The Housing and Children’s Healthy Development (HCHD) study was designed to advance our understanding of the contribution of children’s residential context to their well-being. The HCHD study emanates from a multi-year effort of the MacArthur Foundation’s “How Housing Matters for Families with Children” (“Housing and Children” for short) Research Network. The Housing and Children Research Network developed a consensus about the gaps in this topic area and the best research approach to fill them, including the following:

1. How does housing affect children net of other important influences on children’s lives, including families, neighborhoods, and schools?
2. What features of housing matter most?
3. For whom and in what circumstances does housing matter?
4. How do families with children make choices about housing, neighborhood, and schools and what are the effects of these choices?

The RDDCAP describes the motivations and theoretical framework guiding the study. It explains how the study design will answer the research questions by implementing the first ever randomized controlled trial of the impact of a housing choice voucher on children’s development. It details the innovative measures of outcomes of interest used in the study. And it discusses potential contributions to knowledge afforded by the research design’s inclusion of a complementary survey sample of the general population of families with children. The study has received funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, HUD, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.