Child Trends

Early childhood developmentthe national early care and education (ece) workforce center (the center) is focused on equity and justice for the ece workforce. The center undertakes engagement, research, research-to-practice, technical assistance, and communications activities that are designed to disrupt current practices and structures and move toward equitable and sustainable systems to advance the ece workforce and field. Child Trends (ct), and our core partners the build initiative (build), the center for the study of Child care employment (cscce), the university of Delaware (ud), the university of Massachusetts boston (umb), and zero to three (ztt) along with additional collaborating partners in our learning through action consortium (consortium) form an interdisciplinary team that draws on our collective strengths to implement this bold agenda.the national ece workforce center has four objectives: 1) strengthen system-wide coordination (including goal-setting among key stakeholders in the field), in collaboration with early educators to ensure equitable experiences for the workforce across settings and programs, 2) identify innovative solutions that can be tailored, scaled, and sustained to create equitable career advancement and compensation systems, 3) advance the well-being of the workforce through improved opportunities and reduced barriers for career advancement and equitable compensation that align with educators personal and cultural values and aspirations, and 4) improve equitable access to highly qualified educators for young children and their families.the structure of the center ensures, leverages, and reinforces connections between research and practice. The research and knowledge development activity focuses on producing, promoting, and sharing rigorous research, with a specific focus on actionable solutions. The technical assistance activity occurs through the provision of tailored, responsive, and collaborative support to leaders in states, communities, tribes, and territories, programs, and other systems to support transformation that draws on strengths, assets, and innovation to address ece workforce challenges and disparities. The center connects these two activities through a research-to-practice activity, a unique component of the center that is vital to its success. This activity serves as a bi-directional feedback loop between research, technical assistance, and the ece field more generally to ensure the center does not operate in silos. In addition to facilitating processes, the research-to-practice activity also undertakes tasks such as building the capacity of the ece field through an integrated research and policy fellowship program.together, our core and collaborating partners rely on years of national, regional, state, and local collaborations to operationalize the activities and tasks of the center in a way that establishes it as the nation's leading resource on the ece workforce.the activities and tasks center the experiences of ece educators and acknowledge the historical inequities that have been a challenge to previous reform efforts surrounding career preparation, advancement, and compensation. We believe that collaborating with educators, elevating their expertise, supporting their leadership, and co-creating systems-strengthening strategies are key to facilitating the work of the center and making sustained change in the ece field.understanding the role of licensing in early care and education:although licensing has historically been viewed as the foundation of quality, more recent work has conceptualized licensing is an important part of the larger early care and education (ece) system all along the quality continuum (maxwell & starr, 2019). This 5-year project, understanding the role of licensing in early care and education, is designed to synthesize the literature, refine a conceptual framework, assess the information needs of states and territories regarding their licensing systems, identify gaps, and conduct research to address gaps and build knowledge of the role of licensing in ece.gates prek data framework:to meet the needs of the foundation to build capacity for using high-quality pre-kindergarten data to drive improvement, Child Trends proposes to engage in a series of activities under three main tasks. These activities include task 1: developing a national framework, task 2: examining states' capacity to implement the framework, and task 3: building awareness of this work through a set of public goods (i.e., products and resources) that can be disseminated broadly.the primary objective for this task will be to develop a data systems framework for state leaders to strengthen the coordination and use of data to improve the access, quality, and administration of pre-k programs, with an emphasis on assessing the equity of practices and policies. The framework will include a set of agreed-upon essential questions, associated standards outlining what data needs to be collected and how to answer these questions, and metrics that can be used to evaluate progress. This framework will ensure that data standards and metrics have a focus on equity, including equitable access to pre-kindergarten, and culturally and linguistically inclusive policies and practices. Defining this focus on equity will be done as an initial step with the consortium members, with Child Trends drawing upon their own existing definitions, frameworks, and guiding principles to begin this conversation. Access to pre-kindergarten means that parents can easily enroll their Child in a program that supports the Child's developmental needs because there are high-quality options available. This framework will also consider how pre-kindergarten data can be coordinated with other state-level data systems, such as state longitudinal data systems, or early childhood integrated data systems, to capture long-term Trends for children who participated in pre-k programs. To inform the development of the framework, including each of the components (i.e., essential questions, data standards, and metrics), Child Trends will convene a national consortium of experts and stakeholders. Stakeholders will include individuals whose lived experiences can provide important context for the work and help identity structural inequities, bias, and discriminatory practices and policies the data framework can address. Stakeholders will also include representatives from states that may serve as early adopters of the framework to help inform its feasibility and effectiveness to support states' needs. Following the development of the framework, Child Trends, in consultation with the consortium, will create a planning guide to support state leaders interested in implementing the framework and recommended data standards and metrics.

Child welfarejim casey initiative self-evaluation and database:since 2016, Child Trends has served as the evaluation partner to the jim casey youth opportunities initiative. Child Trends operates and manages the jim casey youth opportunities initiative databases (the opportunity passport data system (opds) and the opportunity passport participant survey (opps), conducts all analyses of the data, and provides all aspects of site-level and initiative-level evaluation training and technical assistance. We are responsible for initiative-level administration of the bi-annual opps (april and october), providing assistance to all sites to ensure that participating young people respond to the opps. Child Trends provides full support of all self-evaluation activities of the jim casey initiative, including initiating, designing, and conducting analyses of all jim casey initiative data, and providing all site-level and initiative-level training and technical assistance related to the use of the information collected in the databases. In addition to collecting, maintaining, and analyzing the opps and opds data, Child Trends is responsible for refining the jim casey policy matrices, supporting sites in their efforts to collect and input policy information into opds, and collecting information on implementation variability of the opportunity passport across the jim casey sites. Finally, Child Trends, in close collaboration with jim casey staff, develops a variety of products to widely disseminate and communicate findings from the analyses to internal and external audiences.

Population-focused research hispanic center 2023-2028:hispanics represent the largest and one of the fastest-growing minority population subgroups in the united states. Hispanics also have one of the highest poverty rates. To help programs and policies better serve low-income hispanic children and families, Child Trends and abt associates together with university partners, launched the national research center on hispanic children & families (center). The center was established in 2013 by a five-year cooperative agreement from the office of planning, research & evaluation, an office of the administration for children & families in the u.s. department of health and human services. The center is a hub, conducting, translating, and providing research-based information across three priority areaspoverty reduction and self-sufficiency, healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood, and early care and education. The center has three primary goals: 1) advance a cutting-edge research agenda, 2) build research capacity, and 3) implement an innovative communication and dissemination approach.in 2018, Child Trends in partnership with the national opinion research center (norc), university of Maryland, college park (umd), university of north carolina, greensboro (uncg), and duke university, was awarded an additional 5-year project to build on work we began in 2013 with the establishment of the national research center on hispanic children & families. The center has three primary goals: 1) advance a rigorous research agenda; 2) build research capacity; and 3) disseminate work to an increasing audience of stakeholders. Our focus will be low-income hispanic children and families.poverty center & race equity: this unrestricted grant is game-changing for Child Trends. It will enable us to accelerate our efforts to combat Child poverty and promote equity for children and youth of color. Across our work, we see the longstanding toxic threats that poverty and racial injustice pose to millions of children and youth in the united states, and we are committed to doing more to eradicate these threats. Child Trends has been steadily building its impact in both areas. Now, with this remarkable new gift, we can go further and work faster in this critical work to:apply new data sources and techniques to gain greater insight into the causes and consequences of poverty and racial injustice for children and youth.-identify proven and promising strategies, especially those that have the potential to scale.-call out approaches that fall short of helping children and youth or worse, that perpetuate harm.-infuse policy debates and policy solutions with high-quality data and research, and provide public officials with effective and timely data tools and resources.

Sexual and reproductive healthpreis manhood sisterhood evaluation:child Trends, along with our partners at promundo and the latin american youth center (layc), proposes to rigorously evaluate manhood 2.0/sisterhood 2.0, an innovative gender-synchronized and gender-transformative sexual health program. The program combines existing content from the previously pilot-tested gender-transformative manhood 2.0 and sisterhood 2.0 curricula and has been created for individuals of all gender identities and sexual orientations. The program is designed to shift unequal gender attitudes and behaviors and provide skill-building on maintaining healthy relationships, making healthy and informed decisions around sex, and avoiding risky sexual behaviors.the overarching goal of this project is to reduce disparities in unintended adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (stis) by piloting and rigorously evaluating the manhood 2.0/sisterhood 2.0 program and disseminating findings, along with the manualized and packaged intervention, to key stakeholders and program implementors. The target population for this study will be black and latino adolescents ages 15-19 in metropolitan Washington, dc, a region with some of the highest sti and teen birth rates in the country, as well as disproportionately high teen birth rates among youth of color.el camino: rigorous evaluation:child Trends, with our partners at identity and the university of Maryland (umd), are rigorously evaluating el camino, an innovative goal setting, sexual risk reduction intervention developed for and with latinx teens. The overarching goal of el camino is to avoid and reduce risky sexual behaviors, prevent teen pregnancy, and reduce stis by aligning teens' behaviors with their future goals, meaningfully contributing to their optimal health. This study is building upon our formative research, spanning five years, and promising preliminary findings, to determine if a teen-focused, goal-setting model can yield significant improvements in sexual health behaviors among latinx teens. In this project, the study team will complete three primary objectives: 1) implement el camino in schools with high latinx populations disproportionately impacted by teen pregnancy in montgomery county, md; 2) conduct a rigorous quasi-experimental mixed methods design evaluation of el camino; and 3) disseminate findings to other public health and health education professionals interested in implementing similar efforts.

Educationcdc school-based hiv prevention:as part of the network of grants supported under the promoting adolescent health through school-based hiv prevention opportunity, Child Trends is assisting each of the fifty states in creating the policy context that can support effective she, shs, and sse to: (1) reduce hiv infection and other stds; (2) reduce sexual risk behaviors among adolescents, and; (3) reduce disparities among adolescent subgroups (e.g., by race, sexual orientation, etc.) For hiv infections, stds, and sexual risk behaviors. As the technical assistance provider to states, our role is to help coordinate multi-disciplinary teams in each state to consider their current policy context, understand best practices, develop model policies, and assess the gaps between the current context and policies that will drive towards the more evidence-based policy related to adolescent std/hiv and pregnancy prevention.

Parenting & family dynamicsopa r2p:child Trends, chapin hall, and healthy teen network are partnering to make research and resources easily accessible to youth-serving professionals in the systems that serve the most vulnerable youth populations through a center for professional development on promoting adolescent health and preventing pregnancy among vulnerable youth (the center). Although the teen pregnancy rate in the general population is decreasing, research indicates that youth in foster care, youth with juvenile justice experience, youth experiencing homelessness, and opportunity youth (youth who are not working and not in school, also referred to as disconnected youth) are more likely to be vulnerable to experience a teen pregnancy than their peers in the general population. To reduce teen pregnancy among vulnerable youth, professionals must address risk for pregnancy and promote protective factors to help youth achieve optimal heath. This project is designed to address a gap in resources for professionals in systems that work with vulnerable youth. Working with a research alliance of researchers, professionals who work in systems with youth (including practice and policy experts), youth that represent the four areas of vulnerability identified for this center, collaborators, and opa, the center will develop evidence-informed research-to-practice resources rooted in the literature on implementation research.the center's main objectives include gathering, synthesizing, and disseminating information about effective and promising adolescent health promotion and pregnancy prevention policies and practices through a diverse range of traditional and innovative approaches; equipping professionals who work in systems that serve vulnerable youth with consistent and accurate knowledge and resources to address pregnancy prevention and broader healthcare needs; and facilitating a dialogue on optimal health and teen pregnancy prevention between researchers and professionals. To do so, the center will assess needs, prioritize, translate research, and disseminate resources using methods rooted in evidence and implementation research. The center's activities will be guided by the bridge framework to translate research to practice in youth services and human-centered design, which uses an iterative process that centers on research-to-practice gaps, needs, rigorous research, utility, testing, training and technical assistance, and evaluation.mast r&d centerin 2018, Child Trends, public strategies, and the national center for family and marriage research at bowling green state university worked with us department of health and human services, office of planning research and evaluation to establish the marriage strengthening research and dissemination center (center). The center serves as a nexus between research on marriage and families in the u.s. and programmatic approaches designed to support healthy marriages and families, particularly for those most in need. The center has three interlinked, organizational objectives: 1) to advance the research and evaluation knowledge base relevant to marriage and relationships; 2) to build and support capacity for research and evaluation; and 3) to translate and disseminate existing and emerging research and evaluation.

Youth development

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