Our own research and data:

We review our new projects and how we help parents and children to make sure we meet the needs of our families and volunteers.

We also use our data to inform current debates on family life – ranging from benefits changes and cuts in funding of local services to the changing face of volunteering and how to best support volunteers.

Your research:

We have a research governance committee which rigorously reviews all requests to contact our families, volunteers and staff. We remain committed to being transparent to both our families and our funders.  If you would like to propose a research project, please email [email protected]. 

 

Download our research

• Empowering Women - to build a brighter future, May 2022
  Working with our partner White Stuff we asked our Home-Start network to share with us the many ways they empower mums to enable them to overcome the challenges they face through our Empowering Women survey. We want to highlight some of these impactful projects happening in local communities across the UK through the Home-Start network. 
  
  
• Home Is Where We Start From, June 2021
  Research to measure the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on parents of young children, surveying over 1200 families around the UK. Findings revealed that families are facing unprecedented challenges, with the pandemic acting both as a magnifier of existing disadvantage, as well tipping more people, who were just about managing before, into poverty. Executive Summary
  
  
• Babies in Lockdown - listening to parents to build back better, August 2020
  Together with Best Beginnings and the Parent-Infant Foundation, Home-Start UK carried out a survey of almost 5,500 parents into their experiences of being pregnant, giving birth and living with a baby at home during the COVID-19 lockdown period of March - June 2020. 
  
  
• Home-Start support for families in the perinatal period and their contribution to PNIMH, April 2020
  In November 2019, as part of a UK wide development around Perinatal and Parent Infant Mental Health all local Home-Starts received a survey to gather information around current activities, areas of identified unmet needs and the support needs of the network to facilitate their work in this area. These are the results from Scotland. 
  
  

• Volunteer-led family intervention: a UK national programme, October 2019
  This paper, by Philip Sugarman, Vice-Chair, Home-Start UK; formerly, Hon. Senior Lecturer, King’s College London, Vis. Professor, University of Northampton and Kamal Chudasama, Systems Developer & Database Administrator, Home-Start UK reports data collected prospectively, from 2010 to 2018 from 300 local Home-Start charities across the UK. The study shows a large improvement effect demonstrated in levels of coping across a range of family needs. 

• The Nature of Home Visiting Support and Improvements in Emotional Well-being for Home-Start Parents, January 2019
  This briefing paper by Dr Nell Warner describes research carried out at Cardiff University using Home-Start’s administrative data (MESH). The research considered families in different circumstances and looked at how the emotional well-being of parents in those different circumstances improves during Home-Start home visiting support.