Robert St. Pierre

Using home visits for multiple purposes: the Comprehensive Child Development Program.

The Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) was a two-generation program that employed case management and home visiting to assure low-income children and their parents of a range of educational, health, and social services. Designed to meet the complex needs of disadvantaged families, CCDP was predicted by its planners to generate positive short- and long-term effects across a variety of child and parent well-being indicators. This article describes the CCDP program and reviews the results of the program evaluation. The evaluation of 21 project sites and 4,410 families followed for five years found no statistically significant impact of CCDP on program families when they were compared with control families in any of the assessed domains: early childhood education, child and family health, parenting education, family economic self-sufficiency, or maternal life course. The authors conclude that the results of this evaluation do not support home visiting as an effective means of social service delivery and parenting education for low-income families.

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.

Balancing federal and local evaluations of federally-funded programs

Abstract Some researchers have suggested that both federal and local studies of early childhood programs could be improved by delegating a portion of the responsibility for federally funded national evaluations to the local level so that local project staff have important roles in national studies. This article describes some of the ways in which the federal government has decentralized the responsibility for national evaluations of federally-funded early childhood programs, the methods used in local evaluation studies, and the strengths and weaknesses of centralized and decentralized national evaluations.