The Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start is a nationally representative survey that provides data on Early Head Start grant recipients in Office of Head Start Regions I through X. The survey is a valuable resource for researchers, data users, and programs looking to identify successful strategies to search for, hire, and support qualified and competent Early Head Start teaching and home-visiting staff. This codebook provides the complete variable-level documentation for the survey dataset. It is intended to support users in navigating the data by describing how variables were created, coded, and organized. Together with the User’s Guide, this codebook offers the information needed to accurately analyze and interpret survey findings.

Why This Matters

To date, limited nationally representative information is available about how Early Head Start programs recruit qualified and competent teachers and home visitors and how they support staff training and professional development. This codebook provides important information on the structure of the variables, their coding, and any special notes related to missing data, skip patterns, or derived variables. This codebook ensures that researchers and data users can correctly use the survey data to answer questions about Early Head Start staffing, training, and professional development.

Key Takeaways

The codebook is organized by topic and includes information about the variables including:

• Survey prompt. The full language of the prompt used in the survey.
• Response type and respondents. Information on how the question was asked and which group of respondents answered it.
• Variable details. The variable name, and label. For multiple-select questions, the corresponding value labels for each response option.
• Frequencies and percentages. For each response, the codebook presents unweighted counts and percentages alongside weighted counts and percentages, so users can see both the raw survey results and nationally representative estimates.

By following the organization of this codebook, users will be able to locate variables efficiently and apply them appropriately in their analyses.

How We Did It

The information in this codebook is based on data from the 2024 Survey of Staff Recruitment, Training, and Professional Development in Early Head Start, which was administered to a nationally representative sample of Early Head Start programs between April and August 2024. Frequencies and percentages were generated from the weighted dataset.