YARH2_Attachment C_Consent statement

ATTACHMENT C


CONSENT STATEMENT FOR INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPANTS

The Implementation Grants to Develop a Model Intervention for Youth/Young Adults with Child Welfare Involvement at Risk of Homelessness (YARH) process study will use the discussion guide presented as Instrument 1 during the site visits. The interviewer will begin the interview by reading the introduction and consent statement aloud to the respondent and securing consent to participate before moving on to the discussion guide.

The YARH-2 process study will include one site visit to each grantee. During the site visit, we will interview (1) key program administrators, (2) frontline staff, and (3) partner organizations contributing to implementation. Interviews will be conducted either one-on-one or in small groups, depending on staffing structure, roles, and the number of people in a role.

CONSENT STATEMENT

Thank you for agreeing to participate in this conversation. Your participation is very important to the study. I’m ______________________ and I work for Mathematica Policy Research, an independent social policy research company.

We are conducting a study for the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The goal of this study is to understand how the YARH-2 grant supported the work of developing and implementing a comprehensive service model to serve youth and young adults at risk of homelessness. We have analyzed documents submitted as part of the grant (such as the grant application and semiannual reports) and we will analyze transcripts from these interviews to understand (1) the programs being implemented, including target populations, the critical program components, program outcomes, how grantees organized program implementation, and the facilitators and challenges of program implementation; and (2) the Phase II activities that grantees planned and completed, including defining Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes (PICO) elements, usability testing, formative evaluation, and preparing for rigorous summative evaluation, and what grantees perceived as the major benefits and challenges of the implementation activities.

We would like to talk with you about your experiences and perceptions of the grant process and activities. Our team will analyze the information we collect from you and other stakeholders in conjunction with information from documents submitted as part of the grant, such as the semiannual reports. We will report to ACF themes that describe the implementation grant experience across the six YARH-2 grantees. Comments will not be attributed to specific individuals or grantees, and no person will be quoted by name. Your participation in this discussion is voluntary.

Your responses will be kept private to the extent permitted by law and used only for research purposes.

All our questions are open-ended. There are no right or wrong answers. You are the experts, and we want to learn from you.

We will not share your comments with anyone other than members of the research team. We will not attribute any statements to you, or your organization, in the final report submitted to ACF.

We have many topics to cover during the discussion. At times, I may need to move the conversation along to make sure we cover everything.

I would like to record our discussion with a digital recorder so I can listen to it later when I write up my notes. No one besides our research team will listen to the recording. If you want to say anything that you don’t want recorded, please let me know and I will be glad to pause the recorder. Do you have any objections to being part of this interview or to my recording our discussion?

We want to reiterate that being part of this discussion is up to you, and you may choose not to answer a question if you wish. Being part of this discussion will not affect your employment or your involvement with the YARH-2 grant.

The discussion will last no more than one and a half hours, and we will not take any formal breaks. Please feel free to get up at any time if you need to do so.

Do you have any questions before we get started?

An agency may not conduct or sponsor, and a person is not required to respond to, a collection of information unless it displays a currently valid OMB control number. The OMB control number for this collection is XXXX-XXXX and it expires XX/XX/XXXX.

After answering any questions

Good, let’s begin.

Once again, thank you for your time.