Preparing for Life collection: Qualitative interview transcripts with children, parents and community workers from a school readiness intervention, 2008 – 2015
Depositor: Northside Partnership, Orla Doyle, UCD Geary Institute PFL Evaluation Team
Preparing for Life (PFL) is a community-led prevention and early intervention programme that is operated by the Northside Partnership (NSP) in Dublin, Ireland. PFL aims to improve levels of school readiness of young children from several designated disadvantaged areas of North Dublin, by intervening during pregnancy and working with families until the children start school. The PFL Programme is a home visiting programme whose purpose is to improve documented low levels of school readiness by assisting parents in developing skills to help prepare their children for school. As such, the PFL Programme operates under a holistic definition of school readiness composed of five dimensions including:
1) physical well-being and motor development;
2) social and emotional development;
3) approaches to learning;
4) language development and emergent literacy; and
5) cognitive development and general knowledge.
The PFL programme was evaluated between 2008 and 2015 by the UCD Geary Institute at University College Dublin (Principle Investigator: Dr. Orla Doyle) to provide evidence on the effectiveness of the PFL programme to positively impact on parent and child outcomes. The PFL Programme was evaluated using a mixed methods approach, including a randomised control trial and a process evaluation. The aim of the process evaluation was to understand how the PFL programme operated by investigating programme fidelity, programme satisfaction, and programme effectiveness using qualitative interviews
A subset of qualitative interviews have been archived with the Irish Qualitative Data Archive and include the following transcripts:
(1) seven focus groups with mothers who participated in the PFL programme. Interviews were conducted with mothers in 2009, and again in 2013.
(2) thirty-six semi-structured interviews with children aged 4 - 5 years who had recently completed their first year of school. Each child was interviewed once, between 2013 and 2014, for the Children's Thoughts About School study. The sample includes both participants and non-participants of the PFL intervention.
For more detailed information on the Preparing for Life collection please refer to the User Guide provided by the IQDA. Quantitative data from the impact evaluation are available through the Irish Social Science Data Archive (Study number (SN): 0055-00) at https://www.ucd.ie/issda/data/pfl/
Access this collection on the Digital Repository of Ireland: https://repository.dri.ie/catalog/bk12ns99k