Using Data to Guide Program Improvement in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Services
Evidence | Publications

Using Data to Guide Program Improvement in Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Services

SIMR Practice Brief, OPRE Report #2023-073
Published: Mar 31, 2023
Publisher: Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Human Services Family Support Strengthening Families and Responsible Fatherhood Federal
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Associated Project

Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs

Time frame: 2019-2022

Prepared for:

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation

Clients
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Authors

Rebecca Dunn

Annie Buonaspina

Caroline O'Callahan

Scott Baumgartner

Key Findings

This brief shares four tips to support grant recipients interested in enhancing their CQI approaches by using data more effectively:

  • Develop learning questions to clarify what you hope to learn. Grantees should define what they hope to learn from testing their improvement strategy before they begin testing. Developing learning questions helped HMRE grantees in SIMR shape their plans for collecting data.
  • Gather data to assess progress towards your goals. Grantees should explore opportunities to use existing data and ensure new data collection efforts are feasible and minimally burdensome.
  • Gather feedback from staff, participants, and partners to inform refinements. Grantees in SIMR collected feedback from various groups of people to learn about why strategies did or didn’t work. Collecting feedback from diverse perspectives promotes inclusive and equitable program improvement.
  • Interpret findings with your team. Assessing an improvement strategy often involves collecting data from multiple sources. Synthesizing the data collected across sources enables grantees to draw conclusions about tested strategies. After concluding a rapid learning cycle, the CQI team should meet to reflect on the data collected and strategize about next steps.

This brief presents four tips for using data to guide efforts to improve services. The tips are drawn from the experiences of HMRE grantees in SIMR. In SIMR, grantees cocreated, tested, and refined promising strategies to address their pressing implementation challenges.

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