Running from 2015 to 2021, the second round of the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF’s) Health Profession Opportunity Grants Program (“HPOG 2.0”) funded grantees to provide support services and healthcare occupational training according to career pathways principles. ACF’s Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is administering a robust evaluation of the HPOG 2.0 effort: the National and Tribal Evaluation of the 2nd Generation of Health Profession Opportunity Grants. The National Evaluation of 27 non-Tribal grantees is comparing outcomes and impacts for program applicants randomly assigned access to the grantees’ HPOG 2.0 programs (treatment group) versus those randomly assigned access only to services available elsewhere in the community (control group).
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, disrupting American lives, labor markets, and local HPOG 2.0 programs. To better understand how COVID changed outcomes and impacts for HPOG 2.0 study members relative to the pre-COVID period, OPRE contracted with Abt Associates to conduct the HPOG 2.0 National Evaluation COVID-Cohort Study.
This Analysis Plan describes the methodology for answering the study’s key research questions. The document also improves the transparency and replicability of study findings by committing the research team to make consequential decisions prior to inspecting estimates of program impacts. Most methods and operationalizations of outcomes measures continue from earlier HPOG 2.0 impact analyses and are described in previous Analysis Plans. This Analysis Plan therefore primarily focuses on specifying analytic methods and presentation strategies specific to this study’s understanding of how COVID shifted the HPOG 2.0 program.
