# Analyzing the Impacts of Two Influential Early Childhood Programs on Participants through Midlife

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO · 2021 · $610,908

## Abstract

Project Summary:
This proposal seeks support for an interdisciplinary team to collect and analyze data to estimate
the impacts on participants through midlife, and the impacts on their children, of the two most
influential early childhood education programs: the HighScope Perry Preschool Program (PPP)
and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC). Both programs targeted disadvantaged,
predominantly African-American children. Evidence from these programs is the cornerstone of
wide-scale initiatives for pre-kindergarten programs around the world. Both programs were
evaluated by RCTs and have, by far, the longest follow-ups of any experimentally evaluated early
childhood programs (PPP through age 40; ABC through age 34). These programs are influential
because they have long-term follow-ups that show persistent beneficial effects through young
adulthood. We are in the final stages of completing a NIH-supported follow-up survey of PPP at
age 50. We seek support to conduct a similar follow-up for ABC through age 45. The proposed
study will collect data in the format used in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is also
being used in collecting the data for the PPP at 50 study. Both studies will include measurements
of (i) physical and mental health, including metabolic and cardiac risk factors, and depression; (ii)
income and employment; (iii) cognitive skills and executive functioning; (iv) noncognitive skills,
including grit and perseverance among other personality measures; and (v) education and health
outcomes of participants’ children. For both interventions, we will have self-reported and
administrative data on earnings, employment, use of social services, criminal activity, and self-
reported and direct assessments of health and cognition. We also seek support to analyze the
PPP and ABC data using the same methods. Our analyses of PPP and ABC will account for (a)
their small samples; (b) departures from initial randomization protocols; (c) the effects of testing
multiple hypotheses on true p-values; (d) non-random attrition; and (e) contamination bias that
arises when control groups use alternative forms of early childcare. We will analyze both data
sets using a variety of different longitudinal approaches. We will (i) conduct dynamic mediation
analyses to explain the sources of treatment effects; (ii) relate experimental estimates to the non-
experimental estimates of the processes of skill formation for comparable populations; (iii) use
the experimental data in conjunction with non-experimental data to assess the validity of
commonly used short-term indicators utilized to predict long-term outcomes in more recently
launched interventions lacking long-term follow-up. In addition, we will combine experimental data
and comparable non-experimental data to conduct rate of return and cost-benefit analyses that
account for the full array of benefits and costs of the interventions, projecting the out-of-sample
benefits for treatments and controls....

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10079449
- **Project number:** 5R01AG053343-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
- **Principal Investigator:** MARGARET RUTH BURCHINAL
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $610,908
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-09-15 → 2023-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10079449

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10079449, Analyzing the Impacts of Two Influential Early Childhood Programs on Participants through Midlife (5R01AG053343-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10079449. Licensed CC0.

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