In this article, Amanda Williford, Jason Downer, Kate Miller-Bains, Jenna Conway, and Lisa Howard tell us how a university research center, an early education advocacy group, and a state department of education joined forces in a research-practice partnership to develop and implement a more comprehensive assessment of young Virginia children's…

Research-practice partnerships often face a fundamental tension: well-designed, high-quality research takes time, but practitioners and policy makers need answers to pressing questions as soon as possible. In this article, Jason Sachs, Meghan McCormick, JoAnn Hsueh, and Catherine Snow discuss this mismatch between the tight timelines of…

Funders are primarily concerned with the impact of the work they support. Yet traditional research activities may take years to be complete, and it may take even longer to determine whether the research had any impact on policy or practice. In a place-based research-practice partnership, collaborative construction of research questions ensures…

In 2014, New York City launched its Pre-K for All program, which rapidly tripled the number of children in free, full-day prekindergarten. Two years later, the city rolled out ThriveNYC, a citywide mental health initiative with a focus on early childhood. By this time, a team from New York University's medical school had partnered for nearly two…

One of the first steps in developing a research-practice partnership is forming a joint research agenda. In this article, Michael Strambler, Joanna L. Meyer, Clare Waterman Irwin, and George A. Coleman describe the collaborative process that Connecticut's Partnership for Early Education Research (PEER) used to develop an agenda driven by…

Many children, especially those from lower-income families, face considerable instability early in their lives. This may include changes in family structure, irregular family routines, frequent moves, fluctuating daycare arrangements, and noisy, crowded, or generally chaotic environments. Moreover, instability and chaos affect young children's…

Nutrition is vitally important both during pregnancy and during a child's early years. Inadequate nutrition during this critical period can harm children's health and developmental outcomes throughout childhood and into adulthood. Thus, write Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Betsy Thorn, it's particularly important that young children have adequate…

Religious institutions can provide spiritual guidance and hope, a sense of belonging, and material support during periods of hardship. Daniel Hungerman reviews the evidence on the roles that religious institutions play in individuals' lives and how engagement with those institutions shapes individuals' economic wellbeing. First, he describes…

Beliefs about socioeconomic mobility have important consequences, writes Mesmin Destin, especially for young people. Moreover, research by psychologists shows that such beliefs are malleable, based on the information and circumstances people encounter. The consequences of beliefs about mobility can be quite positive. When young people perceive…

People don't base decisions about their economic life solely on their own individually formed ideas and preferences. Rather, they're influenced by the experiences of their peers and by social group norms. Gordon Dahl reviews the various ways family and neighborhood peer groups influence decisions to participate in the workforce and in government…

Scholars and policy makers alike are increasingly interested in understanding how social capital shapes people's economic lives. But the idea of social capital is an amorphous one. In this article, economists Judy Hellerstein and David Neumark define social capital as networks of relationships among people who are connected by where they live or…

In this article, M. Rebecca Kilburn and Jill S. Cannon report on First Born, a targeted universal home visiting program operating in over half of New Mexico counties. Created in a small town in response to a lack of support for pregnant women and new parents, First Born adapts features of other home visiting programs, responding to conditions…

Los Angeles County's experience, write Christina Altmayer and Barbara Andrade DuBransky, shows how a universal offer of assistance can establish a foundation on which public and private agencies can plan meaningful systemic reform--and spark incentives for greater, more effective investments in services directed to vulnerable families. The…

How do we screen all families in a population at a single time point, identify family-specific risks, and connect each family with evidence-based community resources that can help them overcome those risks--an approach known as targeted universalism? In this article, Kenneth A. Dodge and W. Benjamin Goodman describe Family Connects, a program…

The United States' high incarceration rate gets a lot of attention from scholars, policy makers, and the public. Yet the most common form of criminal justice supervision is not imprisonment but probation--and that is just as true for juveniles as for adults. Probation was originally promoted as an alternative to imprisonment that would spare…