Evaluating What Works for Helping Children Exposed to Violence: Results from Nine Randomized Controlled Trials

Objectives The study tests whether participation in interventions offered by a subset of sites from the National Safe Start Promising Approaches for Children Exposed to Violence initiative improved outcomes for children relative to controls. Methods The study pools data from the nine Safe Start sites that randomized families to intervention and control groups, using a within-site block randomization strategy based on child age at baseline. Caregiver-reported outcomes, assessed at baseline, six and 12 months, included caregiver personal problems, caregiver resource problems, parenting stress, child and caregiver victimization, child trauma symptoms, child behavior problems, and social-emotional competence. Results Results revealed no measurable intervention impact in intent-to-treat analyses at either six- or twelve-month post-baseline. In six-month as-treated analyses, a medium to high intervention dose was associated with improvement on two measures of child social-emotional competence: cooperation and assertion. Overall, there is no reliable evidence of significant site-to-site effect variability, even in the two cases of significant intervention effect. Conclusions Since families in both the intervention and control groups received some degree of case management and both groups improved over time, it may be advantageous to explore the potential impacts of crisis and case management separately from mental health interventions. It may be that, on average, children in families whose basic needs are being attended to improve substantially on their own

National Evaluation of Safe Start Promising Approaches: Assessing Program Outcomes

Safe Start Promising Approaches (SSPA) is the second phase of a planned four-phase initiative focusing on preventing and reducing the impact of children’s exposure to violence (CEV). This project was supported by Grant Nos. 2005-JW-BX-0001 and 2009-IJ-CX-0072, awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. The RAND Corporation conducted the national evaluation of the SSPA phase of the initiative in collaboration with the national evaluation team: OJJDP, the Safe Start Center, the Association for the Study and Development of Communities (ASDC), and the 15 program sites. The evaluation design involved three components: an outcomes evaluation; a process evaluation, including a cost analysis; and an evaluation of training. This document provides the results of the outcomes evaluation, supplemented from the previous version of this report after funding was made available to analyze additional data collected at four of the original 15 sites. In the main body of this report we provide information on the designs of the studies, instruments used, data collection and cleaning, analytic methods, and an overview of the results across the 15 sites. In the appendixes, we provide a detailed description of the outcome evaluation conducted at each SSPA program, including a description of the enrollees, enrollment and retention, the amount and type of services received, and child and family-level outcomes over time. These results will be of interest to researchers, clinicians, practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, and others interested in evaluating and implementing programs for children exposed to violence. This research was conducted under the auspices of the Safety and Justice Program within RAND Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment (ISE) and under RAND Health’s Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Program. The mission of RAND Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment is to improve the development, operation, use, and protection of society’s essential physical assets and natural resources and to enhance the related social assets of safety and security of individuals in transit and in their workplaces and communities. Safety and Justice Program research addresses occupational safety, transportation safety, food safety, and public safety—including violence, policing, corrections, substance abuse, and public integrity. Information about the Safety and Justice Program is available online (http://www.rand.org/ise/safety). RAND Health, a division within RAND, is one of the largest private health research groups in the world. The projects within RAND Health address a wide range of health care policy issues; the agenda emphasizes policy research that can improve the health of people around the world. This project was conducted within the RAND Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Program (HPDP). RAND HPDP addresses issues related to measuring healthy and unhealthy behaviors, examining the distribution of health behaviors across population subgroups, identifying what causes or influences such behaviors, and designing and evaluating interventions to improve health behaviors. A profile of the Health division, abstracts of its publications, and ordering information can be found at www.rand.org/health

Evaluating the Accuracy of 2020 Census Block-Level Estimates in California

In this study, we provide an assessment of data accuracy from the 2020 Census. We compare block-level population totals from a sample of 173 census blocks in California across three sources: (1) the 2020 Census, which has been infused with error to protect respondent confidentiality; (2) the California Neighborhoods Count, the first independent enumeration survey of census blocks; and (3) projections based on the 2010 Census and subsequent American Community Surveys. We find that, on average, total population counts provided by the U.S. Census Bureau at the block level for the 2020 Census are not biased in any consistent direction. However, subpopulation totals defined by age, race, and ethnicity are highly variable. Additionally, we find that inconsistencies across the three sources are amplified in large blocks defined in terms of land area or by total housing units, blocks in suburban areas, and blocks that lack broadband access