Implementation Fidelity in Early Childhood Home Visiting: Successes Meeting Staffing Standards, Challenges Hitting Dosage and Duration Targets

This brief summarizes the EBHV fidelity analysis findings and highlights the key policy and practice implications for policymakers and direct service providers. The centrality of implementation fidelity as a goal of the EBHV initiative focused the national evaluation on this topic and resulted in development of a fidelity framework that guided data collection and analysis and a related design brief (Daro 2010), an interim report on fidelity in the first two years of the initiative based on fidelity data collected from subcontractors and their implementing agencies (Daro et al. 2012), and the analyses presented in the study’s final report (Boller et al. 2014). The EBHV evaluation is the first to collect similar data on fidelity across five different home visiting models operated in almost 50 agencies. The resulting analyses provide a snapshot of the characteristics of almost 400 home visitors, 5,000 families, and 90,000 home visits. This brief provides findings and draws implications that can be used to inform implementation of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program and state and local efforts to replicate with fidelity to model requirements and good practice standards.