Peters – research design

We did a lot of different kinds of research to answer a verity of questions. We were really interested in the extent to which the Better Beginnings model was actually implemented and the way it was intended and by that I mean one of the requirements was for local residents and parents to be very involved in all aspects of the program and secondly for service providing agencies to cooperate and partner with those parents and residents in all aspects of the program. So there was a service integration piece to it, a community development, a community ownership piece to it, and what we did was to study groups of children that went through the program for four years and then followed them up years later. We also had a comparison site where we studied children in neighbourhood which did not get Better Beginnings. So this is a longitudinal study.  

We were funded by the Ontario government to do three kinds of research: one, qualitative, descriptive work where we had our researchers attend program meetings, take field notes, interview people in the communities to describe exactly how the Better Beginnings programs were developing in those communities, and we wrote many reports on that process, sort of program development process. The second kind of research was of a more outcome oriented, how did the children perform later on? What kind of behaviours did they show? What about the parents? The outcomes more quantitative sort of measures of child and parent and neighbourhood outcomes. The third kind of research that I had mentioned before was cost benefit analysis. We were actually funded to determine what the costs of the programs were. How much it actually cost to implement them in the various communities, and then to see whether or not there were savings in terms of benefits to the government in terms of cost savings in long term.