Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition (2001) / Chapter Skim
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2. Welfare Reform Monitoring and Evaluation: The Current Landscape
2. Welfare Reform Monitoring and Evaluation: The Current Landscape
Pages 24-35
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From page 24... ...
descriptive and monitoring studies; (ii) studies of welfare leavers and related groups; (iii)
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From page 25... ...
Before describing the studies, we briefly note who the major supporting funders are and how the types of funders of current welfare reform research differ from those in past eras. Major Supporting Funders The most active federal governmental agencies supporting research on welfare reform are ASPE and the Administration for Children and Families (ACF)
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From page 26... ...
Monitoring studies are important because they signal whether the wellbeing of the target population is improving, deteriorating, or remaining the same. They are also useful in identifying specific subgroups that are doing particularly poorly, and may therefore, be in need of additional assistance, regardless of what might have caused that condition.
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From page 27... ...
The Urban Change Study and the Three-City Study involve four urban counties and three cities respectively. Both studies have longitudinal, in-person surveys as a central element, and both have an ethnographic component as well; the Urban Change Study also has an implementation component and a neighborhood indicators component.
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From page 28... ...
Indeed, studies of these welfare leavers constitute by far the most common type of welfare reform study conducted since 1996. Most of these studies are specific to a particular state or area within a state, and most to date have only measured employment and earnings outcomes of leavers from administrative data; a few, especially ASPE-sponsored studies, have conducted short telephone or in-person interviews as well.1 The goal of these studies is, simply, to track the well-being of women who have left welfare.
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From page 29... ...
These two cohorts were to be compared to assess whether rates of leaving and leaver outcomes were different after PRWORA than before, thereby addressing the issue of whether leaver outcomes have indeed changed over time. In fiscal 1999, ASPE funded seven more states to expand significantly on the scope of the leaver studies to examine applicants as well as leavers, diverted applicants as well as other applicants, and eligible nonapplicants.
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From page 30... ...
The PostEmployment Services Demonstration was an experiment testing alternative strategies for increasing the rate at which welfare recipients keep jobs once they have obtained them. The Employment Retention and Advancement Project, sponsored by ACE, followed up on this demonstration with a large and more comprehensive experimental test of alternative strategies to assist welfare recipients and welfare leavers in retaining jobs.
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From page 31... ...
The evaluation of the pilot phase of the Minnesota Family Investment Program, for example, tested a package of reforms containing more generous earnings disregards and some new work requirements.5 The New Hope evaluation and the Canadian Self-Sufficiency Program evaluation both test programs that have a few of the features of post-PRWORA programs, but both differ from welfare reform policies significantly in many important respects and are generally quite different in philosophy, particularly in their heavy emphasis on earnings subsidies. The results from these experiments will be useful if the particular reforms they test arise in future policy discussions in Congress, but they are not directly relevant to the effects of PRWORA.
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From page 32... ...
A number of the monitoring and leaver studies already mentioned have some type of implicit econometric evaluation components as well. The most common type of evaluation design is what we termed a cohort comparison study in our interim report (National Research Council, 1999~: the Urban Change Study, the Three-City Study, and the NSAF all have plans for this type of analysis, as do some of the leaver studies.
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From page 33... ...
Finally, the Congressional Research Service has also used state TANF plans reported to DHHS and ACE to produce reports summarizing state program rules on different topics.
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From page 34... ...
A second group of studies consists primarily of data collection projects, most often collection of administrative data. These include a national survey of women and children in the child welfare system, as well as data assembly projects at UC-Data in California, a six-city consortium led by the University of Baltimore, and a multiple-state study using confidential data on business firms collected by the Census Bureau.
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From page 35... ...
ACE has funded state evaluations of employment retention initiatives and rural welfare reform strategies. Both the Urban Change and Los Angeles Survey of Families and Communities studies have components that study neighborhoods in low-income communities in the aftermath of welfare reform.
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