Child Trends actively collaborates with its clients and offers strategic guidance to help them meet their goals. Our independent, actionable research describes and analyzes how children, youth, and families are faring; provides evidence-based technical assistance to programs; clearly communicates findings to policymakers and practitioners in accessible, actionable ways; and helps organizations improve the efficacy of their direct services.
Research synthesis
- Conducting systematic reviews
- Reporting syntheses of findings and recommendations
- Assessing the quality of existing research
- Developing evidence-informed logic models and theories of change that influence program design
Evaluation services
- Monitoring program quality
- Developing performance management systems
- Assessing readiness for an impact evaluation
- Evaluating impact
- Creating actionable evidence
Innovative data collection and analysis
- Identifying and analyzing important factors of child and family well-being
- Linking and analyzing administrative data that illuminate child and family well-being
- Scraping “Big Data” sources like social media, websites, or search queries to analyze trends or forecast changes
- Developing surveys and conducting cognitive and psychometric testing
- Conducting interviews, focus groups, classroom observations, home visits, and other qualitative data collection tools
- Establishing appropriate benchmarks and performance measurement systems
- Auditing algorithms for bias, equity, and transparency
- Natural language processing of legal documents, policies, and open-ended survey responses
- Developing machine learning applications, from text generation to bot identification in surveys
- Creating captivating data visualizations
Capacity building and technical assistance
- Using quality improvement practices to support program developers’ efforts to become evidence-based
- Increasing organizational readiness for evaluation, as well as the usefulness of evaluation
- Building data collection and performance management systems
- Integrating research-based practices into services
- Improving client outreach and recruitment
- Developing effective funder and stakeholder communications
- Providing coaching and mentoring from subject matter and technical assistance experts
- Offering lead knowledge and skill at the universal (e.g., webinars, professional development), targeted (e.g., communities of practice), and intensive (e.g., one-on-one) levels
- Incorporating lived experience
Policy analysis and engagement
- Monitoring shifts in federal and state policy
- Developing policy briefs, blogs, fact sheets, web narratives, and infographics that make our research understandable and actionable
- Compiling state and local policies to examine variation and their implications
- Participating in federal and state briefings and presentations
Communications planning and outreach consultation
- Messaging and content development
- Web interactive and social media graphic creation
- Audience identification, stakeholder outreach, and event planning
- Website and social media metrics analysis
- Traditional and digital media strategy training