Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) Evaluation

Project

Overview

Project Overview

Fathers play a unique role in their children’s lives and development, but some fathers face personal or societal barriers to positive involvement with their children — such as low levels of education, stigma from criminal records, declining wages for low-skilled men, or family instability. Responsible Fatherhood programs aim to improve the well-being of low-income fathers and their children by addressing these types of barriers.

On behalf of the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study partnered with Responsible Fatherhood programs and experts in the field to identify high-priority questions and emerging service approaches. Programs use a number of promising models to work with fathers, but rigorous studies have not yet shown which are effective and worth expanding or replicating.

The B3 team is rigorously evaluating three new and emerging service approaches being implemented across Responsible Fatherhood program sites:

Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Justice Involved Individuals Seeking Employment: a series of interactive workshops designed for small groups to develop interpersonal skills for the workplace
Just Beginning: five one-on-one sessions designed to enhance a father’s early relationship with his young child
DadTime: a smartphone application to support engagement in the Just Beginning program

These interventions were selected for their emphasis on active skill-building for adults. Each works with fathers to help them learn, do, reflect, and successfully build new capabilities.

STATUS: Current

Basics

Issue: Families with Children

Focus Area: Two-Generation Programs, Family Relationships

Population: Families

Focus Population: Fathers

Intervention: Relationship Education, Parenting Skills Programs

Journal Publishes Paper Coauthored by MDRC Researchers on Innovative Video Observation Study of Father-Child Interactions

Children and Youth Services Review has just published an article, “Improvements in Father-Child Interactions: Video Observations from the Just Beginning Study,” by Kristen Harknett of the University of California, San Francisco, and MDRC’s Patrizia Mancini and Virginia Knox.

Report

Can a Smartphone Promote Fathers’ Program Attendance?

Findings from the B3 Exploratory Study of the DadTime Intervention

This report describes a randomized field trial of an app designed to be integrated into a fatherhood curriculum. The app offered reminders, planning tools, and encouragement to participants. The study found no evidence that the app improved attendance, either for the first session or overall.

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Brief

Six Recommendations for Supporting Families Affected by Parental Incarceration

A Review of the Literature

When a parent is jailed or incarcerated, it has direct consequences for children and families. Family-strengthening programs seek to maintain healthy relationships between such parents and their children. They have the potential to reduce the harmful effects of incarceration on families. This brief describes six recommendations for family-strengthening programs.

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Agenda, Scope, <br> & Goals

Agenda, Scope, and Goals

MDRC has assembled a team of leading experts in designing evaluations and providing programmatic technical assistance for demonstration projects. The team is working with six organizations that provide Responsible Fatherhood services.

B3 seeks to inform program operators about the most effective ways to engage fathers and help them become increasingly self-sufficient and responsible parents. The study is designed to test innovative, evidence-informed approaches for fatherhood programs through the evaluation of three separate program components:

Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Justice Involved Individuals Seeking Employment (CBI-Emp)
MDRC collaborated with the University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute to develop CBI-Emp, a new approach to employment services. This intervention aims to help fathers involved with the criminal justice system find and retain better jobs with higher earnings. This approach demands more active learning from participants than traditional job readiness curricula and incorporates methods that have been shown to improve outcomes of men in the justice system.
Just Beginning, an interactive approach to high-quality parenting
Just Beginning represents a new way to build the parenting skills of fathers, whether they live with their children or not, and increase coparenting skills. The intervention engages fathers and their children up to age 3 in a series of sessions designed to strengthen their relationships. Using a play-based approach, facilitators rely on Sesame Street videos to support parent learning and a child-friendly space for father-child play. Developed by Georgetown University and the Youth Law Center, Just Beginning includes direct feedback to emphasize and promote reflection on positive examples of parent and child bonding.
DadTime smartphone application
For fathers who are juggling parenthood, fatherhood program activities, and holding down a job or looking for work, it may be difficult to attend the Just Beginning sessions consistently. In response to this problem, the B3 team collaborated with the developers of the mDAD mobile application and CauseLabs to develop DadTime to improve participant recruitment and engagement. This smartphone-based mobile application provides a father with automated program attendance reminders and a private way to plan how he can apply what he is learning in Just Beginning the next time he is with his child.

STATUS: Current

Basics

Issue: Families with Children

Focus Area: Two-Generation Programs, Family Relationships

Population: Families

Focus Population: Fathers

Intervention: Relationship Education, Parenting Skills Programs

Journal Publishes Paper Coauthored by MDRC Researchers on Innovative Video Observation Study of Father-Child Interactions

Report

Can a Smartphone Promote Fathers’ Program Attendance?

Findings from the B3 Exploratory Study of the DadTime Intervention

Overview »

Full

Brief

Six Recommendations for Supporting Families Affected by Parental Incarceration

A Review of the Literature

Overview »

Full

Design, Sites, & <br> Data Sources

Design, Sites, and Data Sources

Study enrollment and data collection began in 2016. The evaluation includes a process study and an impact study.

The process study will describe who participated in services, how services operated, and the challenges staff members faced. It will provide lessons for the field on key elements for successful program implementation and barriers to overcome when adding these new program components.
The impacts of each of the three innovative program components will be rigorously evaluated using a random assignment research design. The impact study will investigate whether adding these new approaches to an existing program improves key outcomes of interest, including employment, father-child relationship quality, and program participation.

Up to 2,200 fathers across six fatherhood programs will enroll in the B3 study.

STATUS: Current

Basics

Issue: Families with Children

Focus Area: Two-Generation Programs, Family Relationships

Population: Families

Focus Population: Fathers

Intervention: Relationship Education, Parenting Skills Programs

Journal Publishes Paper Coauthored by MDRC Researchers on Innovative Video Observation Study of Father-Child Interactions

Report

Can a Smartphone Promote Fathers’ Program Attendance?

Findings from the B3 Exploratory Study of the DadTime Intervention

Overview »

Full

Brief

Six Recommendations for Supporting Families Affected by Parental Incarceration

A Review of the Literature

Overview »

Full

Funders & <br />Partners

Funders

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families

Partners

MEF Associates

Abt Associates

Georgetown University

National Center for Youth Law

University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute (UCCI)

University of Michigan

University of Wisconsin

Kanawha Institute for Social Research & Action, Inc.

Children's Institute, Inc

Passages, Connecting Fathers and Families, Inc

MDRC Staff

Dina A. R. Israel
Senior Associate, Youth Development, Criminal Justice, and Employment
Israel is one of MDRC’s senior field liaisons and technical assistance team members, as well as a project director.
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Michelle S. Manno
Senior Associate, Youth Development, Criminal Justice, and Employment
Manno works primarily as an implementation researcher for several of MDRC’s evaluations of policies and programs serving populations with barriers to employment, including individuals with experience in the criminal justice system and “disconnected” young adults (those who are neither employed nor in school).
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Dan Bloom
Senior Vice President
Bloom directs MDRC’s Policy, Research, and Evaluation Department, which houses the organization’s research and technical assistance activities.
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JoAnn Hsueh
Director, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
JoAnn Hsueh is the director of MDRC’s Family Well-Being and Children’s Development policy area, bringing expertise in the development of young children, early childhood education.

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Charles Michalopoulos
Chief Economist
Michalopoulos is MDRC’s chief economist and directs the Youth Employment, Criminal Justice, and Employment Policy Area. He has more than three decades of experience studying a wide variety of social policies to help low-income families achieve better economic, health, and social outcomes.
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Virginia Knox
President
Virginia Knox became President of MDRC on October 15, 2019. Prior to being named president, Knox served as vice president and as leader of the organization’s Families and Children Policy Area.
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Erika Lundquist
Senior Associate, MDRC Center for Data Insights
Lundquist currently serves as project director for the Optimizing Texting Technology through Engagement Research with Students (OTTERS) project.
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Electra Small
Senior Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
As a technical manager, Small takes a lead role in every aspect of a project’s technical work, including data acquisition, security, verification, cleaning, imputation, and analyses.

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Rebecca Behrmann
Operations Associate, Youth Development, Criminal Justice, and Employment
Behrmann has more than 15 years of experience in the implementation of large-scale research studies.
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Samantha Wulfsohn
Senior Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
Wulfsohn is a senior field liaison and licensed clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience working alongside staff in the field to continually strengthen program implementation at all stages of the evidence-building cycle.
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Douglas Phillips
Research Associate, Youth Development, Criminal Justice, and Employment
As an operations associate, Phillips focuses on the development and implementation of evaluations serving low-income populations and provides technical assistance for data collection.
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Patrizia Mancini
Research Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development
Mancini is currently one of the data managers for the Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) project, an evaluation designed to rigorously test innovative program approaches to support low-income fathers in working toward economic stability.

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Emily Brennan
Research Associate, Youth Development, Criminal Justice, and Employment
Brennan’s research focuses on criminal justice policies and systems and employment and training programs. Brennan specializes in the implementation of large-scale studies in collaboration with researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, conducting qualitative data collection and analysis as well as quantitative analysis.
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Jillian Verrillo
Editor, Publications
Verrillo serves in a cross-functional role at MDRC.
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