In FY 1999 ASPE funded researcher-initiated grants on various aspects of welfare reform outcomes. We continued this grant program in FY 2000, in cooperation with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), focusing on use of state and federal administrative data, and on current and former Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other special populations affected by state TANF policies. Priority research interests centered on issues likely to be of concern during TANF reauthorization discussions, including the composition of the caseload, patterns of government program use, sub-populations, non-working welfare leavers, sanctions, labor market experiences, employment stability, marriage and family structure, TANF flexibility, use of TANF and MOE funds, barrier identification and service utilization, and entry effects and welfare dynamics. Approximately $1.3 million has been awarded to 10 applicants. In general, ASPE funding is supporting research and secondary data analysis efforts that will be completed within 12 months covering a variety of information about adults, children, and families, including economic and non-economic well-being and participation in government programs. ACF awarded an additional $1.2 million in FY 2000 to support continuation of two of the projects beyond this first year and seven other longer-term projects involving primary data collection. The ASPE-funded proposals are:
These grants enhance state-specific surveys of populations affected by welfare reform and expand or improve data collection activities, including efforts to improve cross-state comparability. Grants to states are used, for example, to add additional survey waves to measure longer-term outcomes, collect data to support greater sub-group analyses, and/or gather more detailed information on non-respondents. To be eligible, states had to have an existing survey that had been administered at least once, so that the grants can facilitate real improvements, without paying for basic startup costs. Survey findings should fill an important knowledge gap that could not be filled with states' existing data, and will cover a variety of welfare reform outcomes, such as measures of family hardship and well-being, barriers to employment, poverty status, and utilization of support programs. When measuring welfare reform outcomes, the surveys and data analyses will focus on subsets of the low-income population including long-term welfare recipients, child-only cases, former recipients, potential recipients, welfare leavers with little or no reported income, and other special populations affected by state TANF policies. The funded proposals include: Alameda County, CA; Iowa; Missouri; San Mateo, CA; and Wisconsin.
Continuation funding is being provided to researchers at the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago to wrap up technical assistance to the states who received prior ASPE grants to promote child indicator work in the context of better understanding of welfare reform outcomes. The technical assistance effort has emphasized collaborative work among the states and peer-to-peer assistance efforts. Technical assistance has been provided, for example, on conceptual and methodological issues in identifying and measuring appropriate sets of child health and well-being indicators within and across states; ways of creating or using survey and administrative data and of combining several data approaches; and ways to involve state policy makers who can help institutionalize data systems for measuring and tracking child indicators and establish procedures for using indicator information to inform policy deliberations. A final project meeting is planned for Summer 2001, and products from the project will be finalized and disseminated. See previous summaries of meetings (November 1998, April 1999, and December 1999).
This book of tables will show trends in income, poverty and other economic measures, such as access to health insurance and food and housing security, with explanatory text and annotated references. Where possible, the book will incorporate tables using alternative measurements of poverty based on recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences. The data book will be composed of five chapters: an overview of income and poverty; children and their families; working-age adults; the elderly; and the impacts of public programs including outcomes of welfare reform. In addition there will be appendices covering basic data from public programs serving low-income and welfare populations and alternative income and poverty measurement issues. Information will come from the CPS, the PSID, the SIPP, and administrative data.
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data show that in 1997 a large proportion of workers were employed in alternative or contingent work arrangements, such as work through a temporary help agency, working for a contract company, or working on-call. Compared to other kinds of workers, contingent workers tend to have lower rates of pay, health insurance coverage and pension plan participation, and higher rates of part-time employment. The one percent of workers employed by temporary help agencies are more likely to be young, female and minority than workers in traditional arrangements (or other contingent arrangements). Many welfare recipients and welfare leavers who go to work are likely to be in the temporary worker population. Low-skilled and low-income individuals may turn to temporary employment as a measure of last resort because they can't obtain permanent positions, or by choice to accommodate personal needs such as child care or education. This project will investigate the prevalence of nonstandard employment among low-skilled and low-income populations including current, former and potential welfare recipients; identify the most common forms of temporary positions; and explore the reasons these temporary jobs are taken. The study will involve a literature review and analysis of various data sources including the CPS and data on industries and occupations to determine rates and trends in nonstandard work and overlap with welfare receipt.
Low-wage working families face multiple demands as workers and as parents. Besides working, low-income parents in both single and two-parent families need time for training and education, navigating complex health and support services, parenting, and managing their children's needs. Some low-wage working parents are also providing care for family members who are elderly or who have special needs. Employers often require that low-wage workers work non-standard and irregular hours. There are numerous questions about what is going on in the lives of these parents, including those who are teen parents and those leaving TANF assistance and entering the labor force for the first time. This project will look at coping mechanisms and examine a variety of factors that may help or hinder a family's efforts to be self sufficient, including formal and informal support services, social support networks, time management, money management and other life skills. The project will also investigate what is happening to children, and how they are being cared for when parents, for example, have to work changing shifts. The project will commission a set of research papers, convene a conference of researchers and policy makers, and disseminate a conference volume.
A majority of incarcerated men and women are parents, and the impact of incarceration appears to be greatest in poor, minority, urban communities. The toll on children, families, and communities has caused increasing concern, and a growing realization that families served by TANF and other HHS programs are families who are also more likely to experience the effects of incarceration. This project will produce a literature review, commissioned papers, and a conference in order to develop a research and practice baseline on what is known and knowable about this high-risk, high-welfare use population. Specifically, the project will focus on five issues: 1) support for continued parenting of children, including living arrangements for children during and after incarceration; 2) loss of financial resources, including issues of TANF eligibility, unemployment, and child support payments; 3) the possibility of losing custody or having parental rights terminated because of incarceration, especially when related to drug and alcohol addictions; 4) lack of availability of appropriate treatment programs for substance abuse and mental illness, both within the prison system and post-release; and 5) integration of inmate rehabilitation services with post-release community interventions for the inmate and his/her children and families. Related issues, such as the effect of pre- and post-incarceration interventions on welfare usage, will also be addressed.
As TANF policies are moving welfare recipients into the labor force, there is growing interest and concern about the barriers that may prevent recipients from gaining and keeping employment. Mental health problems are one such barrier. This project will examine a number of state/local TANF programs in order to: 1) document the methods programs are using to identify, refer and treat welfare recipients with mental health problems; 2) identify approaches that are promising in assisting people with mental health problems to obtain treatment and find and keep employment; 3) highlight the issues and problems that welfare programs are grappling with as they attempt to better serve clients with mental health problems; and 4) assess the challenges and opportunities involved in collaborating with other public systems, such as the public mental health and vocational rehabilitation systems.
Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that the welfare caseload is becoming increasingly harder-to-employ, as the more job ready leave or do not enter the caseload. To date, a number of surveys of welfare recipients have demonstrated that they have a higher prevalence of multiple barriers to employment than women at large. These include lower levels of education, job skills, work experience, literacy; higher levels of physical health problems and mental health problems (e.g., depression, post-traumatic stress disorder); and greater experiences with domestic violence. However, these studies are generally small and not representative and the questions used to assess the prevalence of barriers differ from study to study, making cross comparisons difficult.
This project will build directly on the experience gained from the Women's Employment Study (WES), being undertaken by a research team headed by Sheldon Danziger at the University of Michigan. The purpose of this project is to review what we have learned to date and suggest how we might go about designing surveys that would provide data about multiple barriers to employment. This study will provide a critical assessment of all current studies that are measuring a variety of barriers to employment and the service needs of current and former welfare recipients, e.g., health, mental health, domestic violence, literacy, work skills, etc. It will commission and convene a panel of experts to address a variety of issues that would identify how to frame an optimal caseload survey. A final report will lay out the scope and content of a "model" caseload survey of welfare recipients, focusing on questions such as "What is the optimal survey design?" "What content areas should be included?" "Which specific questions?" "If such a survey were fielded in a number of states, how would it extend the knowledge we are getting from the current round of leaver studies and other caseload studies that are in process?"
This project will critically analyze and synthesize available information on state welfare and related support policies and assess which characteristics of state programs or background characteristics are most significant in predicting outcomes. This project will draw on information on welfare and related support policies collected by the Urban Institute, the Rockefeller Institute, and the State Policy Documentation Project and other key sources. After consulting with an advisory working group, the contractor will develop several possible classification systems that group states according to various characteristics of their welfare programs (e.g., level of benefit, strictness of work mandate) and strategies to support low-income working families. The contractor will then examine which of these approaches is most helpful in understanding the range of outcomes experienced by current and former welfare recipients and other low-income populations. A number of sources including the National Academy of Sciences have recommended that HHS do this analysis. The project will also provide preliminary answers to questions about the relationships between state policy choices and key program outcomes. These answers will be of great interest to policymakers, program operators, and researchers alike.
Families in which a grandparent or another relative has taken over parental responsibilities make up approximately one-third of both the TANF and foster care caseloads. Neither of these service systems have been set up with such families in mind, and, in many ways, the services provided are an inadequate match with families' needs. Several states have set up separate kinship care assistance programs outside the traditional structures of both the child welfare and TANF systems. This project will profile states' efforts in order to compare and contrast the approaches states are using and how these programs help children. It will provide a broad outline of the range and scope of programs operating across the country and in-depth information on programs in six sites. The study will gather information on why the programs were created, how they were designed and implemented - from both a logistical and political perspective, what services they provide, how they are financed, and how they operate in coordination with other state systems.
Declining program participation rates indicate that immigrants and citizen children in immigrant families continue to face benefit eligibility restrictions or barriers to accessing benefits for which they may be eligible. Because of these declines in program participation, there continue to be concerns about economic, health and other outcomes for these populations. Over the last three years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the National Institutes of Health (NICHD and NIA) have jointly funded a feasibility/design study for the New Immigrant Survey, a large, longitudinal survey of recently arriving immigrants beginning in 2000. ASPE's contribution will help 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 support will ensure that the study focuses on how children in these families are faring under welfare reform.
With the implementation of welfare reform, state and local agencies have established a variety of rules and procedures governing enrollment in TANF and Medicaid. As authority for welfare policy has devolved to state and, oftentimes, local levels, local agencies and caseworkers may have more discretion over how individual cases are handled. This study will examine how selected agencies, staff and caseworkers treat special populations, with particular focus on individuals of different backgrounds and limited English language abilities. It will examine the extent to which program services, agency culture and caseworker discretion may differentially affect applicants with diverse backgrounds, possibly leading to differences in approval rates, work assignments, support services, or sanctions. With the complicated new TANF and Medicaid eligibility rules that are based on immigration status, there have been concerns that people for whom English is a second language or who come from specific immigrant communities face more barriers than those explained by eligibility differences. Some of these barriers may be related to lack of language-appropriate application materials, misinterpretation of immigrant and refugee eligibility rules, or other factors. Some of these may help explain how "the chilling effects" of immigrant-based welfare policies are realized at the local level. The results of this project will provide additional information about the effects of program policy and implementation at different levels on program utilization by these special populations. The project will consist of detailed case studies that examine agency policies and practices, as well as caseworker training and discretion, in five (5) metropolitan areas.
This project will study the events associated with people entering and exiting poverty. The project will document the likelihood of entering and exiting poverty for various groups: single working-age adults, children, families, and elderly, and identify how long people remain in poverty. The project also will document the extent to which various transition events or combinations of events account for entries and exits from poverty. This project can help determine whether poverty rates are declining because fewer people are entering poverty or because more people are exiting poverty. It will also measure changes in reasons for poverty exits resulting from welfare reform. The product will be a report with transition rates and reasons by subgroup.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) describes several outcomes of concern related to teen pregnancy, including an increased likelihood of dependence on public assistance, and reducing teen pregnancy is viewed as an important aspect of promoting self-sufficiency and family well-being within the context of welfare reform. Yet, as teen birth rates have fallen at an unprecedented rate since 1991, there is a debate regarding factors that have contributed to this decline. This project will use data from the National Survey of Family Growth to describe data on sexual activity, partner characteristics, and contraceptive use for women surveyed in 1995 who were teens at any time during the study period. This data will be used to create simulation models that may clarify which factors are associated with changes in teen pregnancy and births and how possible future changes in these factors might affect teen pregnancy and birth rates. Using monthly event history data, the study will observe trends in behavior between 1991 and 1995. Trend information will be presented for multiple population subgroups, including by race/ethnicity, age, and parity (whether or not they had a prior teen birth).
Low-income parents of infants and toddlers are challenged to balance work or school activities with the responsibilities of nurturing their young children. These challenges affect parents who are receiving welfare in the post-PRWORA environment as well as former recipients and the working poor. In order to meet their responsibilities, these families need access to high quality child care that fits their work schedules as well as other supportive services. Despite what we know about the particular challenges facing poor families with infants and toddlers, we know little about how these families are faring in the aftermath of welfare reform and whether states and communities have developed strategies to provide them with high quality child care and other services. This project will study strategies which states and communities are pursuing to provide high quality child care and other support services for welfare and working poor families with infants and toddlers. Some of these strategies are being evaluated. This effort will go beyond the few existing basic descriptions of these strategies to provide analysis of how these initiatives have been structured, promising practices or areas of concern, and key outcomes which have been measured. It will also provide a much needed synthesis of the available research evidence and identify measures which have been used to document improvement for use in future evaluations and monitoring efforts.
This five-year 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. The project's first report, Big Cities and Welfare Reform: Early Implementation and Ethnographic Findings from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change, was released in June 1999. A working paper, Food Security and Hunger in Poor, Mother-Headed Families in Four U.S. Cities, was released in May 2000. Both reports are available at MDRC's web site: Project on Devolution and Urban Change.
The Senate Committee Report for the FY 2000 HHS Appropriations bill included language recommending continued support for Iowa State University's (ISU) project to develop a mechanism to provide State-based or multi-state information, particularly in less densely populated areas. Iowa State University has been working with ASPE to develop an approach for doing state-level surveys that is relevant for local welfare program design, implementation, and evaluation and can be integrated into the Census Bureau's Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD). ASPE is currently supporting work by Iowa State University to explore the feasibility of extending and expanding the SPD to capture state-level reliable samples for use in exploring the outcomes of federal and state policies, as well as local economic conditions of low-income families. Continued ASPE funding is supporting further feasibility work on the extended survey, which includes a 20-minute telephone survey of Iowa households using a questionnaire that includes a module from the SPD as well as a transportation module to address the needs for data in a rural setting. This project is designed to help meet the need for state-specific questions and data within a national framework.
This project will identify the likelihood that "young mothers will go on, stay on, leave, and stay off TANF" given use and/or availability of child care, job training, and other social programs in their community. The research will analyze three subgroups of young mothers (ages 18-24) who lived in the Chicago metropolitan area between January 1, 1997 and June 30, 2000. There are three major components of the study: 1) geographic analyses of local area job-related resources, 2) event history models of TANF participation, and 3) process-oriented models of TANF participation. These components will utilize ZIP-code level data on the availability of child care, job training, and other social services; state administrative data to examine when mothers received TANF; and detailed questionnaire data.
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 support of a multi-year effort by the South Carolina's Office of Budget and Control Board's Office of Research and Statistics to link administrative data and additional data from surveys of former welfare recipients.
This project, jointly funded with the Office of Program Systems (PS) within ASPE, examines the trends in the demand for emergency assistance services, such as homeless shelters and food banks, from the mid-1990's to 2000. There are two grants, one covering the State of Massachusetts and another in San Mateo County, California. Researchers are collecting information from providers of these services and other socioeconomic data in order to examine the changing patterns of usage during the period of economic expansion and declining welfare caseloads before and after welfare reform. The final reports will provide information on whether welfare reform is associated with any change in the demand for emergency services. Both projects are now in the data collection phase. In order to provide a more extensive evaluation of this policy question, the Office of Program Systems and HSP jointly funded an Intra-Agency Agreement with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) during FY 2000. SAMHSA's Center for Mental Health Services also added funding to the Agreement. SAMHSA has awarded a contract that adds two sites to this analysis, using timeframes and emergency assistance analyses that are consistent with the above grants. The contract is being jointly monitored by ASPE and SAMHSA.
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.
In FY1998 we began funding, in partnership with ACF, a three year grant to support the evaluation of a New Jersey initiative which aims to improve employment and family outcomes for TANF recipients with substance abuse problems through substance abuse treatment, intensive case management and supportive services. This evaluation will provide important information about the effectiveness of a type of intervention several states are experimenting with to move substance abusing welfare clients toward self-sufficiency. The intervention New Jersey is implementing includes screening of welfare recipients for substance abuse problems, treatment referral mechanisms with enhanced case management, and substance abuse treatment coordinated with employment and training or vocational services. The evaluation, using a random assignment model, compares two models for providing such services, looking at outcomes in several domains including employment and family self-sufficiency, substance use and associated behaviors, child development and family functioning, and child welfare involvement. The intervention being evaluated is intended to improve the post-welfare prospects of TANF recipients with substance abuse problems. The evaluation is being conducted in two New Jersey counties (Essex and Atlantic).
The grantee, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, will produce three products resulting from the evaluation which are intended for use by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and the state to disseminate information about the project. These include: (1) a descriptive profile of the population served by New Jersey's welfare-to-work program, including how many have substance use disorders as well as other barriers to self-sufficiency; (2) an implementation report describing the difficulties encountered and lessons learned about implementing these services, as well as issues to be considered in establishing substance abuse interventions in welfare contexts; and (3) an outcomes report describing outcomes for participants and controls 12 months post-treatment. ASPE and ACF have provided support for this project. Other aspects of the evaluation are being funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Department's National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Over the next six to twelve months, the states and counties that received FY 1998 and FY 1999 Welfare Outcomes grants will be preparing and submitting research data sets that will combine the state-specific administrative and survey data they have collected on former, current, and potential TANF recipients and other special populations affected by state TANF policies, including diversion practices. Grantees are expected to submit the data sets to ASPE, and also to make them available for research purposes. To improve the quality and comparability of these data sets, ASPE has extended a task order contract with ORC-Macro to provide technical assistance and coordination in the preparation of the data sets, to ensure that they are appropriately documented and accessible to outside researchers.
Final reports from several of the FY 1998 State Welfare Outcomes grantees have been released and research data sets should become available over the next year. There is interest in the outcomes of these grants, yet it is a challenge to synthesize findings across the different grantees. Under this project, the Urban Institute is conducting secondary data analyses of welfare outcomes measures, drawing on the state-specific data sets secured under the Technical Assistance on Researcher Access to Data Sets project. The contractor will release an initial synthesis report containing both administrative and survey findings from all available reports. In addition, the contractor will write a final report, building on both the secondary data analyses of welfare outcomes measures and the grantees' written reports. The final report should be completed in time for TANF reauthorization and will add to our ongoing efforts to report reliable state-specific measures of welfare outcomes, including outcomes in the areas of employment and income, family hardship and well-being, recidivism, and utilization of other programs.
The American Community Survey (ACS) is a new Census Bureau program that will make regular intercensal estimates of the distribution of characteristics of households, families and persons in small areas such as census tracts and for small population groups (for example, specific Asian or Hispanic nationality groups, specific age groups, and so forth). It is currently being conducted in 31 diverse sites across the country. The Census Bureau expects to fully implement the survey in every county starting in 2003. This conference convened a group of researchers, policy makers and local practitioners to explore the potential uses of this new data source and to explore the development of econometric models that combine ACS data with local area administrative data and local business economic data to provide local area data. This conference was jointly sponsored by the Bureau of the Census and DHHS-ASPE.
ASPE continues to conduct a Panel Study with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to evaluate the design of current, proposed and future studies of the effects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. The purpose of convening this NAS Panel is to provide the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) with unbiased scientific recommendations for studying the outcomes of recent changes in the welfare system. The Academy's recommendations will provide DHHS with a firm, scientific base upon which to pursue the Department's goals of evaluating the effects of this recent reform.
Throughout the course of this study, the Academy has conducted workshops and seminars focused on methodological issues associated with the study of welfare outcomes and published an Interim Report, Evaluating Welfare Reform: A Framework of Current Work. Prepublication copies of the Final Report are expected in December, 2000. The published Final Report will be disseminated in early 2001.
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.
The devolution of welfare to the states and increased flexibility poses substantial new challenges for data collection and analysis to monitor welfare outcomes. To meet these challenges new and better data are needed at the state and local level. This project supports the administration of a welfare participation question in the HRSA-sponsored state level telephone survey - State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey (SLAITS) which is being carried out by the National Center for Health Statistics. The participation question has been cognitively tested and is the same as that asked on other national surveys (e.g., Current Population Survey, National Survey of Drug Abuse). This data element when combined with other data available from this survey will permit the development of state level estimates of the incidence of special health care needs among children of current and former welfare recipients, as well as the health insurance status (including Medicaid and SCHIP) of current and former recipients.
This project supports the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) Research Forum database and website. The website is designed to provide the most reliable information to key stakeholders, including researchers, policymakers, administrators, and practitioners concerning welfare reform interventions being tested; populations and geographic areas being assessed; research methods being used; major findings already available; and when future findings will be released. The data base and web site provide valuable information useful to Federal officials and other practitioners regarding research and demonstration initiatives related to welfare reform and the well-being of low-income children and families.
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The National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies is using an experimental design to compare the effects of different welfare-to-work strategies in seven sites. In three sites (Atlanta, Grand Rapids, and Riverside), the effects of two approaches to preparing welfare recipients for employment are being compared. In one approach, the human capital development approach, individuals are directed to avail themselves of education services and, to a lesser extent, occupational training before they seek work, under the theory that they will then be able to get better jobs and keep them longer. In the other approach, the labor force attachment approach, individuals are encouraged to gain quick entry into the labor market, even at low wages, under the theory that their work habits and skills will improve on the job and thus being able to advance themselves. The effects of participation in welfare-to-work programs on children are also being estimated as part of this project. Special analyses are also being done of the relationship between depression and low literacy among mothers in the sample. The project will be completed in 2001.
ASPE and the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) are evaluating the implementation and client outcomes of eight Responsible Fatherhood programs, located in Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, California, Wisconsin, Missouri, Maryland, and Washington. The projects address recent research findings that (a) unemployment and/or lack of access to children are cited by parents who owe child support as key reasons for non-payment, and (b) payment of child support is associated with non-custodial parent involvement with their children. States were awarded Section 1115 demonstration grants and waivers in 1997 to implement comprehensive responsible fatherhood programs designed to assist unemployed or low income fathers to: (1) secure jobs or improve income, (2) facilitate father involvement, (3) facilitate access and visitation with children, and (4) access related social services as needed. The evaluation design includes assessments of project implementation and of client, family, and program outcomes. The contract for the multi-site evaluation effort was awarded in FY 1998.
The Department of Education is preparing to launch the nation's first study of a representative sample of over 10,000 children from birth through age five (or longer). 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. We are working with other potential funding partners on the expansion of the sample to include non-resident fathers. The Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics has identified the study as a key target of opportunity for determining how fathers affect children's development. The inclusion of non-resident fathers 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.
Under previous funding, ASPE provided partial support for a planning effort to add a father sample to the Early Head Start Evaluation. The sample has been added, and FY00 funding is supporting the development of a common core of father instruments for use in the Early Head Start Evaluation and in several other large-scale studies so that crosswalks can be made across studies.
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. Continuation funding will be provided for states to receive research technical assistance on collecting survey data using the common core of instruments, using administrative data sources, and developing and coordinating data analysis and reporting strategies. The research technical assistance is provided by the NICHD Research Network on Family and Child Well-Being under Child Trends' Leadership.
SEED is an effort to promote collaborative work among federal agencies to fill gaps in the early childhood science base in areas that have implications for social policies for young children and their families, with a focus on low-income populations. Collaborating agencies currently include NICHD, ACF, ACYF, CDC, and DoED. Funds are used to convene researchers and policy makers on key issues in the early childhood area. Activities will include developing and conducting a major meeting or a series of smaller meetings in a key substantive area for research and policy on early childhood issues. These activities would be modeled on the successful SEED meeting which ASPE helped to sponsor on child care issues. Activities are designed and conducted in collaboration with SEED partners. Research on school readiness will be the focus of work this year.
Demographic changes in the labor force, welfare reform's emphasis on work, and new research on child development all draw attention to the need for high quality child care. Research shows that high quality care has meaningful effects on children's developmental outcomes and parents' ability to maintain employment. As child care policy continues to be shaped, it is important to better understand where there are failures in families' ability to access high quality care, the extent to which government interventions are effective in addressing these failures, and the economic benefits and costs of providing high quality care. This project builds on ASPE's efforts to stimulate discussion about investments in quality child care. During the past year, ASPE commissioned two papers which begin to review the evidence on child care quality and examine the economic benefits and costs of providing high quality care. ASPE will build on this work by convening a conference on the Economics of Child Care during spring 2000. This meeting will provide a forum for presentation of these two papers and be an opportunity for several well-known economists to discuss the economic implications of government investment in high quality child care. Following the meeting, ASPE will commission up to three additional papers which explore specific economic issues related to quality care that are raised during the meeting.
The child welfare system has long been hampered by a lack of reliable data. As recently as five years ago, even basic information such as the number of children in foster care was unreliable. National efforts to improve the quality of administrative data in the child welfare field has been underway since the early 1980s. At the same time our data analysis capabilities are improving, the child welfare system is in a state of flux during which policy analyses of topical issues are likely to be quite useful. This task order will commission a series of 4 issue briefs, to be released over the course 17 months, based on data from the Foster Care Data Archive (FCDA) maintained by the Chapin Hall Center for Children on foster care topics of interest to federal and state policy makers. A briefing for federal policy officials to present the findings of FCDA research will also be conducted.
The data available through the FCDA has several advantages over the federal AFCARS data for certain research purposes. These include the FCDA's capacity to look longitudinally at children's foster care histories, as well as the capacity to link FCDA data with other state administrative data systems in order to look across agency boundaries at service utilization patterns. Currently approximately 12 states participate in the data archive. These include many of the most populous states and nearly two thirds of the children in foster care nationally are represented in the FCDA.
ASPE is a partner with seven other HHS and DOJ agencies to plan and implement a major demonstration initiative addressing the link between domestic violence and child maltreatment. Specifically, the initiative will test out whether implementing guidelines published by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has a positive effect on outcomes for battered mothers and their children. Five sites are to be selected in the fall of 2000 to conduct the demonstration. With FY 2000 funding, ASPE is contributing to the evaluation component of the initiative. This initiative has the potential for having a major impact in the way that battered women and their children are assessed, served, and protected by family courts, child protective services, domestic violence service providers, and community health and social service programs.
ASPE is undertaking a multi-site, multi-year evaluation of Abstinence-only Education programs funded through PRWORA. This study, known as the National Evaluation of Title V Abstinence Programs, is running in parallel with numerous state-funded evaluations of abstinence programs. This project funded a conference involving state-funded evaluators, held at NIH in the Spring of 2000. The conference was focused on the early results of these evaluations and research implementation issues. It helped ASPE, the National Evaluation team, and state evaluators address a range of research and policy issues related to the multi-year National Evaluation which is underway. NIH co-funded the conference.
In September, 1999, The National Research Council's Board on Children, Youth, and Families established the Committee on Community-Level Programs for Youth to review and synthesize existing evidence regarding community-level programs designed to promote positive youth development. The committee will conclude its work in April 2001 with the release of a final report framed around the essential elements of adolescent well-being and healthy development, linking to these the features of programs that contribute to a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. It will examine what we know about the current landscape of development programs for America's youth, as well as how these programs are meeting their diverse needs. It will offer recommendations for policy, practice, and research to ensure that programs are well designed to meet young people's developmental needs.
While there is growing interest in designing and implementing programs to promote youth development, there remains quite a bit of confusion/disagreement as to how one measures this development. Researchers and practitioners have considered a variety of youth development indicators, constructs, or assets, but few have scientifically tested measures. The goals of this project are to develop measures of positive well-being that could be used: 1) to track child well-being within the national indicators system; 2) as dependent and independent variables in longitudinal research studies; and 3) as outcomes in intervention evaluations projects.
HSP staffed the joint HHS/DOL Medical Child Support Working Group, established under the Child Support Performance and Incentives Act to suggest improvements to medical child support enforcement. The Working Group has made comprehensive recommendations that contemplate a shift to the custodial parent as the preferred health insurance carrier (although not necessarily the payer.) There is some evidence that supports the idea that when the custodial parent carries the health insurance, children's access to health care increases and continuity of coverage is better. Consequently, it will be critical to know what proportion of custodial and noncustodial parents (both within and outside of the IV-D system) have access to private health insurance, particularly through their employer, and the cost and take up rates on this coverage. The Working Group also recommended that the child support enforcement program assist children in its caseload who are without private insurance to gain access to public coverage and other public-sponsored group health plans. In order to assess the size of the child support caseload for whom referral to public insurance would be most appropriate, it is important to identify how many child support eligible children are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP, but not enrolled. This project will also identify and assess state "best practices" in coordinating health care coverage for child support eligible children among IV-D, IV-A, Medicaid, CHIP, and other entities. Legal and other barriers to coordination will be identified. We are coordinating with HCFA, OCSE, and HP.
The report on Trends in the Well-Being of Children and Youth is updated annually to provide new data in areas already covered and to broaden the coverage of issues. This document is a valuable tool for the field and has contributed to the social indicators arena.
ASPE has supported the work of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics in a variety of ways over the past four years. Each agency involved in the Forum makes a financial contribution to support all aspects of the Forum's work. These funds are allocated by the Forum to specific agencies for funding publication of the annual indicators report, the publication of other reports, and support for other collaborative efforts.
The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) is the most important national survey for understanding issues around fertility and family formation. In the past the survey has only asked questions of a random sample of about 13,000 women ages 15 to 44. In Cycle 6, based on the recommendations of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, NCHS plans to add direct interviews of 7,000 men to obtain information from them about fertility and family formation similar to what is already asked of women. While we know from other research that gender influences decision making around sex and family formation, our ability to understand these dynamics has been greatly constrained up until now by a lack of solid information from men regarding their attitudes and behaviors.
This expansion of the NSFG is intended to integrate, over time, independent survey work that has been done with young men (Sonenstein/Urban Institute) and to include in subsequent NSFG cycles noncivilian and institutionalized populations of men. This expansion has implications for policy development in the areas of teen pregnancy prevention, out-of-wedlock childbearing, welfare, child support and paternity establishment, and father involvement.
Add Health is a school based study of adolescents in grades seven to twelve which 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).
This project continues ASPE's on-going core support for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). ASPE funds provide partial support for the continued collection and processing of longitudinal data relevant to research on economic factors and income support mechanisms, health, fertility, medical care and disability affecting the poor and the elderly. In addition, ASPE funds will fund an expansion of the set of welfare related questions to assess the entry effects of recent reforms.
Studies of well-being must begin by defining the groups of persons whose resources will be pooled for purposes of making comparisons. Currently, the unit of analysis for measuring poverty is the family (more specifically, the family and the unrelated individual) as defined by the Census Bureau. However, the structure of American families has changed significantly in the last quarter century. The Census Bureau, in "Experimental Poverty Measures, 1990 to 1997," examines the implications of broadening the unit of analysis by looking at four additional units: the cohabiting couple, housemate-roommate, roomer-boarders, and the entire household. This project is using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to develop poverty estimates based on the broader units of analysis and is using the experimental measures of poverty. The study will examine the characteristics of those units remaining in poverty using the broader measures including examining how they differ from units no longer reported as being in poverty. Both point-in-time and cross-sectional estimates will be examined. Extended measures of well-being were collected on the 1991 and 1992 SIPP panels. This information will be used to further examine the well-being of those no longer reported as being in poverty and of those remaining in poverty. The use of other surveys, such as the Consumer Expenditure Survey, to further enhance the analysis will be examined.
ASPE has a strong and ongoing interest in the quality and type of research used to evaluate social programs. While randomized field trial designs have been, and continue to be, useful in many program evaluations, there are circumstances (e.g., program saturation) that impede their use. In such instances, there are various alternative methods (non-randomized field trials) available that can provide the information needed by policy makers. Policy makers weigh research findings according to various factors, including perceived relevance, timeliness, and credibility of the evidence provided. Because some policy makers tend to view randomized field trials as the only acceptable method of evaluating policies and programs, there is a need to understand the use of alternative methods and their potential advantages and disadvantages relative to randomized field trials. It is also necessary to identify circumstances in which randomized field trials cannot and should not be conducted, ways to communicate these circumstances to policy makers, and ways to improve the communication between evaluators and policy makers about the potential value of evidence from non-randomized designs. In FY 1999 ASPE convened two meetings of expert social program and policy evaluators to discuss these issues and outline an agenda for follow-up. This project would fund a set of follow-up activities, including the development of papers and the communication of views to policy makers through publications, meetings or conferences.
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This study will, through several analytical methods, explore the service needs of families following the adoption of a child from the public child welfare system and assess the "state of the art" in the current array of post adoption services. The purpose of the project is to bring together what we know about post adoption services from existing research, what we can know with the analysis of national and/or multi-state data and visits to existing programs, and to suggest an agenda for future federal research on these issues, particularly as they arise from the Adoption and Safe Families Act. Study components will include a literature review, site visits to post-adoption service providers, and data analysis regarding issues of disruption, displacement, and dissolution if appropriate data sets can be identified. An assessment of evaluation issues and strategies regarding post-adoption services programs will also be prepared.
Through this contract, ASPE, in cooperation with ACF, is conducting a study of state and county child protection systems that will enhance the Federal government's knowledge of child protective services (CPS) in general, and of efforts to improve or reform CPS underway in States and communities, in particular. The study will inform the Federal Government about the current structure and landscape of child protective service systems in the United States and what system improvement efforts are underway. The study has five components: (1) a mail and/or phone survey of child protective services agencies, including collection of information from several types of respondents; (2) analysis of state laws, policy documents, reports and other material that describe state child protective services systems and their operation; (3) site visits to ten communities in order to gather more in-depth information than is possible by mail or phone;(4) preparation of a "white paper" on child protective service system improvement; and (5) convening a symposium on child protective services.
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Last updated: 02/04/04