Eileen Bandel

Eileen Bandel is a principal survey researcher with experience designing and directing large-scale data collection efforts that focus on young children, their families, and the quality of programs serving them. She has more than 10 years of experience training field staff to administer standardized assessments of children’s language and cognitive skills, conduct play-based assessments of the quality of parent–child interactions, and gather observation-based ratings of parenting behaviors that support children’s early learning and development.

As deputy director for the Head Start Family Voices Pilot Study, Bandel helped to develop qualitative measures designed to collect in-depth information about families’ service receipt experiences and engagement in Head Start and Early Head Start. She also directed a national web-based survey that documented the characteristics and implementation of partnerships supported by the Early Head Start-child care partnership competitive grant initiative; these grants provide funds to new or existing Early Head Start programs to partner with local child care providers in an effort to expand high quality learning programs for infants and toddlers.

Bandel currently directs survey operations for several descriptive and evaluation studies focused on children from low-income families. She oversees data collection for the 15-month follow-up phase of the Mother and Infant Home Visiting Program Evaluation, a legislatively mandated, large-scale study of the effectiveness of home visiting programs. She also directs the long-term follow-up phase of the study, which aims to help states and the federal government strengthen the Federal Home Visiting Program by examining its effects on a range of child and family outcomes as children transition to school. Bandel also manages data collection for the Harlem Children’s Zone Longitudinal Study and serves as the measurement task lead for the 2017 Early Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey.

Bandel, who joined Mathematica in 2010, is a manuscript reviewer for Infancy. She holds a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from New York University.