Conceptualizing Family Engagement in Home Visiting: Exploring the Use of Existing Data to Promote Collaborative Research

Organizations commonly use management information systems (MIS) to capture data about home visiting service delivery and case management. From 2019–2021, the HARC team partnered with evidence-based home visiting models to see how their MIS data aligned with identified family engagement concepts and to explore the potential for a collaborative study.

This brief summarizes the project and its results, including the number of participating models with comparable data on each concept and promising areas for future research. Behavioral indicators of engagement are commonly recorded in models’ MIS and may inform collaborative research with minor modifications. By contrast, models rarely captured information about families’ perceptions of their home visitors and acceptability, relevance, and fit of services. This gap is notable because model representatives highlighted the importance of these concepts during interviews conducted for the study.