Amy Blasberg, MPP, is a research scientist in the early childhood development research area. Ms. Blasberg’s current research focuses on program evaluation in early care and education contexts, including public schools, child care centers, and family child care settings. She has a particular interest in understanding quality in home-based child care, including both regulated and license-exempt settings. She currently serves as the project director of an experimental evaluation of Rhode Island’s State Pre-K program to understand the impact of State Pre-K on children who do and do not attend. She also leads the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation-sponsored Home-Based Child Care Working Group, a group of researchers that convenes quarterly to discuss research in home-based child care settings.

Ms. Blasberg is familiar with a wide range of research methods, including survey development, study and sample design, primary data collection, and secondary data analysis. She has extensive experience overseeing large-scale primary data collection efforts, including selecting appropriate measures, hiring and supervising a team of 15-20 data collectors, and coordinating and leading trainings on assessment batteries and classroom observational measures. She has expertise with quantitative analysis, including descriptive analyses and mediation and moderation models. She is familiar with complex methods, such as propensity score matching, survival analysis, fixed effects, regression discontinuity design, and partially-nested randomized control trials.

Ms. Blasberg’s past research has focused on a range of early care and education topics, including surveying low-income parents about their child care decision-making process and conducting validation studies of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) in Rhode Island and Georgia. She is currently certified as a reliable Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Pre-K observer and trainer and a reliable CLASS Toddler observer and trainer.