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In 2010, the United States Congress authorized the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, which started a major expansion of evidence-based home visiting programs for families living in at-risk communities. MIECHV is administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The authorizing legislation required an evaluation of the program, which became the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation (MIHOPE). The evaluation is being conducted for HHS by MDRC with James Bell Associates, Johns Hopkins University, Mathematica, the University of Georgia, and Columbia University.

MIHOPE was designed to learn whether families benefit from MIECHV-funded early childhood home visiting programs, and if so, how. The study included the four evidence-based models that 10 or more states chose in their initial MIECHV plans in fiscal year 2010-2011: Early Head Start - Home-based option, Healthy Families America, Nurse-Family Partnership, and Parents as Teachers. MIHOPE was the first study to include all of these four evidence-based models.

To provide rigorous evidence on the MIECHV-funded programs' effects, the study randomly assigned more than 4,200 families to receive either MIECHV-funded home visiting or information on community services. As is the standard method in studies that use random assignment, the primary analytical strategy in MIHOPE was to compare the outcomes of the entire program group with those of the entire control group.

As per the authorizing legislation, the study measured early effects on family and child outcomes in the areas listed below, with the exception of school readiness and academic achievement (which were not included at this point because children were too young to measure those outcomes):

• Prenatal, maternal, and newborn health
• Child health and development, including child maltreatment
• Parenting skills
• School readiness and child academic achievement
• Crime and domestic violence
• Family economic self-sufficiency
• Referrals and service coordination

Videos and Video Metadata: Two sets of videos are included in the MIHOPE restricted access files. They include:

• Mother-home visitor interactions at 387 home visits and
• Interactions between child and mother using the "Three Bags" and "Clean-Up" tasks with 2,832 families.

The mother-home visitor interaction videos were recorded only for treatment group families at two points in time: the first was, on average, about eight weeks after the family's first home visit and the second was about eight months after the family's first home visit. Overall, 264 families are included in the mother-home visitor interaction videos in total, with 123 of these families recorded at both points in time.

The mother-child interaction videos, during which the child and mother play with toys contained in three bags and place the toys back in the bags (the "Three Bags" and "Clean-Up" tasks), were recorded when the 15-month in-home assessments were conducted and are available for 2,832 families in the treatment and control groups.

The videos are only linkable to a few pieces of metadata (home visiting model, video ID, treatment status, and variables indicating whether the family appears in the home visit videos, the three-bag task videos, or both). The videos in the restricted access data are not linkable to any other data included in the restricted access files. Additionally, the videos may only be viewed at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's on-site Physical Data Enclave in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation-Strong Start (MIHOPE-Strong Start) was a large-scale evaluation that rigorously tested the effectiveness of evidence-based home visiting in improving birth and health outcomes during pregnancy and in the year after birth. Local programs included in the study's analysis implemented one of two evidence-based models: Healthy Families America (HFA) or Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP). These models were chosen because earlier evaluations found some evidence of their having positive impacts on birth outcomes.

The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) partnered with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to sponsor the study. MIHOPE-Strong Start was part of the CMMI's Strong Start for Mothers and Newborns Initiative, which evaluated whether enhanced, nonmedical prenatal interventions, when provided in addition to routine medical care, have the potential to improve birth outcomes and reduce health care costs for women enrolled in Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Under contract with OPRE, MDRC conducted MIHOPE-Strong Start in collaboration with James Bell Associates, Johns Hopkins University, Mathematica, and New York University.

The analysis for MIHOPE-Strong Start included 2,899 women and 66 local programs (37 HFA and 29 NFP programs) operating across 17 states: California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, and Wisconsin. Women were eligible for MIHOPE-Strong Start if they were pregnant and at least 8 weeks from their due date.

The MIHOPE-Strong Start analysis included a subset of families and local programs that were recruited for MIHOPE, the national evaluation of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program. Specifically, the MIHOPE-Strong Start impact analysis included information on 46 local home visiting programs and 1,845 families that were initially recruited for MIHOPE but met the MIHOPE-Strong Start eligibility criteria. An important distinction between MIHOPE-Strong Start and MIHOPE is that MIHOPE included only programs receiving MIECHV funding, while MIHOPE-Strong Start included both MIECHV and non-MIECHV-funded programs.

In both studies, families were randomly assigned either to an evidence-based home visiting program or to a control group who was given information on other services available in the community. The random assignment design was intended to create program and control groups that were similar when women entered the study, so that systematic differences in the outcomes of interest observed between the two groups can be attributed to the home visiting services rather than to the preexisting characteristics of the women.

The Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) evaluation was launched in 2003 to develop, to implement, and to test the effectiveness of a program aimed at strengthening low-income couples' marriages as one approach for supporting stable and nurturing family environments and parents' and children's well-being. The evaluation was led by MDRC and was sponsored by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, United States Department of Health and Human Services.The SHM program was a voluntary yearlong marriage education program for low-income married couples who had children or were expecting a child. The program provided a series of group workshops based on structured curricula designed to enhance couples' relationships; supplemental activities to build on workshop themes; and family support services to address participation barriers, connect families with other services, and reinforce curricular themes.

The study sample consists of 6,298 couples (12,596 adult sample members) who were expecting a child or had a child under 18 years old at the time of study entry. The sample consists primarily of low-to-modest income, married couples with diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. In each family, one child was randomly selected to be the focus of any child-related measures gathered in the data collection activities. These children ranged from pre-birth to 14 years old at the time of enrollment in the study. Follow-up interviews were conducted at 12 and 30 months after baseline data collection. More detail is provided in the study documentation.