June 20, 2013  Subscribe

Evaluating Early Care and Education 

In early care and education, Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) are used to collect information about a program's quality and to produce ratings of the program. Child Trends' Kathryn Tout and Rebecca Starr wrote a template that states can use to develop QRIS validation efforts - which assess the degree to which decisions about program quality standards and measurement strategies are resulting in accurate, meaningful ratings - and it was released this month by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, an office of the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Latina Women

Why don't they talk to parents about birth control?

Young adult Latina women are less likely to seek reproductive health services if they don't feel their parents would support them in it. And most don't perceive such support. But why? Child Trends researcher Selma Caal spells out the results of focus groups with 95 young Latina women in a new blog post. She found that many of those women, most of whom were unmarried, were reluctant to have their parents learn that they accessed reproductive health care because it meant admitting to them that they were sexually active. A research article on the topic, co-authored by Selma and Child Trends' Lina Guzman, Amanda Berger, Manica Ramos, and Elisabeth Golub, was published online this month in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Read the journal article

Summer Safety Month

The numbers

Nearly one in ten children under age eight don't use seat belts or other car safety restraints. The number of high school students who report driving after drinking alcohol has fallen by half over the past 20 years. Males ages 15 to 19 are six times more likely than females that age to be victims of homicide. It's safety month! You can find indicators on safety, and other topics related to children and youth, in the Child Trends DataBank. Check it out!

Free Webinar

Improving Parenting Skills: New Tools in PerformWell

Learn what successful performance management looks like in the field of early childhood parenting, and how to improve your program - or funding of such programs - by taking a page from the playbook of a practitioner whose organization doubled its donor base, a funder that is a leader in developing state-level data systems for federal programs, and a researcher whose organization provides technical assistance in early childhood parenting to agencies across the country. PerformWell is a collaborative effort that provides measurement tools and practical knowledge for human services professionals.

 

June 25, 3:00 - 4:30pm EST  

Here We Grow Again!

As we continue to expand, Child Trends is looking for a few good people to join our team. One senior research scientist will work in our child welfare program area, which addresses issues related to child abuse and neglect, foster care, and adoption. Another will work in education, planning and executing major social science research projects or evaluations. We're also hiring a qualitative research scientist for reproductive health and family formation, research and project assistants, and more. 
Copyright � 2013 by Child Trends, Inc.