When the country shut down and home visitors were unable to provide in-person services in 2020, Iowa home visiting programs jumped into action and distributed cell phones to keep families connected. Families reported that they used their phones daily to stay connected with service providers as well as friends and family, demonstrating an important need for social support in a difficult time.

In a mixed-methods evaluation of substance use in Iowa, families who reported a history of substance use were significantly more likely to experience early and extensive disadvantage at the time of the child’s birth compared to other families.

Data Is a Key Resource in Developing Equitable Pre-K Systems - This brief from Child Trends leaders outlines a clear rationale for why we need data, like the I2D2 data system, to help address critical questions to inform equitable early childhood programming. Child Trends will be engaging in focused work to develop and share an evidence-based framework for using data to advance equity. We will be watching closely as this work unfolds over the next couple of years, to help the field of integrated data systems better design and use their systems to help all children. See this data brief for an example of how this work has been applied by I2D2 to identify gaps in preschool access and address equity issues across systems. 

What makes administrative data research-ready? - This report in the International Journal of Population Data Science uses a systematic review and synthesis of literature to define the characteristics of research-ready administrative data in order to provide a common understanding of what constitutes research-ready data. 

Compendium of measures and indicators of home-based child care quality - This report from OPRE examines how well quality measures and indicators measure home based child care (HBCC) quality and what measures are needed to adequately access features of HBCC quality. This report is an example of the body of literature I2D2 uses in order to inform projects such as the Iowa Early Childcare Workforce study using integrated data.