Overview

Overview

CDI’s community-based research and evaluations of early childhood interventions ensures the quality and effectiveness of our services. CDI’s prevention and intervention programme of work was kick started with a baseline study of the experiences of children in Tallaght West in 2004 called ‘How are our Kids?’

Following this a suite of prevention and early intervention programmes were developed to meet the identified needs of the community and achieve improvements in a range of outcomes. The programmes were manualised and independently evaluated during their delivery to help identify what works to improve outcomes.

On completion of the evaluations of these interventions, the following have been produced:

• Several Evaluation Reports on the effectiveness of CDI interventions have been published;

• Policy Briefs which extract the key policy implications of the findings were published;

• An overall Process Evaluation Report called ‘Leading Community Change’ was published in March 2014 documenting CDI’s learning on how to develop and deliver prevention and early intervention programmes.

•  A number of round table discussions were held with key policy makers and influencers, to consider the implications of the evaluation findings.

Regularly CDI conducts community research to understand the new and emerging needs of children and families. Since 2004, CDI has  conducted series of research studies to understand the lives of the children, families and communities through studies such as “How Are Our Kids”, “How Are Our Families” and “How Are Our Neighbourhoods”. CDI’s community research has informed service delivery at community and national level. Key research recently completed includes a study on Child Poverty, as well as research on Youth Mental Health and .

CDI has also used the information and evidence it has gathered to make relevant policy submissions, including to the National Children’s Strategy in 2012; pre-budget submissions; presentations to Oireachtas Committees and submissions to various Government advisory groups. CDI also makes available the datasets for the evaluations conducted through the national repositories including the Irish Social Science Data Archive.