Evaluation of Assessments and Educational Tools Associated With Child Abuse and Neglect

This project was conducted over the course of an 8-­week internship with Nurses for Newborns, with funding from Duke University’s Hart Leadership Program. The purpose of the research was to look at how well the newly introduced AAPI and Nurturing Parenting (NP) tools have been implemented in the Tennessee NFN program over the past year and to determine how these tools had been received by both nurses and clients. Since NFN is thinking of scaling up the use of the AAPI and NP curriculum in the Missouri area–where they are currently used by only the four nurses in the State Home Visitation program–the end goal was to provide information that could inform this process and ensure that it can be carried out as smoothly as possible. Research consisted of two parts: analysis of data from Tennessee client records in 4-­D and semi-­structured interviews with nurses and clients. The subset of data I examined consisted of all clients who received a nursing visit between July 2012 and May 2013; when twins and siblings were removed, this list included 592 clients. Interviews with nurses were conducted by phone or face-to-face and typically lasted for 30 minutes, while client interviews were all conducted by phone and lasted approximately 10 minutes. The main conclusions drawn from this research are detailed over the following pages, with a section of recommendations for NFN to consider at the end.