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The Helping Young Smokers Quit (HYSQ) initiative was a multi-phase project that addressed the critical need to disseminate effective, developmentally appropriate cessation programs for young smokers. Phase I identified and described tobacco treatment programs available for youth in the United States, Phase II evaluated smoking secession programs tailored for youth to help understand what works, and Phase III identified factors associated with program sustainability. Phase II collected data from five sources: (1) program participants, (2) program providers, (3) program curricula, (4) organizational leaders, and (5) community leaders and community ordinances.

Program participants were interviewed at baseline, end-of program, 6-month follow-up, and 12-month follow-up. Topics covered by the interviews include age, gender, race, Hispanic origin, language spoken at home, employment, income, religiosity, school enrollment, education level, school grades, height, weight, extracurricular activities, recreation, sports, exercise, aspirations after high school, psychological well-being, alcohol consumption, cigarette use and use of other tobacco products, attitudes about smoking, plans to stop/continue smoking, attempts to quit smoking, reasons for participating in the program, topics/issues covered by the program, opinions about the program, and smoking experience since the beginning of the program. In addition, for each follow-up survey, the participants provided a breath sample for carbon monoxide analysis to validate self-reported quit status.

After the last session of each program delivery, the program providers, such as program leaders and cessation counselors, were interviewed about the content and delivery of the program and the reactions of the participants and themselves to the program as delivered. The program providers also kept attendance records.

Curriculum content was abstracted from program manuals and other materials used in each program.

Organizational leaders of the organizations that offered the programs were surveyed about various aspects of each organization, including the organization's smoking cessation program and the organization's mission, general operations, and smoking-related policies and practices.

Community-level information was collected in two ways: (1) interviews of community leaders representing local health departments, school boards, and juvenile justice offices, and (2) archival research of public ordinances relevant to tobacco and control policies.

Nine data files/datasets constitute the data. Datasets 1-4 contain the participant questionnaire data, carbon monoxide measurement data, and program attendance data. Dataset 5 comprises information about each program and its curriculum, some information about the community in which the program was located, and summary data about enforcement of tobacco-related ordinances. Dataset 6 contains information about about the program providers and each program delivery, including recruitment, logistics, content, and the reactions of providers and participants. Dataset 7 covers administrative aspects of the smoking cessation programs and each offering organization's mission, general operations, and smoking-related policies and norms. Dataset 8 contains information about local and state-level tobacco-related ordinances for every state and local jurisdiction where each program was located, and Dataset 9 condenses the information in Dataset 8 into one summary record for each community. The unit of observation for Datasets 1-4 is the participant, for Datasets 5 and 7 the smoking cessation program/offering organization, for Dataset 6 the program delivery/program cohort, for Dataset 8 the ordinance, and for Dataset 9 the community.

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.

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.