Welcome to ACF

OPRE builds evidence to improve the lives of children and families. We aim to increase knowledge about effective approaches to helping low-income children and families by sponsoring rigorous research and evaluation projects and by working to increase the quality, usefulness, sharing, and analysis of data. Our work includes descriptive and exploratory studies, implementation and impact studies, measure development, data improvement, and evaluation technical assistance. We work in program areas including welfare, employment, and family self-sufficiency; child care; Head Start and Early Head Start; child abuse and neglect; teen pregnancy prevention and sexual risk avoidance; healthy marriage; responsible fatherhood; family violence; and home visiting. Our work is guided by ACF’s Evaluation Policy, which states that ACF seeks to promote rigor, relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics in the conduct of evaluations.