Design of the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation Long-Term Follow-Up. OPRE Report 2021-16

In 2010, Congress authorized the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program by enacting section 511 of the Social Security Act, 42 U.S.C. § 711, which also appropriated funding for fiscal years 2010 through 2014. Subsequently enacted laws extended funding for the program through fiscal year 2022. The program 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 initiation of the MIECHV Program began a major expansion of evidence-based home visiting programs for families living in at-risk communities. The legislation authorizing MIECHV recognized that there was considerable evidence about the effectiveness of home visiting, but also required an evaluation of MIECHV in its early years, which became the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE). The overarching goal of MIHOPE is to learn whether families and children benefit from MIECHV-funded early childhood home visiting programs, and if so, how. ACF and HRSA were interested in ensuring that any additional follow-ups build on information from the earlier waves of data collection to the greatest extent possible, and that any proposed follow-up points build on one another. This long-term follow-up phase is called MIHOPE-LT. Following the introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents results from the first follow-up with MIHOPE families, which occurred around the time children were 15 months of age. Chapter 3 summarizes evidence from existing long-term studies of the four MIHOPE home visiting models, on the effects of home visiting and benefit-cost analyses. Chapter 4 presents the research questions that MIHOPE-LT is designed to answer, the proposed timing of potential follow-up points, the sampling the study may use, and the data sources and outcome areas that may be examined. Chapter 5 describes the first MIHOPE-LT data collection effort, which began in January 2019 and is occurring approximately five years after women enrolled in MIHOPE, when their children are kindergarten age. This chapter describes plans for the kindergarten data collection effort, focusing on the constructs to be examined. The report concludes with Chapter 6, which highlights the contributions that MIHOPE-LT is expected to make to the research evidence on home visiting and discusses challenges the study could face in collecting data over many years as well as ways these challenges can be addressed. [This report was produced in partnership with Columbia University.]