Family Strengthening Scholars

Grants ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 per year to USA nonprofit organizations, for-profits, government agencies, school districts, and IHEs to support dissertation research on responsible fatherhood and healthy marriages. Applicants are advised that required registrations may take several weeks to complete.

Family Strengthening Scholars grants are to support dissertation research to build empirical evidence in the HM/RF field and to strengthen the capacity of next generation researchers to conduct rigorous, policy-relevant research related to HM/RF programs. These grants are also meant to help graduate students form active, collaborative partnerships with HM/RF practitioners. These grants can support projects for either primary data collection efforts or secondary data analysis of datasets, including, but not limited to, Supporting Healthy Marriage, Building Strong Families, or Community Healthy Marriage Initiative datasets.

The specific goals of the Family Strengthening Scholars grants are:

- To address issues of significance and relevance to policy decisions related to low-income families in order to further the HM/RF field.
- To directly support graduate students’ engagement in HM/RF research.
- To foster mentoring relationships between faculty members and graduate students who are pursuing doctoral-level research in the HM/RF field.
- To form collaborative partnerships with HM/RF practitioners.
- To encourage active communication, networking, and collaboration among graduate students, their mentors, and other senior HM/RF researchers.

For more details on the above goals, see: https://ami.grantsolutions.gov/files/HHS-2019-ACF-OPRE-PR-1563_0.pdf#page=5

Research topics that are of particular interest for this year's Family Strengthening Scholars grants
include, but are not limited to:

- Exploring mediators and moderators for program effects;
- Co-parenting;
- Father involvement;
- Complex families;
- Incarceration (including effects on relationships, relationships that are sustained throughout an incarceration, and issues with re-entry);
- The dynamics of relationships that terminate following a marriage/relationship education program;
- Outcomes from marriage/relationship programs, other than partnership status, such as family-wide outcomes, parent mental health, and child adjustment;
- Effects of mental health on couple and parent-child relationships, especially in the context of low-income families;
- Program features associated with program outcomes (program characteristics, staff characteristics, curricula, dosage);
- Studies that address measurement issues for family strengthening programs (e.g., how to measure father involvement with non-residential fathers);
- Studies that highlight how to enhance employment outcomes in family strengthening programs;
- Programming specific to teen parents;
- Relationship programming for youth in high schools; and
- Cost benefit analysis of family strengthening programs.