In the 1998 reauthorization of Head Start, Congress mandated that the United States Department of Health and Human Services determine, on a national level, the impact of Head Start on the children it serves. The Head Start Impact Study was designed to report on the impacts of Head Start on children and families during the children's preschool, kindergarten, and first grade years.
The Head Start Impact Study began in the fall of 2002 and ended in spring 2006. It was conducted with a nationally representative sample of nearly 5,000 three- and four-year old preschool children across 84 nationally representative grantee/delegate agencies in communities where there are more eligible children and families than can be served by the program. Baseline data were collected through parent interviews and child assessments in fall 2002. The annual spring data collection included child assessments, parent interviews, teacher surveys, and teacher-child ratings. In addition, during the preschool years only, data collection included classroom and family day care observations, center director interviews, care provider interviews, and care provider-child ratings.
The Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study built upon the existing randomized control design in HSIS in order to determine the longer-term impact of the Head Start program on the well-being of children and families through the end of third grade. A principal survey and self-reported data were added.
The Head Start Impact Study with Center Analysis File contains data from a variety of publicly available data sources and provides information about the HSIS centers' communities, including population and household characteristics, crime statistics, labor, and housing data. Since the Center Analysis File (Dataset 32) can only be accessed in the ICPSR Virtual Data Enclave (VDE) this collection provides the data from the two releases above so that researchers have all of the HSIS data available to analyze in the VDE.