DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34161.v2
title: Evaluation of Children's Futures: Improving Health and Development Outcomes for Children in Trenton, New Jersey: Second Community Survey, 2008 and Third Community Survey, 2010
title: Version 2

description: The Children's Futures initiative was designed to enhance the health and well-being of children from birth to age three in Trenton, New Jersey through three major strategies: (1) Improving access to prenatal care and strengthening effective parenting; (2) Improving the quality of child care; and (3) Strengthening and sustaining positive involvement of fathers in their children's lives. As part of the initiative, data were simultaneously collected to assess the effectiveness of the initiative.


The data collection efforts included a baseline survey of the Trenton community conducted in 2002 and surveys of Trenton child care providers conducted in 2003, 2004, and 2005. In addition, births records for Trenton, Camden, and Newark were obtained from the New Jersey State Department of Health. These survey and birth records data were released as ICPSR 21640: Evaluation of Children's Futures: Improving Health and Development Outcomes for Children in Trenton, New Jersey, 2001-2005. The data from the 2002 community survey represents a baseline picture of the primary caregivers of children ages 0-5 in Trenton on a set of outcomes, among them parenting behaviors and strategies that the initiative hoped to influence.


This data collection contains the data from two follow-up community surveys. Like the baseline community survey, the follow-up surveys interviewed the primary caregivers of children aged 0-5 in Trenton households about child and parental health, parenting practices, fathers' involvement in their children's lives, health insurance and health care utilization, attendance at parenting groups or classes, and utilization of child care. In addition, the surveys collected information on country of birth, year of immigration, race, Hispanic origin, education, employment status, alcohol use, earnings, and household income.


The community surveys followed a repeated cross-sectional design. That is, individual community residents were not followed over time; rather, at each wave of data collection, a new sample of respondents were interviewed.
description: A telephone interview was conducted with the primary caregiver of a child age 0-5 in the household. If the respondent had multiple co-resident children aged 0-5, then the one with the most recent birthday was selected as the focal child for certain questions about child health, health care utilization, health insurance, parenting practices, and involvement with biological parents.


The phone calling lists were generated from general and targeted phone databanks similar to ones used to generate the calling lists for the 2002 baseline survey. In addition, because the initiative had moved to a center-based approach and the evaluation designers wanted to be sure to capture individuals who had some connection to Children's Futures programming, lists of phone numbers were extracted from the Children's Futures database of contacts. This strategy was used to ensure that there was representation in the survey of individuals who had some connection to Children's futures.
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: Second Community Survey, 2008
DS2: Third Community Survey, 2010
description: Households in Trenton, New Jersey with co-resident children ages 0-5.
description: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI)More information about Children's Futures can be
found on the project's Web site.