Using a Developmental Approach to Evaluation Capacity Building in Home Visiting

Abstract

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, administered by the Health Resources and Service Administration in collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families, provides evidence-based home visiting services across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories. MIECHV invests in comprehensive technical assistance (TA) to support and build the capacity of awardees to conduct rigorous evaluations of their programs. Throughout the course of the evaluation process, awardees received TA from the Design Options for Home Visiting Evaluation project. Between 2011 and 2020, over 173 state-led evaluations have been conducted. Individual technical assistance (TA) modalities included conference calls, emails, interactive and individualized webinars, developing and sharing resources, and involvement of content experts. When issues and challenges were identified across multiple awardees, Design Options for Home Visiting Evaluation (DOHVE) delivered targeted group TA to awardees with common needs that may benefit from peer-to-peer learning. When cross-cutting issues and challenges were identified, DOHVE used universal approaches such as webinars and guidance documents that were made available to all awardees.Through the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, efforts have been taken to promote awardee capacity by targeting all phases of the evaluation process, including planning, implementing, and disseminating findings and providing TA that is responsive and tailored to meet awardee-specific needs. This approach enabled DOHVE to support MIECHV awardees in expanding knowledge of their programs and the evidence base on home visiting. Lessons learned from TA provision highlight the importance of developing feasible plans and providing ongoing support during implementation.

ETA Special Issue Editor Essay

“…The third paper (Zaid et al, 2021) considers ETA in the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program (MIECHV) 4 administered by the Health Resources and Service Administration in collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families at HHS. As with SIF and TPP, the objective of ETA was to support and build capacity among both awardee project directors and evaluators to conduct rigorous evaluations of their programs.…”

“…The goals of this focused TA are two-fold: (1) to help grantees produce high-quality evaluations that further build the evidence base in a particular area and (2) to increase evaluation capacity among grantees and their evaluators. The four articles of this special issue (Gothro et al, 2020;Knab & Cole, 2020;Zaid et al, 2021;Zandniapour & Hyde, 2020) demonstrate ETA's potential and its challenges.…”