Evaluation of the Defending Childhood Demonstration Program in Six States, 2004-2014 (ICPSR 36244)

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Study Purpose View help for Study Purpose

This study was designed to evaluate the Defending Childhood Demonstration Program, a nationwide initiative to address children's exposure to violence.

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The six sites chosen for the program evaluation were located in Boston, MA; Chippewa Cree Tribe, Rocky Boy's Reservation, MT; Cuyahoga County, OH; Grand Forks, ND; Rosebud Sioux Tribe, SD; and Shelby County, TN.

The evaluation consisted of a process evaluation and an impact evaluation. The process evaluation produced a series of reports describing how stakeholders at six sites organized themselves to create and implement a strategic plan; detailing each site's model; and clearly delineating lessons and actionable recommendations for other jurisdictions that might be interested in replicating the process. The process evaluation portion of this study, which consists of qualitative data, is not available at this time due to confidentiality concerns.

The impact evaluation examined the influence of Defending Childhood through a professional survey, a community survey, and analysis of core community indicators. In order to measure key outcomes, the community survey was administered to a random sample of adults in the target communities both before and after the intervention. Similarly, the professional practices survey, designed to measure the impact of sponsored practitioner trainings, was administered both at baseline and six months to one year after training.

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Community Survey: The basic element in the sample design was the construction of site-specific community sampling frames consisting of (1) residential telephone numbers and (2) cell phone telephone numbers from which a sample of users could be drawn by random digit dialing (RDD) in each frame. At baseline, this yielded 2,989 household, or landline, interviews and 914 cell phone interviews. In an effort to ensure that the study included a sizeable proportion of urban residents in Cuyahoga County, SRBI also employed an over-sample of telephone surveys designated as urban by the US Census Bureau. Sample weights were generated post data collection to correct for disproportionate sampling procedures to more accurately reflect total estimates of each community's population.

Professional Survey: The survey was administered online and sent only to individuals who received training through the Defending Childhood Demonstration programs at the sites. The entire universe was surveyed.

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Universe View help for Universe

Community Survey: adult residents 18 years of age or older in each of the Defending Childhood target communities.

Professional Practices Survey: professionals in each of the target communities who received one or more Defending Childhood professional trainings during the intervention.

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CI DATA.sav (264 cases, 73 variables): this file includes data derived from administrative records in each community. Variables include information about various types of violent incidents, including community, month, year, quantity, and whether the incident occurred before or during the intervention. Violent incidents include child abuse and neglect, violent arrests, domestic violence with a child present, school fights, school suspensions and expulsions, sexual assault, juvenile witnesses and victims of violent crimes.

CS-W2-NonTribal Sites Data.sav (6005 cases, 183 variables) and CS-W2-Tribal Sites Data.sav (1689 cases, 153 variables): these files include data derived from both waves of the non-tribal and tribal implementation sites. Variables include whether the interview was conducted on a landline or cellphone, number of adults in household, gender, age, income, ethnic background, marital status, employment, level of education, and length of residence. Respondents were asked to assess the extent to which the following were problems in their community: child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, violent crime, bullying, dating violence, gang violence, and sporting event aggression. Respondents were also asked to assess the general safety and cohesion of their neighborhoods. Respondents were asked whether they thought that exposure to violence led to negative outcomes for children, whether various actions could be considered violent, whether respondent would report various types of violence, whether respondent was aware of any community initiatives to address the issue of children witnessing violence, how often the respondent had experienced or witnessed violence, and how often the respondent's child had experienced or witnessed violence.

SPP DATA.sav (467 cases, 138 variables): This file includes data derived from the Professional Survey. Variables include information about the study cite where training was received, survey dates, gender, age, occupation, level of education, length of employment, experience with the Defending Childhood initiative, professional training from previous 2 years, and self-assessment of professional knowledge and activities.

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Not available.

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Several Likert-type scales were used.

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Original Release Date View help for Original Release Date

2017-12-12

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Community survey: The weighting plan for this community survey was a three-step sequence. The first step in the sample weighting procedure was designed to correct for procedures that yielded unequal probability of selection within sampled households. Although the survey was designed as a community population survey, for the landline survey, only one eligible person per household could be interviewed (because multiple interviews per household are burdensome and introduce additional design effects into the survey estimates). A respondent's probability for selection is inverse to the size (number of other eligible adults) of the household. Moreover, households with multiple phone lines (or cell phone respondents with multiple cell phones) have a higher probability of selection. Hence, the base weight was equal to the number of eligible respondents within the household. The landline sample in Cuyahoga County had an additional first stage, or pre-weight, procedure which was designed to correct for the oversampling of urban households in this county, by dividing the expected population distribution, based on the sample of landline phone numbers, by the base-weighted sample distribution for urban and suburban households in Cuyahoga County.

The second step in the weighting process was to correct the study design for non-response bias by dividing the expected population distribution, based on Census projections, by the base-weighted sample distribution for census division, age and gender. Specifically, the post-stratification weight corrected the sample to the cell distribution of the population using the 2010 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample File (ACS PUMS). For the follow-up survey in 2014, the 5-year 2008-2012 American Community Survey (ACS) was used instead. Finally, the weights produced in the second step were scaled to total the un-weighted number of completed interviews within each community.

Weighting was not used in other components of the study.

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