Preparing for Life (PFL) is a community-led prevention and early intervention programme that is operated by the Northside Partnership (NSP) in Dublin, Ireland. PFL aims to improve levels of school readiness of young children from several designated disadvantaged areas of North Dublin, by intervening during pregnancy and working with families until the children start school. The PFL Programme is a home visiting programme whose purpose is to improve documented low levels of school readiness by assisting parents in developing skills to help prepare their children for school. As such, the PFL Programme operates under a holistic definition of school readiness composed of five dimensions including: 1) physical well-being and motor development; 2) social and emotional development; 3) approaches to learning; 4) language development and emergent literacy; and 5) cognitive development and general knowledge. The PFL programme was evaluated between 2008 and 2015 by the UCD Geary Institute at University College Dublin to provide evidence on the effectiveness of the PFL programme to positively impact on parent and child outcomes. The PFL Programme was evaluated using a mixed methods approach, incorporating (1) an impact evaluation and (2) an implementation evaluation. The impact evaluation was used to determine whether the PFL Programme had an impact on parent and child outcomes for the duration of the intervention, and data was collected on children’s physical health and motor skills, social and emotional development, and behaviour, learning, literacy and language development, and on mother’s pregnancy behaviours, physical and psychological health, cognitive ability, personality, and parenting skills from pregnancy onwards (this data is being archived with ISSDA). A process evaluation was also conducted to investigate perceptions of PFL using qualitative interviews with PFL participants and PFL staff members at 6 months and at 24 months; and with fathers of and father figures to PFL children at 36 months (qualitative material will be available via IQDA).

Probability: Simple random. Recruitment into the PFL Evaluation occurred through (1) the maternity hospital or (2) in the community, and began in late January, 2008 in the five communities in North Dublin. Due to the relatively slow uptake rate within these communities, the PFL catchment area was expanded to include three additional areas in North Dublin in January 2009. A second expansion was initiated in late June 2009 to include two more communities in North Dublin. An in-depth analysis of the demographic similarity showed that the expansion areas were relatively similar to the original PFL catchment area on key socio-demographic characteristics. Of the 233 participants recruited into the PFL Programme, 172 (74%) are from the original catchment area, 39 (17%) are from the first expansion area, and 22 (9%) are from the second expansion area. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to identify the degree of similarity between the PFL treatment groups and a community comparison group (LFP group) by calculating the Euclidean pairwise distance between communities. Small area population statistics (SAPS) from 2006 Census were used to rank all 322 communities in Dublin in terms of their closeness to the PFL community based on standard demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. The selected comparison community was identified as the most similar socio-demographically to the PFL community and not receiving an early childhood intervention at that time. The PFL Evaluation is a RCT, or a quantitative comparative assessment of various levels of treatments in which participants are randomly allocated to one of two treatment groups. Randomisation provided each participant with an equal opportunity of receiving either the low or high PFL treatment and therefore, on average, the observed and unobserved characteristics of the participants should be distributed evenly across the two groups before the programme began. PFL participants were randomised after written informed consent was obtained. An unconditional probability randomisation procedure presented each participant with an equal chance of being randomised into the low or high treatment group. After consenting to take part in the PFL Programme and Evaluation, the participant pressed a key on a computer which randomly allocated her treatment group assignment. The computerised randomisation programme created an array equal to the size of the number of people to be in the randomised group. In the case of the PFL Programme this array consisted of 250 possible PFL numbers populated with a one or zero. This array was then shuffled using a random number generator to randomly assign the numbers a location in the array. This process resulted in a list of ones and zeros where the numbers were in a random order and were written to a file one per line. As each participant clicked on the randomisation website they was assigned a one or zero which corresponded to the two treatment groups in the study and their PFL code was inserted beside the one or zero in the file. To ensure randomisation was not compromised, once the participant pressed the key on a computer, an email was generated which included the participant’s unique ID code and assignment condition. This email was automatically sent to the PFL programme manager and the PFL evaluation manager. If there were any attempts to reassign participants from one group to another, by either directly changing the database or repeating the randomisation procedure, a second email would automatically highlight this intentional subversion. Tests of baseline differences between the high and low PFL treatment groups found that the two groups did not statistically differ on 97% of the measures analysed, indicating that the randomisation process was successful. The aggregate PFL group and the LFP comparison group did not statistically differ on 75% of the measures; however, the comparison group was of a relatively higher socioeconomic status.

Face-to-face interview: CAPI/CAMI

Face-to-face interview: PAPI