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    • Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation: Eight Sites within the United States, 2003-2013

    Metadata Updated: September 6, 2025

    The Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) evaluation was launched in 2003 to develop, to implement, and to test the effectiveness of a program aimed at strengthening low-income couples' marriages as one approach for supporting stable and nurturing family environments and parents' and children's well-being. The evaluation was led by MDRC and was sponsored by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, United States Department of Health and Human Services.The SHM program was a voluntary yearlong marriage education program for low-income married couples who had children or were expecting a child. The program provided a series of group workshops based on structured curricula designed to enhance couples' relationships; supplemental activities to build on workshop themes; and family support services to address participation barriers, connect families with other services, and reinforce curricular themes.

    The study sample consists of 6,298 couples (12,596 adult sample members) who were expecting a child or had a child under 18 years old at the time of study entry. The sample consists primarily of low-to-modest income, married couples with diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. In each family, one child was randomly selected to be the focus of any child-related measures gathered in the data collection activities. These children ranged from pre-birth to 14 years old at the time of enrollment in the study. Follow-up interviews were conducted at 12 and 30 months after baseline data collection. More detail is provided in the study documentation.

    Units of Response: Low-income married couples with children

    Type of Data: Evaluation

    Tribal Data: No

    COVID-19 Data: No

    Periodicity: One-time

    SORN: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/09/19/2022-20139/privacy-act-of-1974-system-of-records

    Data Use Agreement: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/rpxlogin

    Data Use Agreement Location: https://www.childandfamilydataarchive.org/cfda/archives/cfda/studies/36852/datadocumentation

    Equity Indicators: Sex

    Granularity: Household;Individual

    Spatial: United States

    Geocoding: Unavailable

    Access & Use Information

    Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

    Downloads & Resources

    Dates

    Metadata Created Date September 6, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date September 6, 2025

    Metadata Source

    Harvested from Healthdata.gov

    Other Data Resources

    Additional Metadata

    Resource Type Dataset
    Metadata Created Date September 6, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date September 6, 2025
    Publisher ACF
    Maintainer
    Identifier https://healthdata.gov/api/views/dnq4-4gua
    Data First Published 2023-11-17
    Data Last Modified 2025-07-03
    Category ACF
    Public Access Level public
    Bureau Code 009:70
    Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
    Metadata Catalog ID https://healthdata.gov/data.json
    Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
    Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
    Harvest Object Id 8d1826c1-93f4-4239-aaa0-e331348b922e
    Harvest Source Id 651e43b2-321c-4e4c-b86a-835cfc342cb0
    Harvest Source Title Healthdata.gov
    Homepage URL https://www.acf.hhs.gov/opre/project/supporting-healthy-marriages-2003-2014
    Program Code 009:103
    Source Datajson Identifier True
    Source Hash 2c1c73ffb6fc7b6a0e17698a2fb9fd15bb8744f6800a7f24667d9605de908b84
    Source Schema Version 1.1

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