Measurement Brief: Selecting Data Collection Measures for Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Benchmarks

In 2011, the Health Resources and Services Administration developed a set of constructs to help federal home visiting awardees measure improvement in six benchmark areas. The guidance allowed individual awardees to select or develop their own indicators for each construct.

For example, programs may address the construct of maternal depression by counting available mental health providers in their communities or the number of participating mothers they screen for depression each year.

This brief walks home visiting programs through key steps for determining how to assess legislatively mandated constructs:

• Selecting indicators and defining measurement improvement
• Developing an operational definition of the indicator
• Selecting data sources
• Reviewing and selecting a measurement tool