Supporting and Learning from Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Implementation Research and Evaluation: Understanding the Two-Phase Grant Structure to Inform Future Research

OMB Control No.: 0970-0356

Expiration Date: 03/31/2018

Supporting and Learning from Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Implementation Research and Evaluation

Attachment E: Group Discussion Guide for Grantees

16 Respondents

75 Minutes

Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 90 minutes per response, including the time to review related information and instructions and to schedule and participate in the group discussion. This information collection is voluntary. 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. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to: Reports Clearance Officer (Attn: OMB/PRA 0970-0356), Administration for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services, 330 C Street, SW, Washington, D.C. 20201.

Thank you for taking the time to participate in this phone interview. My name is [NAME] and this is my colleague [NAME]. We are both researchers at the Urban Institute. As you know, the Urban Institute has a contract from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families to support the efforts of grantees awarded CCDBG Implementation Research and Evaluation planning grants. As part of that contract, we are engaging in a data collection to objectively document how the planning process unfolds for grantees and the benefits and challenges of having a two-stage grant structure, that is, having a separate planning grant now and an implementation grant in the future. The information collected will be used for internal planning purposes only, to guide ACF’s future research activities.

Just a few ground rules. The discussion will last about 75 minutes. We invited you to come here today, but your participation in the discussion is completely voluntary. You are allowed to decline a question or leave the group at any time. Your decision to participate will not affect any funding you may be receiving or your eligibility to receive future government funding.

There are no “right” or “wrong” answers to the questions I’ll be asking you today. Please feel free to share your views, even if they are different from what others have said. Please tell us your thoughts and opinions, whether they are positive or negative.

At the conclusion of the data collection, we will write a final report and submit it to the federal government. When we write our report and discuss the study findings, information from all informants is compiled and presented so that no one person is identified. We will not attribute responses to you or your state or territory. Although individuals will not be cited as sources, a reader might be able to infer the identity of the information source given the small number of grantees.

In efforts to protect your privacy, the report will be an internal document; it will not be published or shared beyond the evaluation team and the federal government. We will not share a copy of the report with your agency or any other grantees. Further, the report will be submitted to the government after implementation grants have been awarded; your participation in this interview and the responses you provide will have no bearing on any grant award decisions.

I cannot guarantee that other participants of this group will protect your confidentiality like the research team will. But I want to encourage you all to respect one another by keeping the information shared inside this group private. Please do not talk to others outside of this group about what you heard here today.

Although you may not directly benefit from participation, this data collection will ultimately be used internally by the Administration for Children and Families for future research planning. Feedback provided by grantees will be crucial in this process.

I would like to encourage everyone to participate, because these groups work best when everyone contributes. You don’t have to answer each and every question. You don’t have to raise your hand to speak. But if some of you don’t get a chance to speak, I may call on you to give you a turn, because I’d like to know what everyone here thinks.

We value the information you will share with us today and want to make sure we accurately capture all the details. A research assistant will take typed notes as we speak and we will audio record the discussion to help fill in our notes later, but we will not share this recording with anyone outside the evaluation team and will destroy the file after our notes are cleaned and complete.

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 collection is 0970-0356.

Since we’re recording, it is important that only one person speaks at a time. If two people talk at once, we won’t be able to understand the recording.

Okay, let’s get started.

Let’s go around and introduce ourselves, in case we do not all know each other.

1. One goal of this evaluation is to examine the pros and cons of the two-stage grant structure—that is, having a separate planning grant and implementation grant.

   1. What do you see are some advantages of structuring the grant this way?

   2. What are some disadvantages to this structure?

Probes for challenges with: length of period of performance, timing of grant awards, funding amount, specific grant requirements, and no guarantee of implementation grant.

3. If the government were to repeat opportunities like this, what changes or improvements would you recommend?

4. What if there was a single research grant with time for planning and implementation: what would be the pros and cons of that structure? How long would the grant need to be?

1. Give me an example of ways you have built your research and evaluation capacity in the past year.

Probe for whether they think this increase in capacity would have been possible without the planning grant.

3. In what areas do you feel you still need to build capacity to effectively carry out your planned research?

Probe on whether additional grant funding, time, and/or technical support would be useful.

4. What advice would you share with other CCDF lead agencies interested in applying for these types of grants in the future?

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