS involved in the reporting and if so, what was the role of the program?
• Can maltreatment be predicted from other information about children and families collected through the EHS research study?
• What are the factors that increase or decrease these children’s risk of maltreatment, and to what extent does EHS play a role in buffering these risks?

Title: Multnomah County Project LAUNCH
Investigators: Beth Green (PI), Callie Lambarth
Funder: Multnomah County ESD, with federal funding from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
Project Period: October 2010-September 2015

Multnomah County Project LAUNCH is one of a number of federall-funded demonstration projects design to improve child wellness by improving early childhood service systems. Multnomah County LAUNCH provides both direct services, such as early childhood mental health consultation and Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support services to home visitation and child care, and a Parent Help Line linked to 211Info call centers, as well as workforce development (including training primary care health providers to conduct early and systematic screening for developmental and social-emotional disorders) and systems development, such as social marketing campaigns.The evaluation includes outcome and process evaluation of both service components and systems change, including annual assessment of the functionality of Multnomah’s current early childhood system. In addition, Multnomah County LAUNCH is being evaluated through a national cross-site evaluation headed by Abt Associates.

Title: IV-E Waiver Demonstration Evaluation (Relationship Based Visitation)

Investigators: Beth Green (Co-PI), Angela Rodgers, Amanda Cross-Hemmer, Carrie Furrer
Funder: Oregon Department of Human Services, with federal funding from DHHS, Children’s Bureau
Project Period: July 2011-June 2016

The IVE-E Waiver Demonstration Evaluation is a partnership with Oregon’s Department of Human Services (child welfare) to evaluate two demonstration programs being implementing using Oregon’s federal IV-E Waiver funds. These funds allow Oregon to utilize monies that would typically be spent on foster care placements to be used to prevent and/or shorten the duration of children’s out-of-home placements in the child welfare system. Two demonstration interventions are being evaluated: Parent Mentoring, an innovative, peer-mentoring model for parents with substance abuse issues; and Relationship-Based Visitation, an enhanced visitation model that provides parent intervention and coaching during parent-child visits.

Relationship-Based Visitation Evaluation

The Relationship-Based Visitation program provides parenting intervention and coaching for families with children 13 years of age or younger who are in out-of-home placements.The program focuses on nurturing a healthy parent-child relationship and facilitating the development of empathic parenting through the use of an evidence-based parent training program called Nurturing Skills (NS). NS is a Nurturing Parenting Program (NPP) developed by Dr. Stephen Bavolek. Nurturing Skills provides individualized family planning to address identified parenting needs utilizing visitation coaches who help facilitate positive parenting during supervised visits between parents and children. RBV services will be provided in 13 Districts throughout the state of Oregon which encompasses 29 counties.

The evaluation of RBV uses a randomized control design to evaluate the effectiveness of the program in improving parenting skills, foster positive parent-child relationships, reducing time spent in foster care, and improving the likelihood of successful family reunification. Over a two-and-a-half year period, the evaluation will randomly assign 1200 parents to either receive RBV services, or visitation as usual. Detailed information about the fidelity of the model will be collected using a combination of documentation of visit activities, observations, and interviews with parents and providers. A subset of 400 parents will participate in a parent interview that will capture outcomes that can not be readily identified using state child welfare administrative records (such as parenting skills, parenting stress, and quality of parent-child relationships).

Title: Earl Boyles Elementary School Early Learning Initiative
Investigators: Beth Green (PI), Peggy Nygren with Leslie Munson, David Allen, Risa Proehl, and Janet Walker
Funder: Multnomah County ESD, with federal funding from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
Project Period: July 2011-June 2016

The Early Boyles Project is a neighborhood-based intervention located in the Earl Boyles Elementary School catchment area in Portland, Oregon. The project aims to develop a comprehensive set of early childhood services beginning at birth and provided through fifth grade, and available universally to all neighborhood residents. As such it represents a unique attempt to align services and goals for children and families across a long developmental trajectory. The project is a partnership with the Children’s Institute, a local early childhood policy advocacy organization, and includes a number of community partners. The evaluation is working with these partners to collect community needs assessment information, baseline data on entering kindergarteners and their parents prior to implementation of services, and ongoing evaluation and tracking of program developments and outcomes.