Randomized trial of Healthy Families Arizona: quantitative and qualitative outcomes

Home visitation has the potential to improve parent, child, and maternal outcomes and has become a widely implemented prevention program across the United States. The purpose of this research was to use a randomized controlled trial to assess the short-term effectiveness of the Arizona Healthy Families program across a range of outcomes. Two hundred and forty-five families were randomly assigned to the experimental group (Healthy Families) or control group (Child Development assessment only). Results revealed significant findings across four domains including safety and resources, parenting attitudes and behaviors, health and maternal outcomes, and mental health and coping. These results were further corroborated with an analysis of qualitative findings that analyzed linguistic differences between how the treatment and control group described their parenting. These results add to the existing literature on the effectiveness of the Healthy Families model of home visitation.