A typology of the potential outcomes of maternal-child home visits: A literature analysis

Home visiting the maternal-child population has been a major focus of public health nursing. The focus of a large portion of empirical studies of maternal-child home visiting has been on the demonstration of outcomes. Despite a general consensus about its benefits, public health nursing has experienced difficulty conclusively demonstrating the effectiveness of maternal-child home visitation. A systematization of potential client outcomes across studies has not been conceptualized. With the aim of tracing overall trends in past attempts to identify, measure, and validate the potential outcomes of maternal-child home visits, an overview and analysis of these studies is presented chronologically. How specific outcomes were identified and measured are analyzed, and support and nonsupport for potential outcomes are summarized. A tentative typology of maternal-child home visitation client outcomes is proposed. Four types of outcomes, reflecting an ecological conceptualization of the client, emerged from this analysis. Maternal-child home visiting outcomes were concerned with the mother (maternal outcomes), the child (child outcomes), the relationship and interaction between the mother and child (maternal-child interaction outcomes), and the relationship of the family with the extended family, neighborhood, and community (environmental outcomes).