Appendix B - Project Description

Appendix B – Project Description

Family Level Assessment and State of Home Visiting (FLASH-V)

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program (MIECHV), supports the well-being of each state's most vulnerable parents and children.

However, the program has limited resources and cannot serve all eligible families. In order to support service delivery and program planning, we hope to better understand how communities and local programs decide which families are offered services and which families actually receive home visiting services. Currently, little is known about these decision-making processes.

The FLASH-V project will help the field better understand how families are selected for these services and to what extent the selection processes use evidence on how home visiting affects different families.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, in collaboration with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), leads the FLASH-V project.

We will do the study in two stages

In the first stage, FLASH-V will:

• examine the available literature on family risk factors that are associated with the effectiveness of home visiting

• scan training and technical assistance materials that local implementing agencies may use for deciding whom to enroll

• collect and analyze descriptive information about recruitment and enrollment decision-making processes at the national, state, and local level

In the second stage, FLASH-V will collect and analyze information about referrals and enrollment into home visiting services from management information systems and survey data.

We will select up to 30 agencies for the study

These agencies will be either:

• centralized intake agencies that refer families to MIECHV programs, or

• MIECHV-funded local implementing agencies that typically receive more referrals than they have capacity to serve

We will conduct semi-structured interviews with people from these agencies.

The study will help decision makers, agencies, and families

Decision makers can use the information we get from this study, together with results from the national evaluation of MIECHV, to help target services to those who need them most and can benefit most.

The burden on participants is low

We will ask participants for:

• one interview lasting about an hour

• copies of their referral forms, screening forms, enrollment criteria, and recruitment materials

We may invite some of these people to take part in the second stage of the study.

Your participation is voluntary and information will be kept private.

Your participation in this study is voluntary and you may end your participation at any time. Privacy will be maintained to the degree permitted by the technology used.

James Bell Associates and MDRC are conducting this study

For more information:

• Project Lead: Melanie Estarziau – Estarziau@jbassoc.com

• Federal Project Officer: Laura Nerenberg – Laura.Nerenberg@acf.hhs.gov

An agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a currently valid OMB control number. The OMB number for this information collection is 0970-0356 and the expiration date is 03/31/2018.