Are Federally Supported Relationship Education Programs for Lower-Income Individuals and Couples Working: A Review of Evaluation Research.
ACF has funded hundreds of community-based organizations to provide relationship education services to youth, young adults, cohabiting parents, and married couples to help them gain the knowledge and skills that strengthen romantic relationships. They’ve launched a rigorous evaluation agenda of these services. Policy pundits and scholarly observers have determined this policy initiative to be a failure, but Alan Hawkins argues in this report that the critics’ conclusions are based on an early and limited range of evaluation work. A careful examination of the ongoing, developing research on ACF’s HMRE policy initiative reveals large, serious, and rigorous evaluations that show promising successes, disappointing failures, and nuanced findings.
