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The overall goal of the Baby's First Years study is to assess the causal role played by household income in affecting children's early cognitive, socio-emotional, and brain development. Recent advances in developmental neuroscience suggest that experiences early in life have profound and enduring impacts on the developing brain. Family economic resources shape the nature of many of these experiences, yet the extent to which they affect children's development is unknown. The Baby's First Years project is the first randomized controlled trial to provide estimates of the causal impacts of unconditional cash gifts on the cognitive, socio-emotional, and brain development of infants and young children in low-income U.S. families.

Specifically, 1,000 recruited mothers of infants with incomes below the federal poverty line from four diverse U.S. communities are receiving monthly cash gift payments by debit card. Mothers were initially told the gifts would last for the first 40 months of their child's life, but we have secured funding to continue the payments for three additional years (i.e., for a total of 76 months). Parents in the high cash gift group (n=400 in the study sample) are receiving a cash gift of $333 per month ($4,000 per year), while parents in the low cash gift group (n=600) are receiving a nominal monthly gift payment of $20 ($240 per year), also for 76 months.

In order to measure the impacts of the unconditional cash gift income on children's cognitive and behavioral development, we are assessing high and low cash gift group differences at ages 4, 6, and 8 (and, for a subset of measures, we capture interim development at ages 1, 2, and 3) in measures of cognitive, language, memory, self-regulation, and socio-emotional development. In order to understand the processes by which child impacts emerge, we are measuring a host of family process measures summarized in our pre-registration chart. Our data collection points are referred to as: "baseline", "age 1", "age 2," "age 3", "age 4", "age 6", and "age 8".

Additional information on the project, survey design, sample, variables, and COVID-19 pandemic adjustments are available from:

• The User Guides for Baseline, Age 1, Age 2, Age 3, and Age 4, which are included under the "Data and Documentation" tab
• The project's website: babysfirstyears.com

The researchers request that all peer-reviewed papers using BFY Data:

• be submitted to PubMed https://publicaccess.nih.gov immediately upon acceptance for publication
• include the following citation to the data in their bibliography:

Citation

Magnuson, Katherine A., Kimberly Noble, Greg J. Duncan, Nathan A. Fox, Lisa A. Gennetian, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, and Sarah Halpern-Meekin. Baby's First Years (BFY), New York City, New Orleans, Omaha, and Twin Cities, 2018-2023. ICPSR37871-v8. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], YYYY-MM-DD. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37871.v8

• and include the following in their acknowledgements:

Acknowledgement

This research uses data from the Baby's First Years study. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD087384 and 2R01HD087384. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. This research was additionally supported by the US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation; Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research-Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health; Andrew and Julie Klingenstein Family Fund; Annie E. Casey Foundation; Arnold Ventures; Arrow Impact; BCBS of Louisiana Foundation; Bezos Family Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Bill Hammack and Janice Parmelee, Brady Education Fund; Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Silicon Valley Community Foundation); Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies; Child Welfare Fund; Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund; Ford Foundation; Greater New Orleans Foundation; Heising-Simons Foundation; Holland Foundation; Jacobs Foundation; JPB Foundation; J-PAL North America; Lozier Foundation; New York City Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity; Perigee Fund; Robin Hood Foundation; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Russell Sage Foundation; Sherwood Foundation; Valhalla Foundation; Weitz Family Foundation; W.K. Kellogg Foundation; and three anonymous donors.

Principal Investigators

Katherine Magnuson, PhD; University of Wisconsin-Madison, lead PI social and behavioral science

Kimberly Noble, MD, PhD; Teachers College, Columbia University, lead PI neuroscience

In alphabetical order:

Greg Duncan, PhD; University of California, Irvine

Nathan A. Fox, PhD; University of Maryland

Lisa A. Gennetian, PhD; Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy

Hirokazu Yoshikawa, PhD; New York University

Principal Investigators of Qualitative Substudy

Sarah Halpern-Meekin, PhD; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Katherine Magnuson, PhD; University of Wisconsin-Madison

Study Management

Lauren Meyer, Teachers College, Columbia University; National Project Director

Andrea Karsh, University of California, Irvine; Administrative Director

Matthew Maury, Duke University, Production and Retention Management

Study Co-Investigators

Sarah Black, PhD; University of New Orleans

William Fifer, PhD; Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Columbia University Medical Center

Michael Georgieff, MD; University of Minnesota

Joseph Isler, PhD; Columbia University Medical Center

Debra Karhson, PhD; University of New Orleans

Alicia Kunin-Batson, PhD, University of Minnesota

Connie Lamm, PhD; University of Arkansas

Dennis Molfese, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Victoria Molfese, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Jennifer Mize Nelson, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Timothy Nelson, PhD; University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Sonya Troller-Renfree, PhD; Teachers College, Columbia University

Study Data Collectors

The Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is responsible for recruitment and baseline, age-1, age-2, and age-3 data collection waves. Starting at age-4 through age-8, SRC is responsible for tracking families and assisting site-based staff in locating families. SRC data collection operations are overseen by: Stephanie Chardoul, Director of Survey Research Operations and Piotr Dworak, Senior Survey Specialist, Survey Research Operations.

Contact

To contact the study investigators, email them at [email protected]

Website: babysfirstyears.com

This data collection contains the first four waves of the Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYFP), conducted in 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992. The Iowa Youth and Families Project was developed from an initial sample of 451 7th graders from two-parent families in rural Iowa. The study was merged with the Iowa Single Parent Project (ISPP) to form the Iowa Family Transitions Project in 1994, when the target youth were seniors in high school. Survey data were collected from the target child (7th grader), a sibling within four years of age of the target child, and both parents. Field interviewers visited families at their homes on several occasions to administer questionnaires and videotape interaction tasks including family discussion tasks, family problem-solving tasks, sibling interaction tasks, and marital interaction tasks.

The Household Data files contain information about the family's financial situation, involvement in farming, and demographic information about household members.

The Parent and the Child Survey Data files contain responses to survey questions about the quality and stability of family relationships, emotional, physical, and behavioral problems of individual family members, parent-child conflict, family problem-solving skills, social and financial support from outside the home, traumatic life experiences, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use, and opinions on topics such as abortion, parenting, and gender roles. In addition, the Child Survey Data files include responses collected from the target child and his or her sibling in the study about experiences with puberty, dating, sexual activity, and risk-taking behavior.

The Problem-Solving Data files contain survey data collected from respondents about the family interactions tasks.

The Observational Data files contain the interviewers' observations collected during these tasks.

Demographic variables include sex, age, employment status, occupation, income, home ownership, religious preference, frequency of religious attendance, as well as the ages and sex of all household members and their relationship to the head of household. Demographic information collected on the parents also includes their birth order within their family, the ages and political philosophy of their parents, the sex, age, education level, and occupation of their siblings, and the country of origin of their ancestors.

The Language Development of Non-verbal Children Age 3 Years through 7 Years in the Kansas Metro Area is one of the three projects in the Communication of People with MR, 2006 to 2012 Series, which focuses on identifying participant variables that predict success in increasing communication skills of individual with intellectual disabilities. Data for Dataset 1 of this study were collected to illustrate how acquisition of symbolic communication using Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA) affects the development of successful communication exchanges. For the data collection of Dataset 1, children were recruited by contacting school districts in and near the Kansas City metropolitan area, specifically, in Topeka, Kansas, and Wichita, Kansas. Teachers and speech-language pathologists were asked to nominate any children meeting specific criteria. The 93 children who were enrolled were administered the Mullen Scales of Early Learning and the Preschool Language Scale. A structured play assessment was also administered.

Subsequently, data for Dataset 2 was collected to analyze and compare 19 Spanish-speaking children to the original sample. Both data files contain the results of Complexity of Communication Scale, a measure developed by the Communication of People with MR project.

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.

The Requests for Assistance with Adaptive Switches from Individuals with Severe Communication Impairments study is one of the three projects in the Communication of People with MR, 2006 to 2012 Series, which focuses on identifying participant variables that predict success in increasing communication skills of individual with intellectual disabilities. The study data were collected to show how children and adults with profound multiple impairments can learn to request assistance with adaptive switches and to on examine the change from pre-intentional to intentional symbolic communication.

The study examined 77 respondents, ages 2 through 71, by administering three assessments: the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS), the Mullen Scales of Early Learning and a functional vision assessment. The CCS was administered to 68 respondents on up to three occasions. The first occasion of administration was to participants who were pre-intentional communicators. The CCS was administered on a second occasion to participants when they were identified as being on the cusp between pre-intentional and intentional communication. The third and final occasion of administration occurred when participants were identified as "learners" and could express preferences using switches and other means.

The Mullen Scales were administered to 22 of the participants. Of the 77 participants initially selected for the study, 7 did not complete either scale. Vision impairment was identified in 68 respondents, 28 who had no functional use and 41 who had some functional use of their vision.

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.

The Young Children with Physical Disabilities Seattle, Washington study is one of the three projects in the Communication of People with MR, 2006 to 2012 Series, which focuses on identifying participant variables that predict success in increasing communication skills of individual with intellectual disabilities. The study data were collected to show that triadic eye gaze for joint attention can be established in very young children with moderate or severe motor impairments.

Dataset 1 contains 48 cases. Most cases include data on results of the Complexity of Communication Scale, a measure developed by the Communication of People with MR project. In addition, Dataset 1 contains data on a Functional Assessment, the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, the Mullen Scales of Early Learning and the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales.

Dataset 2 contains data on Triadic Eye Gaze and Coordinated Joint Attention. Participants for Dataset 2 were convenience sampled from birth-to-three centers in Seattle, Washington. There were 18 participants, children with severe physical disabilities between 10 and 24 months of age, who were randomly assigned to one of two groups: (a) an experimental treatment group ( n = 9) or (b) a control group ( n = 9).