Child Care and Early Education Research Connections

Skip to main content

CAP Family Life Study: Year 3 report: September, 2012-December, 2013 [Executive summary]

Description:
CareerAdvance--administered by the Community Action Project of Tulsa County (CAP Tulsa)--combines Head Start services with education and stackable training in the healthcare sector. The program draws on the best innovations from the adult education literature by offering a sequence of programs in partnership with community colleges so that participants can make concrete progress, exit at various points with certificates, and then return for further advancement. CareerAdvance also provides a number of key supportive components, including career coaches, financial incentives, and peer group meetings, to prepare parents for high-demand jobs in the healthcare sector. CareerAdvance is one of the only fully-operating, two-generation, human capital programs in the country. The CAP Family Life Study is a quasi-experimental, mixed-methods, multi-level study of CareerAdvance, in which we examine the short-term and longer-term effects of the program on family, parent, and child outcomes. The research team for the CAP Family Life Study includes P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Teresa Eckrich Sommer, and Terri Sabol from Northwestern University, Christopher King from the University of Texas at Austin, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn at Columbia University, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa at New York University. The current study investigates how variation in program participation is linked to different subgroup patterns of educational attainment, employment, and family health and well-being. The CAP Family Life Study includes a combination of primary quantitative and qualitative data collection and secondary data. For primary data collection, we conduct an array of parent, child, and teacher assessments and surveys. We are implementing a qualitative study that includes intensive individual interviews and focus groups with parents and CAP staff. We also collect and integrate existing data resources to enhance our primary data collection, including data from CAP Tulsa and Oklahoma administrative data. Collectively, the primary and secondary data provide an unprecedented opportunity to address the effects of a dual-generation workforce development program on low-income parents' and children's well-being. This report presents our progress in Year 3 of the CAP Family Life Study. This year we advanced the development and implementation of our two-generation evaluation design and conducted our first study on program persistence and educational success for CareerAdvance parents. We expanded our data collection to include Wave 3 data collection for Cohort 4, Wave 2 data collection for Cohorts 5 and 6, and baseline data collection for Cohorts 7 and 8. We also selected the matched comparison group for Cohorts 7 and 8, using the same advanced statistical matching technique used for previous cohorts to select parents who closely match CareerAdvance participants. We continue to find that the matched comparison and CareerAdvance groups have similar baseline characteristics, which is central to the success of the study (see Section 2). In addition, a key goal of Year 3 was to better understand how participants progress through CareerAdvance, and how this program compares to similar workforce training and education programs for low-income students. We made important progress in defining and coding participants' progress in CareerAdvance to understand educational persistence, advancement, and achievement. We also conducted a literature review on existing workforce development programs and find that persistence in CareerAdvance after one year is equal to and some cases surpasses that of similar programs. (author abstract)
Resource Type:
Executive Summary

Related resources include summaries, versions, measures (instruments), or other resources in which the current document plays a part. Research products funded by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation are related to their project records.

- You May Also Like

These resources share similarities with the current selection.

CAP Family Life Study: Year 3 report: September, 2012-December, 2013

Reports & Papers

CAP Family Life Study: Year 2 report: September 30, 2011-September 29, 2012 [Executive summary]

Executive Summary

CAP Family Life Study: Year 2 report: September 30, 2011-September 29, 2012

Reports & Papers
Release: 'v1.57.0' | Built: 2024-03-14 09:29:08 EDT