About the Family Impact Seminars

For over three decades, the Family Impact Seminars (FIS) have supported evidence-informed child and family policy deliberations within hundreds of state legislative sessions across the country. The expansion of the FIS model created the most established infrastructure for supporting state legislative use of child and family research-based outcomes in the United States and likely worldwide. Historically, twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have participated in the Family Impact Seminars network by conducting Seminars in their capitals.

The FIS model comprises a series of seminars, discussion sessions, and briefing reports—which provide state policymakers with nonpartisan, solution-oriented research on family issues such as after-school programs, children’s health insurance, early childhood care and education, juvenile crime, and welfare reform. It has been successful to date because it relies on bipartisan policy advisors to inform the timeliness and relevance of seminar content.

These seminars are designed to provide an independent research service in partnership with state policymakers, including legislators, legislative aides, gubernatorial staff, legislative service agency staff, and agency representatives. The seminar topic is selected by a bipartisan group of policy advisors based on what issues are timely and relevant for the current political agenda. For each seminar, brief presentations and a briefing report summarizes high-quality research on the issue in a succinct, easy-to-understand format. The seminars have historically been sponsored primarily by universities and Cooperative Extension.

This model builds on a university-based, team-focused infrastructure of researchers and policymakers that allows for sustainable, ongoing research support. Faculty serve in the role as seminar directors, coordinating the seminar event that presents current and relevant research findings to state officials. In recent years, the model has been further developed to embed a context-relevant strategy for attending to racial equity in the topics identified by policymakers. This work is informed by the targeted universalism theory, which asserts that a “universal goal” across a population (e.g., student success) is most politically feasible compared to “targeted” policies (e.g., affirmative action) that are thought to only benefit certain groups. Thus, the strategy is guided by a universal focus with simultaneous discussion of implications for diverse populations.

Goals

This project is guided by two major aims related to evaluating the FIS model:

• Create data infrastructure for evaluating the Family Impact Seminars model. The study team will recruit and train multiple faculty members on the implementation and evaluation processes. This includes capturing both process data (e.g., participant reporting) and outcome data (e.g., surveys from legislative advisors and seminar attendees). This project also updates implementation resources, enhancing a system of operations for coordinating across numerous state partners.
• Examine its historical impact across multiple state contexts using a quasi-experimental design – an interrupted time series that assesses trends in how state legislators used research in child and family bills in relation to the occurrence of a seminar. This study will use archival records of bills from the past 13 years to conduct a longitudinal analysis examining research language as predicted by state contextual variables (e.g., staff capacity), timing (e.g., when bills are introduced), other covariates (e.g., political interest group influence), and the influence of seminar events.

We expect more equitable and evidence-informed policies will benefit children, families, and communities. We also expect that findings can inform scientific knowledge brokers, intermediaries, and others in policy practice. It’s important to evaluate models like the Family Impact Seminars for their potential to inspire change that benefits all people.