The Navy and Marine Corps' NPSP home visiting option assists families who are at risk for child abuse and neglect by providing those families with home visitation by a trained professional (e.g., licensed clinical social worker, nurse). The ultimate goal of NPSP home visiting is to promote strong parenting practices and healthy families by providing parents with skills to foster child development and well-being. Families, expecting a child and with children up to age three, participating in the NPSP home visiting services at select military installations will be recruited for a cluster randomized controlled effectiveness-implementation hybrid Type 2 design program evaluation, which simultaneously tests the implementation and client related outcomes of a program (Curran et al., 2012).
Rigorous program evaluations of Navy and Marine Corps NPSP home visiting services are lacking. In fact, only one published study evaluating Navy NPSP could be located (Kelley et al., 2006). While the results of Kelley et al.'s (2006) study were generally positive, it was a single-group retrospective design that did not assess implementation outcomes or program outcomes related to child maltreatment. Thus, that study's ability to inform NPSP home visiting services is limited. Further, findings from past analyses of Army NPSP offered no evidence that NPSP services directly prevent child abuse and neglect (Kaye, Faber, Schiavone, \& Perkins, 2016). Among the general U.S. population, research findings are mixed with regard to the effectiveness of home visiting programs for preventing child maltreatment (Howard \& Brooks-Gunn, 2009; Kaminski, Valle, Filene, \& Boyle, 2008). However, the available evidence does indicate that these programs can positively alter parenting practices.
Without a rigorous, experimental evaluation, it is difficult to assess whether the Navy's and Marine Corps' NPSP service as usual (SAU) is having the intended impacts on participating families. Further, the both Services are interested in exploring the utility of delivering the Take Root Home Visitation (TRHV) program. TRHV is a newly developed, evidence-informed, secondary, home-visiting prevention program developed by researchers at the Clearinghouse for Military Family Readiness at Penn State in collaboration with the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy. TRHV has not been evaluated within the context of the Navy or Marine Corps. TRHV has been implemented with the Army as part of the Clearinghouse's three-phase evaluation of Army NPSP. Though the final report is still forthcoming, a preliminary report on program implementation showed that home visitors found TRHV to be acceptable and were able to implement the program with fidelity (Kaye et al., 2021). Moreover, parents receiving TRHV reported high levels of satisfaction with the program and stayed in NPSP services longer than parents receiving SAU (Kaye et al., 2021).
The extent to which the Army TRHV implementation findings generalize to the Navy and Marine Corps is unclear. Additionally, it is unclear to what extent TRHV will impact program outcomes, especially when compared to SAU. This study is designed to help bring clarity to these issues.
