Overall, the focus of the Office of Human Services Policy (HSP) FY 2003 Research and Evaluation agenda is to cover a wide range of research on families and children. This agenda provides an integrated picture of the low-income population, including analyses of the economic condition, health and well-being, socio-demographic characteristics, and the social service needs of low-income individuals, families, and children. Our policy interests cover a broad spectrum, including welfare outcomes, working families, supports for low-income populations, the hard to serve and special populations, and children and youth programs and policies.
Efforts were made throughout the planning process to ensure that, to the fullest extent possible, our research agenda complements and enhances other research activities, both within and outside the federal government, and avoids unnecessary duplication. To that end, we paid careful attention to identifying ongoing research, evaluation, and data activities which could be enhanced or modified and identifying activities being funded or planned by other entities that could provide joint-funding opportunities.
For presentation on the web, our FY 2003 research agenda is organized into six broad areas:
FY 2003 will be the second year of the multi-year commitment to support the National Poverty Research Center and three Area Poverty Research Centers. The National Poverty Research Center, located at the University of Michigan, will continue to plan and conduct a broad program of policy research to describe and analyze national, regional and state environments (e.g., economics, demographics) and policies affecting the poor, particularly those families with children who are poor or at-risk of being poor. The Center will continue the mentoring and training of emerging scholars. The three area centers located at the University of Kentucky, the University of Missouri, and the University of Wisconsin, will also continue a more focused agenda to expand our understanding of the causes, consequences, and effects of poverty in local geographic areas, especially in states or regional areas of high concentrations of poverty. The areas centers will continue the mentoring of emerging scholars with interests in exploring more geographically focused poverty research. For more information, see the Overview.
This project examines wage progression among low-wage workers by tracking the dynamics of low-wage employment over a four-year period from 1996 to 1999 using the newly released 1996 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Given the strong work-focus of TANF and time limits on the receipt of federal TANF assistance, policy makers are interested in understanding the potential for advancement in the labor market among low-wage workers. Do individuals in low-wage jobs have opportunities to progress economically? What helps low-wage workers advance? Do low-wage workers need to change jobs and/or employers to make wage gains? Do individuals need to take on multiple jobs to make significant economic gains? While past research has examined the dynamics of low-wage employment, wage progression, and unemployment in the 1980s, the same in-depth research has not been conducted after the passage of PRWORA. The upcoming public release of the full longitudinal 1996 SIPP panel offers a valuable, rich data resource for examining these critical wage and labor market issues in the mid to late 1990s.
This project will examine the effect of: 1) welfare changes, 2) the 1990 and 1993 expansions of the EITC, and 3) changes in the business cycle on three specific issues concerning the California welfare population. These issues include: 1) how do these factors contribute to the economic well-being of families; 2) how do they affect labor market and transfer program participation; and 3) how do they affect employment changes and earnings trajectories? The project will use California administrative data drawn from the welfare, unemployment insurance, and tax systems.
This project continues ASPE's ongoing core support for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID is a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of US individuals and the families in which they reside that has been ongoing since 1968. The data files contain the full span of information collected over the course of the study. PSID data can be used for cross-sectional, longitudinal, and inter-generational analysis and for studying both individuals and families. PSID data have been utilized in a variety of ASPE-sponsored research projects as well as by the broader research community to address key questions related to the health and well-being of low-income families and individuals. ASPE support will focus on the maintenance of the size of the low-income sample, the addition of core sample households for the child development supplement, and the inclusion of an extensive set of welfare participation-related questions in the survey instrument.
Currently, the family is the basic unit for measuring poverty based on the premise that family members share resources to an extent that unrelated persons do not. In the last quarter century, however, the structure of the American family has changed significantly — with a rise in single parent families, nonfamily living arrangements, and cohabitation. Working with the Census Bureau, a technical report will be prepared that examines the effects on reported poverty rates of broadening the family unit to include nonfamily household members. Measures of well-being will be used to examine whether there are differences in well-being among households that result from resource sharing with nonfamily members. Data for this analysis are from the 1996 longitudinal panel of Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).
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HSP has a strong interest in understanding the effects of welfare reform within the context of the devolution of responsibility for major social programs from the federal government to the states. Questions about the implementation and outcomes of welfare reform are legion and encompass a broad range of interests and perspectives. The continued infusion of Policy Research funding dedicated to studying welfare outcomes has been and continues to be invaluable to our efforts to add to and enhance the information available to the Department, Congress, and other interested parties in upcoming debates about future directions for welfare reform.
This project is will examine the effects of fiscal capacity on state spending choices on programs to support low-income populations. Although research has been conducted in the area of state fiscal capacity, little is currently known about how fiscal capacity directly affects the spending choices of state budget officials regarding social welfare programs. The project will include a two-part study of state spending on social services. The first part will use existing data sources to build a multivariate, fifty-state model. This model will examine social welfare spending choices made by states at different points in time. The second part will include site visits to a half-dozen of the poorest states to develop a more detailed analysis of the spending decisions across social welfare programs.
This project will assess the current state of knowledge of private employers and TANF recipients and identify options for future study. Despite the crucial role of private employers in a welfare system that emphasizes work, employers themselves have received relatively little attention. Many companies are known for ingenuity in recruiting, training, retaining, and promoting TANF recipients. Several case studies and pilot projects have examined innovative practices and several surveys have examined particular industries locales. Nevertheless, we lack a comprehensive portrait of the prevalence, variety, and limitations of employer practices. This project will synthesize recent research and identify gaps in knowledge by reviewing existing studies, survey instruments and data sources, and consulting with experts, to help ASPE identify research projects that it may fund in the future.
This project will integrate TANF administrative data with the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) database, which contains detailed longitudinal records on employment outcomes and employer characteristics. The expanded database will be used to generate state and local indicators of employment-related TANF outcomes and to analyze the worker and employer characteristics that promote or hinder job retention and wage growth. By building on an existing program (LEHD) at the Census Bureau, the data needed to undertake this depth of analysis will be assembled at relatively low cost. Census has done extensive cleaning, matching, and longitudinal linking of administrative records for both workers and employers, and the data currently represent 18 states and contain several million observations. Under this project, TANF records also will be linked to the database, the number of states represented would increase from 18 to 28 (for coverage of about 70 percent of the population), and analyses and indicators specific to employment-related welfare outcomes will be generated.
This project will analyze job retention and wage advancement among low-wage workers and former welfare recipients, focusing on the role played by worker characteristics, firm characteristics, and issues of location. With the tremendous success achieved by welfare reform in moving large numbers of former recipients into jobs, the ability of these workers to move ahead in these jobs and achieve self-sufficiency is now a key concern. To understand better the factors that promote or hinder job retention and wage advancement, we need up-to-date data that capture recent developments in labor markets, that describe not only the characteristics of the worker but also the firm, that can track worker outcomes longitudinally over time, and that contain a large sample that is broadly representative. No single, national survey data set combines all these attributes, so this project will use the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data. This project will produce a report showing the role of worker and firm characteristics in job retention and wage advancement, the importance of location, how these outcomes differ for former welfare recipients compared to other low-wage workers, and how these outcomes have changed following recent changes in the labor market.
This project will utilize five, Federally-administrated databases to assess outcomes for former TANF recipients. The project will assess six outcomes: four are related to employment: job entry, earnings, earnings gains, and job retention. By linking various databases: ACF's TANF Database of closed TANF cases, New Hire Database (NDNH), Quarterly Earnings Database, and possibly the Child Support Case Registry Database this project will provide state-by-state estimates of important welfare outcomes.
This study focuses on the subgroup of TANF families who exit and re-enter welfare, particularly those who return for multiple times. It builds on past ASPE-funded studies of welfare leavers and welfare applicants that found that many leavers re-enter welfare, and similarly, that many applicants have prior welfare history. This study also builds on a National Academy of Sciences' study that recommended that HHS conduct research focused on caseload dynamics and particular TANF subgroups including former recipients who return to TANF. Using administrative and survey data from multiple welfare program evaluations and from the project on Devolution and Urban Change, this study addresses research questions about cyclers in two main areas: (1) What are their demographic characteristics and employment outcomes, as compared with other comparison groups of welfare recipients? and (2) How have patterns of benefit receipt and the phenomenon of cycling changed since PRWORA?
This project examines variations in sanction policies, practices and outcomes. Previous studies have found wide variation in sanctioning rates across sites (e.g. Urban Change) and even across offices within a single city (e.g. Legislative Audit Bureau study of W-2 in Milwaukee). The study looks at outcomes for sanctioned families, including welfare exits and re-entries and participation in work activities. This project, conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, draws largely on administrative data, as supplemented by site visits to improve our understanding of how sanctions are implemented. As part of this project, MPR conducted a review of the existing literature on TANF sanctions, including tables describing state policy choice (see Review).
This project explores the ways in which one-stops serve TANF and other low-income populations and identifies successful approaches to program coordination. Site visits were conducted to New Jersey, Illinois, and South Carolina. These states were selected both to maximize variation in sanction policies and to leverage existing administrative data sets. The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) one-stop system is likely to become the nexus of support for ever larger numbers of low-income and low-skilled people seeking employment and employment-related services. DOL Welfare-to-Work grant activities are winding down, possibly further increasing pressure on one-stops to fill the gap in serving the hardest-to-employ. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some employers may be reluctant to participate in one-stops that serve a largely low-income or welfare client base and that some one-stops are hesitant to take on special-needs clients such as those with substance abuse histories or learning disabilities. This project, conducted by Abt Associates, involves a literature review and intensive visits to seven purposively selected sites to identify challenges and successes in serving these vulnerable groups through one-stop centers designed to serve people at all income and skill levels.
This project examines how child support status (i.e., paternity established, order established, receipt of child support) interacts with TANF exit or reentry and self-sufficiency, as well as how different child support and TANF policies may affect this relationship. Child support is an important component of family self-sufficiency, and therefore increased knowledge about the interaction between child support and TANF could be used to increase self-sufficiency for families served by these two programs. Research questions will be answered based on analysis of national survey data and state level experimental data. MDRC and Lewin Group are the contractors.
New approaches to integrating diverse funding streams, expanding services to new populations, or redesigned service delivery systems often emerge from innovations at the state or local level. Secretary Thompson initiated the State Innovation Grants program to stimulate states to develop new and creative approaches to program planning and health and human service delivery. ASPE will also facilitate information exchange among grantees, other States, and others interested in new and creative ways to deliver health and/or human services. In FY 2003, ASPE awarded three new demonstration grants, for a total of eight.
In September 2001, ASPE awarded about $1.4 million in grants to states to study the characteristics of individuals receiving cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. The funding allows states to enter cooperative agreements with ASPE to examine the characteristics of current TANF recipients and their households in terms of demographics; personal, family, and community barriers to employment; and employment and economic outcomes. To foster comparability across states, ASPE provided a common telephone survey instrument to state grantees for use in collecting data on their TANF caseload. The instrument has been supplemented by states according to their particular needs. This project will enhance understanding of the current TANF caseload in a range of states, and in so doing, will inform ASPE, individual states, and the research and policy community. See State Studies of the TANF Caseload for current reports.
The cooperative agreements are the result of a competitive announcement of the availability of funds and request for applications to study the current TANF caseload that appeared in Volume 66, Number 87 of the Federal Register on May 4, 2001. The following grantees were selected for funding:
State and county grantees conducting Welfare Outcomes studies are preparing and submitting research data sets that combine the state-specific administrative and survey data they have collected on former, current, and potential TANF recipients. Most of the grantees are expected to request storage of their files in a controlled environment where confidentiality can be protected. The funds in this interagency transfer will support storage of these files at the Research Data Center (RDC) of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The funds will 1) support NCHS staff time in working with the Welfare Outcomes Grants; and 2) lower the cost to researchers of accessing the files by providing subsidies of not more than 75 percent of the RDC fee usually charged to researchers, up to a total of $2,000 per project.
State and local agencies are making substantial investments through TANF and other sources to help low-income families with demonstrated difficulty entering and sustaining employment. A significant amount of activity and a variety of approaches are being used to help low-income parents address or cope with the personal and family problems that interfere with their employment stability. Under this project, ACF, ASPE, and the Department of Labor are supporting a multi-site evaluation of programs working with hard-to-employ low-income parents to identify effective strategies for promoting employment and family well-being and to determine the effects of such programs on employment, earnings, income, welfare dependence, family functioning, and the well-being of children. MDRC was chosen as the contractor to design and conduct a multi-site evaluation that studies the implementation issues, net impact, and benefit-costs of selected programs.
In FY 2002, ASPE funded a project that focused on TANF, which has had an explicit Charitable Choice (CC) provision for several years. With the Executive Order broadening the range of programs affected by the principles of CC, it is important to learn how CC has been implemented thus far in other programs as well. This expands the CC study to include SAMHSA's Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment (SAPT) program, a major program that includes a number of faith-based service providers. The project involves a national survey of state and county contracting officials in the TANF and SAPT programs. Results of the survey will be analyzed to answer questions about how CC rules are understood and implemented at the state and county levels.
This project continues ASPE's support of a study to determine the prevalence of job-holding associated with a living wage in the post-1996 period for adults who received AFDC benefits in calendar year 1996. The sample of 1996 adult recipients will be drawn from the 1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Annual Demographic Supplement (ADS) to the March 1997 Current Population Survey, and the 1997 base-line interview sample of the Survey of Program Dynamics. Post-1996 earnings activity will be documented using earnings records obtained from the Social Security Administration (SSA) administrative records matched to the samples for each of these surveys. Initial tracking of job holding and earnings levels via administrative records will be restricted to calendar years 1996, 1997, and possibly 1998. Job holding of female family heads with dependent children who were not receiving means-tested benefits will also be tracked to provide a broader context for interpreting the observed patterns among adult AFDC recipients. Employment and earnings outcomes will be differentiated by both baseline characteristics and earnings patterns established on the basis of the pre-1996 year-by-year lifetime earnings histories stemming from the SSA administrative records files.
Begun in 1999, the L.A. FANS is a longitudinal study of children, families, and neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health, with ASPE and Los Angeles County providing supplemental funding for the first wave of data collection conducted by RAND. L.A. FANS includes a representative sample of 65 neighborhoods (census tracts) throughout Los Angeles County, with an oversample of poor neighborhoods. In each neighborhood, interviews are conducted with a total of 40 to 50 randomly-chosen households; households with children (0 to 17) are oversampled. Extensive information is collected on household socioeconomic status, health care utilization, immigration, and other characteristics. In addition, L.A. FANS collects a detailed, two-year, month-by-month calendar of changes in employment, unemployment, health insurance coverage for adults and children (by type and reason for changes), and program participation (TANF, SSI, GA, food stamps). Information is also collected on the characteristics and available health services in each sampled neighborhood. For more information, see The Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey on RAND's web site.
This ongoing project (which is primarily foundation-funded) is a multi-disciplinary study by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) of the implementation and impacts of welfare reform and welfare-to-work programs on low-income individuals, families and communities in four large urban areas: Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami. Other Federal partners include HHS' Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and the Economic Research Service at USDA. The project brings together data from an unusually wide array of sources: longitudinal administrative data for all families receiving AFDC/TANF or Food Stamps dating back to 1992, survey data, an implementation study, neighborhood indicators, an institutional study focusing on local service providers, and an ethnographic study of a limited number of families. Publications from the study are available at MDRC's web site: Project on Devolution and Urban Change.
ASPE continues to work on a Congressionally mandated evaluation of the Department of Labor's Welfare-to-Work Grant Program, grants to states and local communities to promote job opportunities, and employment preparation for TANF recipients and noncustodial parents of needy children. The evaluation consists of four main components: a descriptive assessment of all grantees; an in-depth process and implementation study; an assessment of participant outcomes in 11 selected sites; and a process and implementation analysis of tribal WtW grantees. Reports available so far:
Beginning in October 2001, ASPE, ACF/OFA, and ACF/OCS collaborated to fund the Urban Partnership for Welfare Technical Assistance Initiative, which promotes collaboration among state and local TANF agencies and other entities to increase jobs and services for TANF clients in large urban areas. The goals of the initiative are to: help larger urban welfare programs learn from each other's experiences; build capacity to take greater advantage of available assets and resources; and improve employment and child well-being among the most vulnerable citizens. Urban area teams met in Dallas, TX in February 2003 to strengthen their partnerships and share information with their colleagues. After the meeting in Dallas, the teams developed strategic plans around collaboration. Urban area teams receive ongoing, tailored technical assistance to continue to strengthen collaborative efforts. They participate in monthly conference calls with the Federal Project Officers to provide input into the next Academy meeting in October 2003 in Minneapolis. In the next phase of the project, teams will have the opportunity to take part in a series of subject matter teleconferences. A web conference on EITC was recently hosted by ACF. Areas of focus for future project efforts include: homeless families, substance abuse and mental health problems, hard-to-employ populations, issues affecting working parents with young children, and family formation. Teams continue to work with the contractor, Caliber, to build local partnerships, and to implement their strategic plans for collaboration.
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Our strategy in the children and youth area focuses on early childhood, youth, and children's services systems. Policy areas of interest include improving our understanding of early childhood education, promotion of youth development and prevention of teen risk behaviors, and the examination of child protection and child welfare service systems.
This project will provide the next phase of funding to support research on the effectiveness of early childhood interventions and programs for children from birth through age 5 in promoting children's school readiness. This project is part of a joint HHS/DoEd initiative announced by Secretaries Thompson and Paige at the White House Summit on Early Cognitive Development in the summer of 2001. No Child Left Behind Act, the Good Start, Grow Smart Early Childhood Initiative, and the Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development have called for the development of a scientific knowledge base to inform early childhood practices and policies that support school readiness. This interagency early childhood research initiative responds to this call by studying the effectiveness of early interventions in promoting school readiness. In FY 2003, interagency partners will fund 8 to 10 new 5-year grants to study a range of early childhood programs, interventions, and curricula for children from birth through age 5. The project has two components: funding of research grants, and provision of technical assistance to researchers to help ensure that funded projects yield data that are useful for making informed policy and practice decisions in early childhood.
The ECLS-B is a large scale (N=12,500), nationally representative, longitudinal study launched by the Department of Education to follow a single age-cohort of children from birth to their entry into first grade. ASPE has sponsored enhancements to the research focusing on: the study of minority children (language minority and other minority children); the study of the impacts of non-resident fathers on children's early development; and, the study of policy contexts for children's development. In addition, we are working with other potential funding partners on the expansion of the sample to include non-resident fathers, which will fill a major gap in the knowledge base for understanding basic developmental processes and for understanding a group of children and families of key policy interest.
This project will support the design phase of research on professional development interventions in child care settings being funded by ACF, and ensure that the research designs include rigorous assessments of children's well-being and school readiness. ASPE's support in this important early childhood research will focus on having child outcomes rigorously assessed as part of the study. The project will identify and prioritize constructs that should be covered when measuring children's progress, outcomes, and learning environments; help develop rigorous research designs; and identify sites.
The Science and Ecology of Early Development (SEED) initiative promotes work among federal agencies to fill gaps in the early childhood science base in areas that have implications for young children and their families, with a focus on low-income populations. The project will provide continuing support to the SEED initiative to address key research and policy issues in early childhood, such as school readiness. This year, participating agencies will begin strategic planning for a new SEED research grant announcement to be funded by NICHD. It will build on issues related to childcare, school readiness, professional development, and measurement. ASPE's support will foster the development of a research agenda and research capacity building activities. Areas of focus will include aligning early childhood services with formal schooling (K-12) in the context of education reform and assisting researchers to disseminate new evidence without over-interpreting policy implications.
This project will support the continued evaluation of a multi-agency demonstration project that is addressing the co-occurrence of domestic violence and child maltreatment. The evaluation is designed to assess whether child protection agencies, child maltreatment courts, and domestic violence programs can, by participating with others in multi-disciplinary, community-based collaborations, achieve significant organizational change that helps children and parents in abusive families to become safer and more stable. Several analytical approaches are employed including network analysis and pre-post evidence of changes in agency practice. The national evaluation documents changes that take place and studies factors that contribute to project outcomes.
This study is exploring how adoption subsidies are implemented by states and used by the growing population of families who have adopted children from foster care. Little information currently exists about this growing portion of child welfare expenditures. However, projections indicate that in the next few years the number of children with adoption assistance agreements will outnumber those in foster care nationally. This study seeks to create better information about how the program is operating, the population being served, and the benefits achieved through this substantial federal investment. Specific research questions include: (1) What proportion of children adopted receive a subsidy initially and how many have one instituted later? (2) What factors go into subsidy rate decisions? (3) With what frequency do adoption subsidy levels change and for what reasons? (4) Does the availability of adoption subsidy affect the likelihood, timing and success of adoptions? Data sources for the study include title IV-E claims data, the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, and state administrative data. Secondary data analyses will be performed on questions of federal interest and several states will be assisted in answering additional questions of their own.
This study is examining the role of fathers in child welfare casework. Identifying, locating and involving non-custodial fathers in child welfare activities is essential to the prompt attainment of permanency for the many children in foster care whose biological fathers did not live with them at the time of placement. This study will describe current practice regarding non-custodial fathers and how state and local policies and practices support or discourage father involvement. Study methods include a literature review; interviews with child welfare caseworkers about their efforts to identify, locate and involve fathers of children in specific child welfare cases in several child welfare agencies; testing whether standard child support enforcement techniques (including use of state and federal parent locator services) would have yielded additional information in cases where fathers had not been located; and visits to several child welfare agencies implementing practices to improve the identification and involvement of fathers.
Foster parents play a critical role in the lives of children in state custody. But while many studies have explored the dynamics of children's experiences in foster care, we know little about the patterns in which foster parents' take in children. Existing studies of foster parenting have been based primarily on surveys of current or former foster parents and concentrate on foster parents' characteristics, motivations and practices. This study will instead use administrative data from several jurisdictions to examine the patterns and dynamics of foster parents' care giving careers. Issues under examination include: how many children are cared for at once and over time; how quickly new children are placed in a home after a child leaves; system capacity and utilization of foster parents; and turnover rates. This study is using methodologies previously developed to study children's experiences in foster care to examine the patterns in which foster parenting is conducted.
This project will support secondary analysis of the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). National data regarding victims and perpetrators of child abuse and neglect have become increasingly detailed in the past few years as more states have voluntarily submitted data to NCANDS. This project will generate a more complete understanding of the characteristics and short-term service dispositions of children subjected to abuse or neglect, and of the perpetrators of abuse and neglect. The study will involve (1) an examination of how abuse by parents, particularly fathers, differs from abuse by non-parental men living in the household, results of which would relate to healthy marriage initiatives and related Administration priorities; (2) an examination of the characteristics of families served by so-called "alternative" child protective services that do not involve investigations (an increasingly popular service model about which little is currently known); and (3) construction of longitudinal files that would be used to examine patterns of repeat investigations on individual children as well as recidivism of perpetrators.
The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) National Evaluation is collecting and analyzing data to assess the overall impact of the SS/HS Initiative across the 100 SS/HS sites. The Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative (SS/HS) is a collaboration between the Departments of Education, Justice, Labor, and Health and Human Services. The Initiative provides funding to schools and communities for implementing comprehensive community-wide strategies to create safe and drug-free schools and promote healthy child development. The evaluation is gathering a minimum level of process and outcome data on all of the sites and conducting in depth case studies in 15 sentinel sites.
This project will design a rigorous evaluation of Maternity Group Homes, a service model that offers an array of on-site social support services for the most at-risk teen families. These programs aim to prevent second pregnancies, help young women move toward self-sufficiency, and improve outcomes for the children of teen mothers. Limited evidence suggests that Maternity Group Homes may be effective in addressing subsequent teen pregnancies, school-related outcomes, self-sufficiency, and childhood immunization rates. However, a rigorous impact evaluation of Maternity Group Homes has never been conducted. The design phase will include the development of an evaluation design, a site selection process, and measures. The final products for the first phase of the project will include a rationale for site selection, as well as a detailed description of the study design and proposed measures.
Since 1996, HHS has provided funds to states for the operation of programs that teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for school-age children. This evaluation will determine to what extent are abstinence education program effective in persuading youth to be sexually abstinent and in changing teen sexual behavior. The evaluation was mandated by Congress in 1997 and focuses on eleven programs, representing a range of program models and serving different target populations. The evaluation includes an extensive implementation and process analysis as well as rigorously designed impact studies of five "targeted" programs that provide services to specific, identifiable groups of youth. The current evaluation design is following a sample of approximately 2,500 youth in 5 sites for up to 3 years. Currently, the evaluation is in the third round of data collection. This funding will provide for another round of data collection and longer follow-up, allowing for the measurement of impacts on behaviors with a greater number of youth who are older, when the likelihood of engaging in risky behaviors is higher. Depending on funding available, cohorts will be surveyed an additional time. Funds will also be used to support additional communications tasks and to build evaluation capacity in the field.
This project will continue to develop evaluation designs for the community-based abstinence education program and other teen pregnancy prevention approaches. It will include the development of evaluation instruments and evaluation designs for a competitive contract. This project will also document the range of existing strategies and services available to prevent teen pregnancy in order to inform an evaluation design specific to these services. Ultimately, the evaluations will add to the current knowledge about the effectiveness of strategies designed to promote abstinence and prevent teen pregnancy. Congress earmarked a portion of the Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program funds (up to 2.5 percent of the amount of the FY2001 appropriation and up to 3.5 percent of the FY2002 appropriation) to support comprehensive evaluations, including longitudinal evaluations, of abstinence education.
Add Health is a school-based study of adolescents in grades seven to twelve that provides information on physical, mental, and emotional health status, and health behaviors, including sexual behavior and contraceptive use. The Add Health cohort is aging into adulthood and represents an opportunity to track transitions into adulthood (e.g., family formation, welfare receipt, labor market transitions). Add Health has already provided essential adolescent health data for many of the HHS agencies. It has multiple funders. This contribution will help fund Wave 3 data collection, which will be available in Spring of 2003.
This project has several objectives: (1) describe what HHS programs have done in promulgating guidance for their grantees about their obligations to report suspected violations of state statutory rape laws; (2) summarize major features of state statutory rape laws; (3) survey grantees of selected HHS programs to determine what policies and procedures they employ to comply with state laws; and (4) make recommendations about strengthening HHS guidance to, and training for, grantees on complying with laws in their states.
With other federal and private funders, ASPE and ACF are working with states to improve measurement of child health and well-being outcomes in state welfare evaluations. Five states are using a common protocol to add child outcome measures to their welfare reform evaluations. Continuation funding is enabling states and their evaluators to receive research technical assistance on collecting survey data using the common protocol, using administrative data sources, and developing and coordinating data analysis and reporting strategies. The focus of the current phase of work is the production of syntheses of the findings from the state evaluations.
Child-only cases have continued to grow, reaching 782,000 cases by FY 2002 and representing over a third of the total TANF caseload. These are cases where only the children in a family/household are receiving TANF, and the adults in these cases are ineligible (e.g., caretaker relative, SSI parent, immigrant parent, sanctioned parent). Despite the growing proportion of these cases in the overall TANF caseload, we know very little about these cases, such as whether these cases pose special issues for TANF agencies and whether there are any issues related to the well-being of children in these cases. This study will begin to provide information about the majority of child-only cases where there is no parent in the household and the children are cared for by a relative. The study will: (1) systematically review and analyze existing data and studies to describe the health and social service needs and well-being of children who are receiving TANF assistance and being cared for by non-parent relatives who are ineligible for TANF; (2) describe whether states have established any goals or outcomes related to children in these child-only cases, and if so, what strategies are being employed to achieve those outcomes; and (3) determine how such cases are handled at the local level, and the degree to which the service needs and the well-being of children in these families are taken into account.
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Our strategy in the family formation area is to increase our focus on understanding family structure and functioning, particularly family composition and poverty and health insurance status. We are continuing our focus on issues related to fertility, the impact on welfare reform on marriage and the living arrangements of children, and how parents are fulfilling their economic and emotional responsibilities to their families.
This project describes trends in participation of married and two-parent families in TANF and Food Stamps and the factors related to those trends. With growing emphasis on the TANF goals related to promoting health marriage, it is critical to first gain an understanding of existing programs and the role they might play in either supporting or discouraging the formation of such unions. Recent data have shown that participation rates in these programs have typically been lower for two-parent families than single-parent families and that the rates are falling faster. This project will use output from the MATH and TRIM simulation models to examine trends in both eligibility and participation among eligibles for both married parent and all two-parent families. The study will also incorporate regression analysis to examine the likely importance of state-level program rules and economic variables, as well as family and individual characteristics as they influence both eligibility and participation in TANF and Food Stamps.
This project will examine alternatives to developing a complete and systematic approach to generating data on marriage and divorce. These data are key to addressing issues relating to family formation, family dissolution, and other aspects of family dynamics. The study will examine system characteristics at the state and local levels, including an examination of their laws and procedures and variations among state practices in gathering and storing data. The issues to be examined are: (1) the minimum and uniform data elements that are required to study marriage and divorce across states that will provide the information basis for implementing a nationwide strategy; (2) the pros and cons of various data collection strategies (universe vs. sampling, survey-based, piggybacking, etc.) and their costs and benefits; (3) data analysis plans under various options and their promises and limitations; (4) assignment and enforcement of responsibilities in the cooperative federal/state data collection system; and (5) the administrative costs of maintaining a marriage and divorce surveillance system.
This project continues ASPE's support of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). It is an important, ongoing survey for informing policy development on teen pregnancy prevention, out-of-wedlock childbearing, family formation, welfare, child support and paternity establishment, and father involvement. Our involvement has ensured that questions and sample sizes have been, and continue to be, sufficient to follow trends and do analysis on such issues as teen childbearing, men, minority groups, cohabiting vs. married couples, how teens get responsible messages about sexual behavior, religiosity, and child care usage.
PRWORA authorized HHS to retain data from the Federal Parent Locator Service (FPLS) for TANF and child support enforcement research purposes. This is a rich source of wage and employment data, but does not include key program participation and demographic variables. The purpose of this project is to insure that all child support administrative data is used to the full extent of its statutory authorization to support child support management information and research uses. Some child support information is already part of a cross-program research initiative to match child support, TANF, and Medicaid data. This project examines how all child support data might be used in conjunction with the research initiative to understand child support performance. The FPLS is primarily a national data system to help States locate non-custodial parents, alleged fathers, and custodial parents so they can establish and enforce child support obligations. PRWORA expanded the data available in this system to include information on child support cases and wage and employment data on nearly all workers. The law also authorized HHS to retain samples of this data and use them for research likely to contribute to achieving the purposes of titles IV-A (TANF) or IV-D (Child Support Enforcement). Conference Committee language from the FY 2002 Appropriation for the Department of Health and Human Services recommends that Welfare Reform Outcomes funds be used in part for the collection and use of "data administratively linking that National Database of New Hires (which is part of the FPLS), other child support enforcement data, TANF, and Medicaid records together." The design and implemention of the FPLS, TANF, and Medicaid data warehouse is a joint ASPE, ACF, and CMS project to monitor the progress of welfare reform. Child support data, TANF client data, and Medicaid client data will be merged into a research data warehouse that will assist with federal and state program oversight, research, statistical reporting, policy, and evaluation for the populations served by TANF, Child Support, and Medicaid. One major advantage of the data base is that it will help us understand program participation and interactions over time. For example, information on child support, medicaid participation, and earnings will help us understand individual and state differences in movement on and off TANF cash assistance and develop policies to increase family self-sufficiency.
This project will analyze legal, ethical, financial, and psychological challenges around paternity establishment, focusing on how the science of DNA testing may impact the child support enforcement system, family economic security, child well-being and the principles of family law that underlie child support practices. Potential changes to the paternity establishment process, particularly in response to challenges to paternity acknowledgements established without benefit of DNA testing, could have a major impact on the performance of the child support enforcement system as well as Federal and state child support financing. Given the potentially controversial nature of this project, it will be a low-profile project that will provide the Department with an analysis for internal use only. Background papers will be drafted in consultation with experts.
This joint ASPE/ACF' Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) project will identify causes and consequences of the accumulation of arrearages (past due child support) in the child support enforcement (CSE) program, and profile who owes the debt, through analysis of state administrative data and state child support policies. Wage data and state child support policies on child support order establishment and arrearages also may be analyzed. The findings will help OCSE and state CSE programs develop policies and procedures to increase current support payments to families and increase family self-sufficiency.
This project will model the effects of child support pass-through and disregard policy to estimate the benefits and costs of various federal and state policy choices. We will estimate the effects of both program variables, such as changes in other public benefit payments and administrative costs, and individual variables, such as custodial parents' employment (and subsequent tax payments) and noncustodial parents' payment of child support. The cornerstone of the Administration's child support proposals for welfare reauthorization are a range of state policy choices designed to encourage them to pass through more child support to current and former TANF families. The findings from this project will inform the Department and states about the potential effects of different choices that can be made under the legislation. National survey data, such as the Child Support Supplement of the Current Population Survey and state administrative data, may be used in developing the model.
In the area of medical child support, states have identified coordination with State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) agencies and private insurers as the number one issue for which they need federal assistance. Also, the HHS/DoL Medical Child Support Working Group recommended that further research be conducted on states' efforts to coordinate health care coverage availability between child support, Medicaid, and SCHIP. This project, conducted by The Urban Institute, will describe and analyze state efforts to coordinate between these three programs to secure appropriate health care coverage for child support-eligible children; the effects of federal policy on this cross-program coordination; and barriers to these efforts. The project has two components. The first involves convening a panel of experts to discuss why state agencies collaborate, what the barriers to collaboration are perceived to be, and the effects of federal policy on the decision to coordinate. Second, a series of case studies of several sites where coordination between child support, Medicaid, and SCHIP is underway will document the nature of the coordination, identify innovative practices and barriers, and describe the effects of federal policies. The project is being jointly monitored with the Office of Health Policy (HP) in ASPE.
The project will make the SIPP more useful for monitoring child support and visitation trends, identifying determinants of self-sufficiency and well-being, and improving microsimulation tools. The project will include secondary data analysis and an invitational conference of research experts. Data from the modules will be examined for internal consistency, response rates, and utility in current analytic uses.
The Partners for Fragile Families (PFF) demonstrations are designed to help fragile families (young unwed parents and their children) by helping fathers work with mothers in sharing the legal, financial, and emotional responsibilities of parenthood. In March 2000, the Department approved ten state waivers for the PFF demonstration projects. The PFF projects will test new ways for state-run child support enforcement programs and community-based organizations to work together to help young fathers obtain employment, make child support payments and learn parenting skills; and to help parents build stronger partnerships. Unlike previous efforts which have focused on fathers with unpaid child support obligations, the PFF projects will test approaches to serving young, never-married, non-custodial parents who do not have a child support order in place and may face obstacles to employment. The five-year evaluation, conducted by The Urban Institute, has three broad purposes: to increase knowledge about systems change; to build knowledge about program operations and delivery of services to fragile families; and to describe client behavior. Process and outcome evaluations will be conducted by interviewing all service providers, including child support enforcement, community-based organizations, and partner agencies; and by analyzing client data a case study will also be conducted. This project is jointly supported by ASPE and the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE).
The Department of Education's Early Childhood Longitudinal Birth Cohort Study (ECLS-B) is the nation's first study of a representative sample of over 10,000 children from birth through age five (or longer). ASPE funds will continue to support a focus on strengthening one or more of the following areas: measuring policy contexts at state and possibly local levels, expanding the sample of fathers to include non-resident fathers, supporting sample retention for low-income children, and/or addressing measurement issues for minority children. The omission of non-resident fathers would leave a major gap in the knowledge base for understanding basic developmental processes and for understanding a group of children and families of key interest in policy, especially poor children in minority families. The study is proceeding well, but has had to overcome a number of early design and measurement hurdles to satisfy state review boards and pilot test instruments. These changes have resulted in overall increased costs being shared by the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and study partners.
This task order provides logistical support to the government for the development of a research and practice baseline on the effects of incarceration on individuals, their children, families, and communities. Needs of children and families with incarcerated parents will be addressed through continued efforts to strengthen health and human services and criminal justice systems interaction and coordination. This funding also supports HHS' efforts to strengthen cross-program coordination by providing targeted information to program managers about population overlap and program interactions. Finally, ASPE's support will ensure our involvement in the development of a multidiciplinary research agenda around children and families with incarcerated parents. Two separate government efforts will be supported by this logistical contract: The first effort provides support for the Public Health and Housing Work Group of the Council of State Governments' (CSG) Re-entry Policy Council; the second effort supports the development of a research agenda on children and families with incarcerated parents.
ASPE, OCSE, and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) within the Department of Justice are funding a small study to get a preliminary look at child support issues for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated fathers. Under an NIJ contract, Caliber Associates, working with partner agencies in New York City, is examining the effects of incarceration on the ability of child support agencies to establish paternity and child support orders for noncustodial parents during their incarceration and following release and assessing how post-prison employment services might increase payment of child support. Caliber is using a sample of incarcerated offenders released from shock incarceration in upstate New York to a community work program in New York City, the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO). Among the principal research questions to be answered are: What was the impact of incarceration on the child support agency's ability to proceed with actions related to paternity establishment, order establishment, and enforcement?; For those offenders with active orders prior to incarceration how much debt did the average ex-offender accumulate while incarcerated?; and What payment history does the ex-offender establish following release?
This frequently updated web site contains a wealth of information on what is being done under the auspices of the Department’s Fatherhood Initiative.
The Early Head Start (EHS) Research Network, working with ACF and Mathematica Policy Research, is continuing the longitudinal core evaluation of the Early Head Start Program through the preschool school years and is currently developing a funding strategy for continuation through kindergarten and into first grade. NICHD is committed to continuing its ongoing support for the Fathers Studies component of the Early Head Start Evaluation, however, additional dollars will not be available until the start of FY 2002. This project, in concert with ACF/ACYF would provide bridge funding to the Early Head Start Evaluation/Fathers Studies Project to provide resources to maintain contact with the fathers between interviewing cycles and to support the Network in the development of the father interview protocols for fathers of children who are turning five years of age and are entering kindergarten. The Early Head Start Evaluation is measuring both child and program outcomes and is one of the only father-involvement studies that has randomly assigned treatment and control groups. The bridge funding will make it possible for the EHS Research Network to take advantage of the NICHD grant and will keep interview schedules in their appropriate time sequences.
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Building and enhancing state and local capacity for data collection and monitoring studies remains integral to HSP's efforts. Our FY 2002 research agenda continues support for state-level data collection efforts, administrative data linking, and the creation of public-use and restricted-access data files. We also continue our efforts to provide technical assistance to improve the quality of research results, ensure more uniformity and comparability across studies, and synthesize results across state and local level monitoring studies.
This project will expand the work of indicator development beyond traditional measures like family living arrangements and union formation and include measures that provide greater social context such as religiosity, family functioning, community interaction, and volunteerism. The work will build on HSP's leadership role in developing and disseminating key indicators of well-being and will provide important context for the welfare reform agenda of strengthening families. Products will include a report on key indicators available through existing data as well as a series of papers discussing what additional measures are needed and approaches for developing those measures. The project will wrap-up with a meeting of key researchers and policy makers to present the products, solicit feedback, and generate continued interest in expanding work in this area. An expert panel will provide guidance on choice of indicators, data, measurement, and conceptual issues.
This project will convene experts in the areas of youth programming, state policy and indicator data collection to develop a technical assistance effort that will support states' self assessment of their needs. This will help states develop tools they can use to assess the services, supports and opportunities are available to youth; quality of available services, supports and opportunities; how funding is allocated to youth across departmental lines and finally what kind of data is or could be collected to assess youth skills, attitudes, behaviors, status (e.g. educational, employment, marriage, parenthood, living). This work builds on previous work by ASPE on state indicators and by ACF's Family and Youth Services Bureau on youth development in states.
The purposes of this project are to: (1) Review and analyze a wide variety of research literature and data pertaining to rural America in order to identify and describe the social and economic conditions in rural America today. The analysis will include identification of both persistent and emerging trends across the spectrum of social and economic indicators, as well as a specific focus on key human services. The focus on human services will address the prevalence of certain conditions, and the availability and usage of services to ameliorate those conditions. (2) Develop a compilation of data sources that can be used to conduct research on rural issues, particularly with respect to human services issues. The compilation will: a) identify the full range of data sources appropriate for rural research (from national surveys to state administrative data) that include information on human services, b) summarize the content of each database, c) describe the strengths and weaknesses of each data source for rural research purposes, and d) identify what data can be made available to researchers, the circumstances under which it can be made available, and any safeguards that must be in place for researchers to have access to the data.
This project will work with states to improve their capacity to use the administrative data they gather from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program for program management and performance measurement. By working closely with several states in an iterative process through a series of working group meetings and visitations to state TANF offices, the Contractor will develop a software tool for using TANF administrative data to develop performance indicators. This improved capacity for analyzing and presenting data will be used to assist states in producing periodic reports for program management purposes. As a positive by-product of the project, states will have an incentive to improve the quality of the TANF administrative data collected and reported to HHS.
This project will make available TANF individual-level, administrative data for prior years on a web site, along with the ability to tabulate and analyze the data online and to download full data files or extracts. The purpose is to foster the use of the TANF administrative micro data by making quick tabulations readily available. The contractor will gather the existing TANF micro data sets for the years 1998 through 2001 (and 2002 if it becomes publicly available before the end of the project) and post them on an HHS web site, and provide the ability to tabulate and analyze the data. Complete documentation and instructions will also be provided on the web site. The project builds on two existing ASPE-funded projects — a web-based archive of AFDC data and an analytical enhancement to ACF's web site for aggregate TANF data. Data extracts will be limited slightly to protect privacy.
This project will provide support for the continuing work of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics (the Forum). The Forum consists of 20 federal agencies as well as partners in private research organizations and ensures coordination, collaboration, and integration of federal efforts to collect and report data on conditions and trends for children and families. Among its activities, the Forum produces a annual report on the well-being of children in the United States titled “America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being” and maintains the web site www.childstats.gov. The report tracks approximately 24 national indicators of child well-being in four areas: economic security, health, behavior and social environment, and education.
Under this project, ASPE and ACF will support an update of the Welfare Rules Database (WRD). Under TANF, states vary greatly in how they set the parameters of their welfare programs. Researchers and policy analysts need to know state and local welfare policies to monitor implementation and to link specific welfare policy parameters with outcomes. The state TANF plans submitted to ACF do not describe state welfare program rules in any detail. The WRD was developed to meet this need and is the only readily available, central source for information on state welfare policies. Currently, the database contains information on eligibility and benefit rules for 1996 through 2002. Under this project, a contractor will bring the information in the WRD forward through 2003 by reviewing state welfare manuals and other documents and by having the entries reviewed by state officials.
The Welfare Indicators Act of 1994 requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to prepare an annual report to Congress on indicators welfare dependence. The Indicators of Welfare Dependence report is prepared within the Office of Human Services Policy and delivered to Congress each spring. As mandated under the Congressional act, the report addresses the rate of welfare dependency, the degree and duration of welfare recipiency and dependence, and predictors of welfare dependence. Further, analyses of means-tested assistance in the report include benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program; the Food Stamp Program, and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. The report also includes risk factors related to economic security, employment, and non-marital births, as well an appendix with data related to the above programs. (Previous reports)
Although a number of national and state surveys have begun gathering measures of material hardship (e.g., utility cutoffs, inability to get needed medical attention, food insecurity, evictions), it is hard to respond to Congressional interest in gathering information on a state-by-state basis, given the small sample size of most national surveys and the lack of comparability across state surveys. The purpose of this project is to advance understanding of the value and limitations of measures of material hardship as a component of family well-being. The contractor, Abt Associates, will be responsible for convening a working meeting on measuring material hardship; commissioning papers on various aspects of material hardship measures; and producing a final report summarizing the one-day meeting and options for further steps.
This project continues ASPE's support of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). It is an important, ongoing survey for informing policy development on teen pregnancy prevention, out-of-wedlock childbearing, family formation, welfare, child support and paternity establishment, and father involvement. Our involvement has ensured that questions and sample sizes have been, and continue to be, sufficient to follow trends and do analysis on such issues as teen childbearing, men, minority groups, cohabiting vs. married couples, how teens get responsible messages about sexual behavior, religiosity, and child care usage.
This project continues ASPE's ongoing core support for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID is a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of US individuals and the families in which they reside that has been ongoing since 1968. The data files contain the full span of information collected over the course of the study. PSID data can be used for cross-sectional, longitudinal, and inter-generational analysis and for studying both individuals and families. PSID data have been utilized in a variety of ASPE-sponsored research projects as well as by the broader research community to address key questions related to the health and well-being of low-income families and individuals. ASPE support will focus on the maintenance of the size of the low-income sample, the addition of core sample households for the child development supplement, and the inclusion of an extensive set of welfare participation-related questions in the survey instrument.
This project maintains highly expert technical support services for performing the wide variety of complex tasks that are necessary to operate and maintain a microsimulation model used to estimate the effects of altering tax, transfer, and health programs and policies. The current ASPE model simulates the effects of changes in twelve cash and income transfer, health insurance, and tax programs and analyzes the effects of these changes on individuals, families, and households. Five major ongoing tasks will be supported, including: (1) providing for the basic maintenance of the model; (2) obtaining expert technical assistance in analyzing the costs and impacts of alternative proposals for modifying tax, transfer, and health programs; (3) incorporating new data and program changes into the model to keep it up-to-date; (4) upgrading the model to reflect program changes and computer enhancements; and (5) continued documentation and training.
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Our strategy in the special populations issue area is to examine innovative approaches for delivering services while ensuring accountability. The research in this area is designed to reach and effectively serve populations that have the greatest difficulty in succeeding in employment and thus may be left behind. Issues related to substance abuse, mental health, homelessness, and domestic violence, as well as research on immigrants, are included in this section.
Child-only cases have continued to grow, reaching 782,000 cases by FY 2002 and representing over a third of the total TANF caseload. These are cases where only the children in a family/household are receiving TANF and the adults in these cases are ineligible (because they are a caretaker relative, SSI parent, immigrant parent, or sanctioned parent). Despite the growing proportion of these cases in the overall TANF caseload, we know very little about these cases, such as whether these cases pose special issues for TANF agencies and whether there are any issues related to the well-being of children in these cases. This study, conducted by RTI International, provides information about the majority of child-only cases in which no parent is in the household and the children are cared for by a relative. The study: (1) systematically reviews and analyzes existing data and studies to describe the health and social service needs and well-being of children who are receiving TANF assistance and being cared for by non-parent relatives who are ineligible for TANF; (2) describes whether states have established any goals or outcomes related to children in these child-only cases, and if so, what strategies are being employed to achieve those outcomes; and (3) determines how such cases are handled at the local level, and the degree to which the service needs and the well-being of children in these families are taken into account.
This project will support the continued evaluation of a multi-agency demonstration project that is addressing the co-occurrence of domestic violence and child maltreatment. The evaluation is designed to assess whether child protection agencies, child maltreatment courts, and domestic violence programs can, by participating with others in multi-disciplinary, community-based collaborations, achieve significant organizational change that helps children and parents in abusive families to become safer and more stable. Several analytical approaches are employed including network analysis and pre-post evidence of changes in agency practice. The national evaluation documents changes that take place and studies factors that contribute to project outcomes.
This project will examine the effectiveness of the collaboration among HUD, HHS, and VA in ending chronic homelessness. The Administration has stated a specific goal of ending chronic homelessness in a decade, and the three Departments will blend resources and expertise in up to 15 communities to test how the integration of permanent housing with health and social services helps to end homelessness among persons with disabilities and protracted homelessness patterns. The evaluation will examine which collaboration approaches used by the communities lead to effective partnerships. The program will focus on the most-difficult-to-treat categories of homeless individuals, and the evaluation will examine the extent to which services were targeted to this subgroup, their placement in housing, delivery of appropriate treatment services, changes in health status, rates of housing retention, and effectiveness in using mainstream service programs to deliver care.
Homeless clients frequently present providers with complex health care needs that must be comprehensively addressed. Service delivery fragmentation is a significant challenge to address the needs of such multi-problem clients. To overcome this, SAMHSA and HRSA have developed a collaborative program of service delivery for homeless individuals. Its goal is to improve access to primary and behavioral health care by supporting 12 community-based approaches that link these providers. The project will describe the collaborative approaches implemented and measure the outcomes for homeless clients. ASPE is a partner in the evaluation, which is being done by the National Center on Family Homelessness.
Under this study, all States will be offered assistance with developing and implementing a homeless action plan that explores new policies and approaches for integrating housing and treatment for homeless persons. States have been selected as the focus because of their responsibility for developing and administering programs that are responsive to the needs of their residents and because the State is the principal level for administering HHS assistance programs. Teams of state personnel responsible for treatment, housing, employment, and veterans affairs participate in one of seven Policy Academies. The teams receive assistance in advance to help them prepare, facilitation at the Academy to develop a draft action plan, and follow-up assistance to implement a more integrated response to homeless individuals. HUD, VA, DOL, ACF, CMS, HRSA, and SAMHSA are co-sponsors. A national conference is included to help State to State exchange of examples of effective new policy approaches to homelessness.
This study, being conducted by Capital Research Corporation explores the feasibility of developing a core set of performance measures for the four DHHS programs that focus on services to homeless populations — Programs for Homeless and Runaway Youth, Health Care for the Homeless, Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH), and Addictions Treatment for Homeless Persons. The core set is expected to include both process and outcome measures. Both routine administrative reporting and homeless registry/homeless management information systems will be examined as sources for indicators for these programs. Based on common goals in these programs and measure usefulness, up to 10 common measures will be proposed and vetted with the programs. To determine if these performance measures have utility in documenting services to homeless persons in generic, non-homeless-specific service programs, the contract will explore whether routine reporting in selected block grant programs and Medicaid could generate any of the measures. The final report will include specific recommendations on performance measures for programs serving homeless individuals, including recommendations for both targeted and mainstream programs.
Two previous national surveys — in 1987 and 1996 — produced useful descriptions of homeless populations, allowed for more complete understanding of the existing services system, and provided a foundation for policy evaluation and formulation. The value of these previous surveys makes another national survey desirable as HHS seeks solutions in a changing environment. The contract, funded in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, convenes a group concerned with homelessness to critically review the 1996 National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC) and to set goals for a potential repeat of NSHAPC or other approaches. The contract with Westat will permit HHS to assess which methodologies and operations approaches used in NSHAPC 1996 should be retained and/or revised in the potential repeat; whether additional variables can be identified to describe the scope of the homeless assistance system and its services, e.g., by affiliations, funding, and geographic variations; and new conceptualizations of homeless clientele and other users, e.g., by risk and protective factors or their prior homeless histories. Based on these considerations, a final report will identify up to three design options for a national data collection effort.
The purpose of this project is to ascertain the evaluability of discharge planning as a strategy to prevent subsequent homelessness as this planning occurs in several settings — foster care, residential treatment for adolescents, inpatient psychiatric hospital treatment for adults, and residential treatment for adults with substance abuse problems. The project has three purposes: 1) to determine the feasibility of conducting a rigorous evaluation; 2) to identify key evaluation questions by setting and across settings; and 3) to develop alternative evaluation designs. This study is related to a strategy in the Department's plan that recommends identifying and promoting the use of effective, evidence-based homelessness prevention interventions including discharge planning. Methods to be utilized in the study include an expert panel, documentary analysis, site visits, and logic model analysis by and across settings.
In collaboration with partners from several agencies, this project is funding a comprehensive evaluation of several innovative programs in New York City for welfare recipients with substance abuse and mental and physical health barriers to employment. It is part of an evolving national evaluation of programs across the country with these problems. Core funding for the evaluation is being provided by the Department through the Administration for Children and Families' Employment Retention and Advancement project, a national evaluation of programs serving TANF clients with significant and multiple employment barriers. Funding from ASPE and several other agencies (particularly the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) will enable a longer follow-up period as well as the collection of more detailed data through in-person interviews.
The New Immigrant Survey is a large, longitudinal survey of recently arriving immigrants beginning in 2000. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD of the National Institutes of Health) are the principal funders of the survey. ASPE has contributed to this effort and also has provided input to the planning of the study and the development of the pilot instruments. ASPE's contribution helps ensure that comprehensive and relevant data are collected and analyzed about program utilization and hardship and well-being over time among newly arriving low-income immigrant families in different states. In particular, ASPE's continued support will ensure that the study focuses on what is happening to children in these families under welfare reform.
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Last updated: 06/08/04