Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Pathways to Health Equity for Children ("PATHS Equity") is a research program focused on evaluating the impact that policies and programs have on child health and development. PATHS Equity is also looking at whether these programs helped close the gap in health and development outcomes between children from high and low income families. PATHS Equity evaluated the impact several programs had on child health including (1) The Healthy Baby Prenatal Benefit which provides a monthly cheque to low income pregnant women worth $81.00, (2) The Families First Home Visit program which sends paraprofessional home visitors into the home to support vulnerable families with young children, and (3) Full-Day Kindergarten which provided a full day in school to children enrolled in kindergarten. It is often hard to untangle whether or not a program had a real impact on child health in the real world; many other things could explain observed improvements. The PATHS Equity team took two steps to try to figure out whether improvements were likely to be real programmatic effects. Our first step when evaluating each program was to compare groups of children who received the program with groups of children who did not receive the program who were similar on several factors such as age, income, the mother's age, and many other risk factors. We tested to make sure that our groups were, in fact, comparable on these characteristics. The second step we took was another analysis which allowed us to ask the question , "How likely is it that these statistically significant associations are due to a program effect versus being due to unmeasured confounding?" In the case of Full-Day Kindergarten, we found that although there were statistically significant improvements associated with the program, these improvements were likely artifacts of unmeasured confounding and not due to any real program effect.