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BOCYF Projects
Recent Evaluations on Home Visitation
Publications: Revisiting Home Visiting: Summary of a Workshop (1999)
On March 8-9, 1999, the Board on Children, Youth, and Families, with funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, held a workshop for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers to discuss the evaluation evidence on home visitation. The goals of the workshop were to:
- portray the diversity of home visiting interventions;
- consider where there is agreement about the conditions under which, for whom, and for which outcomes a home visiting strategy is and is not effective;
- place the knowledge base about home visiting in the context of other pertinent basic and intervention research literatures; and
- identify the most promising avenues for future research and policy.
The first day of the workshop was designed to address the question: "What can we say today about the field of home visiting?" Panels addressed the standards of evidence that are used to evaluate home visiting programs, new meta-analytic work on home visiting evaluations, and the strength and implications of the new findings regarding the conditions under which home visiting strategies are more or less effective. The second day of the workshop was designed to examine the broader context in which home visiting interventions operate, including discussions of poverty, maternal depression, child abuse and neglect, and cultural and linguistic diversity, and to bring experiences from other forms of intervention to bear on home visiting.
The workshop was not intended to reach a consensus about the effectiveness of home visitation, nor to compare the impacts of home visiting programs to other forms of intervention. Instead, experts presented honest analyses of a variety of home visiting programs and other forms of intervention, sharing information about how, when, and with whom their programs seemed to work best, the challenges they face, and ideas about directions for the future. The workshop also did not attempt to address the topic of children with disabilities and special health care needs.
A brief workshop summary entitled Revisiting Home Visiting: Summary of a Workshop was published.
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