MEASUREMENT ISSUES IN HOME-VISITING RESEARCH WITHIN TRIBAL COMMUNITIES: CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES

In this article, Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) grantees share strategies they have developed and adopted to address the most common barriers to effective measurement (and thus to effective evaluation) encountered in the course of implementation and evaluation of their home-visiting programs. We identify key challenges in measuring outcomes in Tribal MIECHV Programs and provide practical examples of various strategies used to address these challenges within diverse American Indian and Alaska Native cultural and contextual settings. Notably, high-quality community engagement is a consistent thread throughout these strategies and fundamental to successful measurement in these communities. These strategies and practices reflect the experiences and innovative solutions of practitioners working on the ground to deliver and evaluate intervention programs to tribal communities. They may serve as models for getting high-quality data to inform intervention while working within the constraints and requirements of program funding. The utility of these practical solutions extends beyond the Tribal MIECHV grantees and offers the potential to inform a broad array of intervention evaluation efforts in tribal and other community contexts.