ABSTRACT
The approach to promoting child development became the cornerstone of the Child and Family Resource Program (CFRP), a federally funded demonstration initiated in 1973 by the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF). The complexity and variability of CFRP suggested that CFRP was the kind of program for which supplementary use of qualitative techniques might be most revealing. Tensions existed and influences were exerted throughout the evaluation by actors at every level—by ACYF at the federal level, by local CFRP programs, by the evaluation team, and to some extent by enrolled parents. Both the diversity across programs and variations in treatment within them necessitated a complex set of statistical analyses. The findings on CFRP's effectiveness as a family-oriented child development program are not surprising given its general orientation. The preemption of child development by crisis management and social service referrals cited earlier is an example of what can evolve.
