Observational studies of parent/child interactions

The Observational Studies were part of an extensive project created to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of two unique welfare intervention programs, the New Chance Demonstration and Job Opportunities Basic Skills Training Program (JOBS). The full study included 5,250 women who were either enrolled in one of the two programs or who served as part of the control group. Measures for the full study included a structured survey interview and follow-up surveys given 18 and 42 months later for the New Chance participants, and 2 years later for JOBS participants. Surveys included the questions from the Test of Adult Basic Education, the CES-D, the Mastery Scale, the HOME and Parenting Scale, and the Difficult Life Circumstances Scale as well as questions which encompassed household structure, health care, employment, income, child care, and relationship with the child's father. The embedded videotaped Observational Studies involved a subsample of 300 New Chance participants (including 200 experimentals and 100 controls) and 372 JOBS participants (including 207 experimentals and 165 controls). For these sessions, mother/child dyads engaged in several reading and problem-solving tasks known to be predictors of success in school and other aspects of children's development. An additional questionnaire, focusing on the mother/child relationship, was also administered. The Murray Center maintains videotaped observations of 282 New Chance mother/child dyads and 365 JOBS mother/child dyads. The Center holds computer-accessible data for the two intervention programs, as follows: Baseline and two-year survey data, and data from the Observational Studies Questionnaire are available for New Chance; Baseline, interview, self-adminstered questionnaire, and Descriptive Study survey data are available for JOBS. Transcripts of portions of the videotaped sessions for both the New Chance and JOBS samples are also available.