DOI: 10.3886/icpsr39334.v1
title: Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start, United States, 2024
title: Version 1

description: The Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start (EHS) was a nationally representative survey that described EHS programs' strategies, successes, and challenges to ensure staff meet or exceed the Head Start Program Performance Standards qualification and competency requirements. The survey included questions that asked EHS program staff how they searched for and hired qualified staff and supported staff in their ongoing career development.
description: The project addressed the following research questions:


How do Early Head Start (EHS) programs search for teaching and home visiting staff with the qualifications and competencies necessary to deliver high-quality EHS services to infants, toddlers, and families? What strategies or approaches have been most successful? What challenges do programs face?


How do EHS programs hire teaching and home visiting staff with the qualifications and competencies necessary to deliver high-quality EHS services to infants, toddlers, and families? What strategies or approaches have been most successful? What challenges do programs face?


How do EHS programs support existing teaching and home visiting staff in improving their qualifications and competencies? What strategies or approaches have been most successful? What challenges do programs face?
description: The web survey collected data from a nationally representative probability sample of Early Head Start (EHS) programs. An EHS staff person with knowledge of their program's recruitment, training, and professional development strategies and experiences completed the survey. Most survey respondents were program directors or EHS directors. Other types of survey respondents included human resources directors, managers, or staff; assistant program directors; site directors; education managers; education specialists; home-based services directors or managers; and family services managers. Respondents completed the survey between April and August 2024.


Programs that offer only center-based or family child care educational services employ teachers to deliver services in classrooms. In contrast, programs that offer only home-based services employ home visitors to deliver services in families' homes. Based on input from experts, researchers developed two versions of the survey. One version was for respondents from programs that offer only the <strong>home-based program options</strong> to report about the recruitment, training, and professional development of home visitors. The other version was for respondents from programs that offer only the <strong>center-based or family child care program options</strong> to report about the recruitment, training, and professional development of teachers.
description: The survey collected data about programs' strategies and experiences recruiting teachers and home visitors, as well as training and professional development provided to teachers and home visitors.
description: The full sample survey weight variable is labeled as <strong>WEIGHT.</strong> It is recommended that researchers use the survey weight when analyzing data from the Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start (EHS).


Survey weights reduce potential nonresponse bias by adjusting the sample so that the distribution of the characteristics of respondents and non-respondents are like those found in the 2022-2023 Program Information Report, which was the sampling frame for this study.


In this study, the weights adjusted for:

Response rate difference by Office of Head Start region as regions II and X had a lower response rate and region VI had the highest response rate.
Lower response rate from programs with fewer staff.
Lower response rate from programs with a home visitor option.
Lower response rate from programs with unfilled vacancies.
Lower response rate from programs with children referred to child welfare.



While almost half of the EHS programs sampled did not participate in the study, relatively few differences between respondents and non-respondents were found. Therefore, the survey weights were small and ranged from 0.61 to 1.44. The
estimated design effect for the survey was 1.02.


There are an additional 25 replicate weight variables labeled as <strong>REPWT1, REPWT2, REPWT3 ... REPWT25</strong> that can be used to get adjusted standard errors that takes into account the design effects associated with using the survey weight.
description: Response Rates: In total, 1,017 programs were invited to complete the survey. Of these, 502 respondents completed the full survey. Researchers also included 25 respondents who partially completed the survey in the data. Researchers only included partially completed surveys where respondents at least answered the questions in the "Active Search" section of the survey to retain any responses that could be included in any possible analysis. Researchers used a formula from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) to calculate the response rate. The final sample of 527 respondents reflects an AAPOR response rate of 51 percent. More than two-thirds of the sample (n = 363, 69 percent) completed the teacher survey and almost one-third (n =164, 31 percent) completed the home visitor survey.
description: Researchers sampled programs from a list of programs that completed the 2022-23 Program Information Report (PIR). All Head Start (HS) and Early Head Start (EHS) programs are required to complete the PIR annually, making it the most reliable record of all existing EHS programs. Of the total population of about 3,300 HS and EHS programs included in the PIR, researchers initially considered approximately 1,500 EHS programs eligible for inclusion in the study. For this study, researchers only included programs from Office of Head Start (OHS) Regions I through X and excluded programs who operated outside of the continental United States.


Because a single program can have multiple EHS grants, the program could also have several entries in the PIR. Grant recipients that had the same program name, program director's email address, program address, and phone number were combined into a single program for sampling purposes. In some cases, the respondent from the initial outreach asked the researchers to contact someone else in their program to ask them to complete the survey because they had better knowledge of the survey topics. With the new contact information, researchers found a few other grant recipients that the researchers needed to combine. For example, researchers may have combined grant recipients after a program director from one grant recipient gave the researchers an email address for another staff person that matched the program director email address associated with another grant recipient in the PIR. Researchers reviewed each of these matches carefully to decide whether to combine them. If more than one grant recipient received joint correspondence from the OHS or if they had overlapping centers or facilities, researchers combined the grant recipients into one program. In the end, researchers found 1,205 unique programs.


Researchers used a probability proportional to the size of the stratified sample design to select EHS programs for inclusion in the study. The design included four strata of programs that provided


center-based or family child care services only;


home-based services only;


both center-based or family child care and home-based services; and


combinations of center-based, home-based, family child care, and local services.




The sample was released in three waves, which minimized programing errors and allowed researchers to proactively monitor response rates for key groups. By monitoring response rates, researchers were able to address nonresponse bias by increasing outreach efforts with groups that had lower response rates.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start, United States, 2024
description: Early Head Start programs in the Office of Head Start Regions I through X in the 2023-2024 program Year.


Early Head Start programs in U.S. territories, under transitional management, and those that did not directly
provide services to children and families were <strong>not</strong> part of the sample.
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description: web-based surveyFor more information regarding the geographic variable <strong>REGION_PIR</strong> users should visit the list of Office of Regional Operations from the Administration for Children and Families.