Barbara Goodson

Effectiveness of a comprehensive, five-year family support program for low-income children and their families: findings from the comprehensive child development program

A randomized experiment was conducted to test the effects of the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP), a two-generation program that employed case management and home visiting to ensure multi-risk, low-income children and their parents a range of education, health, and social services to meet the complex needs of disadvantaged families. The evaluation of 21 CCDP projects, which followed 4,410 families for five years, found no statistically significant impact on CCDP families when they were compared with control families in either child outcomes (cognitive and socio-emotional development, and health) on parent outcomes (parenting, family economic self-sufficiency, or maternal life course). Since the intervention failed to change parenting behavior or family economic status, the two hypothesized pathways to affecting the well-being of the children, not unexpectedly there were no significant impacts of CCDP on children. The study suggests that the combination of case management and parenting education, delivered through home visits, is not an effective means of improving developmental outcomes for low-income children.

The "quality " of early care and education settings: definitional and measurement issues.

There is a widespread belief that high-quality early care and education can improve childrens school readiness. However, debate continues about the essential elements of a high-quality experience, about whether quality means the same things across different types of care settings, about how to measure quality, and about the level of quality that might make a meaningful difference in outcomes for children. Are the aspects of the child care environment that researchers measure the ones that are most strongly related to childrens development? This article argues that the ways in which researchers currently measure early care environments are flawed and that the conclusions drawn about the relationship between these measures and outcomes for children are frequently incorrect or overstated. The article addresses four questions: How is the quality of the child care environment commonly defined and measured? Do the most commonly used measures capture the childs experience? Do they work well across all settings? Are researchers drawing the correct conclusions from studies that relate the child care environment to child outcomes? Finally, the article discusses some possible directions for future research.

Child abuse and neglect treatment demonstrations

Abstract The impact evaluation of demonstration treatment programs funded by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect was designed to examine the kinds of services provided to families and to assess changes in families. Information was abstracted from a sample of 488 case records at fifteen sites. The sample represented the kinds of maltreatment seen in each project and was proportionate to the size of the client population at each site. An exploratory study of family outcomes focused on all families seen by project staff in the two largest projects during a six-week period. Primary caseworkers completed a questionnaire describing the family and its problems, services received, and changes in the family. The study found that mothers received services more frequently than fathers even in cases where fathers were more responsible for maltreatment. The service provided most frequently to parents was counseling or casework. Children received few services; most were for medical treatment for non-accidental injuries. While caseworkers judged maltreatment to have diminished or stopped in the majority of the cases, services were only weakly associated with improvement. The studys two major conclusions were: The focus of treatment services on parents left unmet, in many cases, the needs of abused and neglected children and their siblings for medical and psychological attention; and that projects expended most resources and efforts on families with severe and chronic problems who showed little or no improvement.