Boston

Drawing on a sample of 318 African American and 354 Latino urban, low-income families, we identify maternal monitoring knowledge trajectories and examine which trajectory predicts fewer late-adolescent externalizing problems and which family and neighborhood factors predict trajectories with positive implications for lateadolescent externalizing behaviors. The majority of adolescents in both groups perceived long-term high levels of maternal monitoring knowledge throughout adolescence—stably high for the African American sample and high for the Latino sample.

The objective of the Family Options Study is to provide research evidence to help federal policymakers, community planners, and local practitioners make sound decisions about the best ways to address homelessness among families. The study will compare four combinations of housing and service interventions for homeless families who have been in emergency shelters for at least seven days. The study is conducted as a rigorous, multi-site experiment, to determine what interventions work best to promote family stability and well-being.

This brief summarizes the experiences of leaders and staff from eight career pathways programs that participated in the Pathways for Advancing Careers and Education (PACE) Evaluation. Based on firsthand accounts, the brief describes how staff perceived the benefits of participating in the randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluation, the challenges they experienced—in particular recruiting study participants and implementing its random assignment procedures—and how they overcame challenges. The brief then describes lessons staff learned from participating in PACE.

Population health is associated with the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods. There is considerable scientific and policy interest in community-level interventions to alleviate child poverty. Intergenerational poverty is associated with inequitable access to opportunities. Improving opportunity structures within neighborhoods may contribute to improved child health and development.

Many American cities suffer from de facto residential segregation along lines of race and class, and their school districts have long struggled to find ways to mitigate this segregation in their schools. A common solution is the creation of school choice and assignment policies that enable students to submit a list of schools from across the city that then creates assignments based on a lottery.

The Pathways for Advancing Careers and Education (PACE) evaluation is a study of nine promising programs that use a “career pathways” framework for increasing education, employment, and self-sufficiency among low-income individuals and families. Funded by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, PACE will include three points of participant follow-up—at 18 months, three years, and six years after random assignment.

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care compared 3 statistical methods that adjust for family selection bias to test whether child care type and quality relate to cognitive and academic skills. The methods included: multiple regression models of 54-month outcomes, change models of differences in 24- and 54-month outcomes, and residualized change models of 54-month outcomes adjusting for the 24-month outcome. The study was unable to establish empirically which model best adjusted for selection and omitted-variable bias.

Research indicates that most families using emergency shelters stay briefly—one to four or five months—and rarely return (Culhane et al. 2007). However, some families remain homeless for long periods of time or experience repeated episodes of homelessness. These families may have characteristics and service needs that differ from those of families who leave shelter quickly and permanently. Communities and homelessness practitioners might benefit from identifying those families’ characteristics and experiences to improve targeting of services.

Increases in peak blood lead concentrations, which occur at 18-30 months of age in the United States, are thought to result in lower IQ scores at 4-6 years of age, which IQ becomes stable and measurable. Data from a prospective study conducted in Boston suggested that blood lead concentrations at 2 years of age were more predictive of cognitive deficits in older children than were later blood lead concentrations or blood lead concentrations measured concurrently with IQ.