The Colombia Parenting Intervention

A 2010 randomized controlled trial across 96 Colombian towns evaluated two child development interventions and their interactions. In each town, children aged between 12 and 24 months, living in households that were recipients of a Colombian conditional cash transfer program, were sampled. The first intervention consisted of weekly home visits, during which a visitor would engage the mother and child in a number of activities. The second intervention consisted of micro-nutrient supplementation, while the third combined the first two interventions. Following the 2010 baseline survey, data were collected at the end of the intervention in 2011 and also two years later in 2013.

Each survey wave included rich data on child development, including standardized tests covering various domains and anthropometric measures, such as height, weight, and anemia for the child and mother. The data also includes information on parenting practices, household background variables and municipality-level information, including prices and the incidence of violence. The second follow up survey had new measures, including information on beliefs of mothers about the process of child development, and DNA samples taken from mothers and children for genotyping.

The Odisha Early Childhood Interventions

This dataset includes 2000 children and their households from 192 villages in the Indian state of Odisha. It was designed to evaluate two consecutive interventions that were randomized at the community-level (for the first trial). It contains demographic and economic data on the household as well as detailed and advanced measurements on child skills. It also contains network and community-level information. The size and the scope of this dataset allows research on poor communities well beyond the original research. It also forms the basis of a cohort with the potential of following the children and their families into the future with numerous research objectives, including a follow-up of the effects of the interventions that motivated it in the first place.

Tanzania Child Development Survey

The Tanzania Child Development Survey combines construction of new child development measures with their validation and use in a new cohort dataset. First, in collaboration with psychometricians, researchers produced new measures of child development which could be implemented with limited resources in disadvantaged contexts. These were validated against established instruments. Alongside, the project collected a variety of measures on individual beliefs and preferences. Researchers are further validating these measures and collecting new measures using techniques such as eye-tracking electroencephalographic recordings (EEG), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and language environment analysis (LENA).

Other Related Datasets

Other related datasets include the following: data from three survey waves related to an early childhood intervention conducted in Cuttack, India; data on the a girl empowerment intervention conducted in Rajasthan, India; data on a school intervention in Senegal; data from four survey waves on a conditional cash transfer program conducted in Colombia; and two waves of data on a group parenting trial as well as a nurseries intervention conducted in Colombia.

If you are interested in using any of the datasets above, please fill out the following Google Form and you will receive a response shortly.