HARC’s Early Career Scholars Awardees

HARC recently wrapped up the pilot year of our HARC Early Career Scholars Program.  Six early career researchers, shown below, were selected from a robust applicant pool in mid-2024.  Over the course of a year, the scholars attended the 2024 HARC Collaborative Science of Home Visiting Meeting, met as a cohort on a bimonthly basis, worked closely with an expert mentor to develop a research project, and came back together in-person at the end of the year to share their project results.

Scholar projects covered a range of topics and formats, including:

• Examination of associations between neighborhood conditions, demographic characteristics, and child development outcomes in an Early Head Start (EHS) program. Findings may be used to inform local EHS program needs.
• Secondary analysis of Start Early data to identify the predictors and outcomes associated with father attendance at prenatal and postnatal home visits and father and/or doula attendance at birth on maternal and child outcomes. Results will be used by Start Early programs to inform outreach to fathers during home visits.
• Creation of an interactive dashboard using Healthy Families America local program data collected by the national office.  This dashboard is a visual way for local programs to interact with data to inform programmatic decisions.
• Analysis of Arkansas state-level home visiting data to identify distinct professional quality of life profiles of home visitors and how these profiles relate to characteristics such as education level, caseload, and reflective supervision—factors relevant to workforce support and policy development in home visitation programs.
• Development of a proposal for a study to evaluate the implementation and outcomes of integrating a “bundle” of economic support services into existing home visiting programs that serve families with young children and low incomes.