Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition (2001) / Chapter Skim
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3. Research Questions and Populations of Interest
3. Research Questions and Populations of Interest
Pages 36-53
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From page 36... ...
Finally, we assess whether the existing monitoring and evaluation efforts summarized in Chapter 2 adequately cover all the important groups and outcomes of interest for welfare programs and whether these efforts adequately address the priority research questions of interest.
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From page 37... ...
and Early Head Start programs; children have also been the focus of more long-standing programs, such as Social Security Insurance and Head Start. Recent welfare reform was primarily directed at changing the old AFDC program into the new TANF program.
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From page 38... ...
Families in particularly poor physical or mental health; the disabled; individuals with a history of substance abuse; women and men who experience domestic violence; men with a criminal history who have difficulty reintegrating into society, families with troubled adolescents; children with special physical, cognitive, or behavioral problems; and abused and neglected children are examples of groups with such special problems. Programmatically-defined groups, such as child-only cases, two-parent family cases, and poor but ineligible immigrants, should also be of interest in
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From page 39... ...
Other subgroups of the lowincome population have special needs that require assistance independent of their effects on employment, including: families with poor physical or mental health, substance abuse problems, or problems of domestic violence, as well as families with troubled adolescents or children with special physical, cognitive, or behavioral problems. OUTCOMES OF INTEREST A comprehensive list of all the outcomes of interest in welfare evaluations would be quite long and is not appropriate for this report.
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While some people believe that the government should limit its assistance for welfare and other programs, others believe that government should provide assistance outside welfare through more universal programs, such as EITC, child support enforcement, and universal health insurance. Others take a position between these.
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From page 41... ...
Each of these broadly defined outcomes discussed here individual adult and family well-being outcomes, such as income, poverty, consumption, employment, education and health; traditional measures of children's physical, cognitive, emotional and behavioral well-being; family structure and family formation outcomes, such as marriage and divorce, childbearing, teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births; and outcomes of governments themselves, such as expenditures, caseloads, and administrative structures should be studied as part of a comprehensive welfare program research agenda. Conclusion 3.4 The set of outcomes of interest for studies of welfare reform should be defined broadly to include all the outcomes that the different audiences of studies of welfare reform the public, Congress and state legislators, and other governmental officials and program administrators are concerned about.
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From page 42... ...
Assessing the overall effect of PRWORA is necessarily a retrospective question, although we argue that the answers to this question may have implications for future systemwide changes. Questions of the effects of broad components and detailed strategies are retrospective in that they assess the effects of policies already in place.
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From page 43... ...
Under TANF, program authority has devolved to the states, who now have the discretion to devise programs of their own choosing (subject to a few requirements in the PRWORA legislation)
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From page 44... ...
Thus, once again, 2These programs can be financed out of federal block grant dollars or state maintenance-of-effort funds. States are required to continue to spend their own funds on social welfare programs at a level that is a fraction of what each state' s spending was before PRWORA.
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From page 45... ...
However, capturing that benefit of policy variation requires that the policies be documented in sufficient detail for accurate characterization when conducting a formal evaluation analysis. Formally Evaluating the Impact of Welfare Reform A critical set of questions concerns the formal evaluation of the effects of welfare reform, where by formal evaluation we mean a rigorous assessment of the effects of a change in policy on outcomes relative to what would happen in the absence of that change.
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From page 46... ...
This three-tier classification of the questions that need to be asked is useful because each type of question requires a different evaluation strategy and somewhat different data, as discussed in the next two chapters, and because there are different audiences for each of the three questions. The overall effect takes into account not just the immediate effects on welfare recipients, but also the multiple systemic changes that result, such as changes in the nature of the welfare system, in the expectations that the individuals and the families in the low-income population (including current nonrecipients)
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From page 47... ...
Such evaluations could identify the subgroups toward whom new policies could be addressed. The second category of question that many audiences find interesting is the effect of individual, broad components of welfare reform, such as family caps, time limits, work sanctions, and special provisions applicable to teenage parents.
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From page 48... ...
Nevertheless, the importance that many give to determining the incremental contribution of time limits to the effect of welfare reform illustrates the policy importance of questions surrounding the effects of broad program components. The third category of evaluation questions concerns the effects of detailed strategies and detailed programs and approaches within the broad components.
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From page 49... ...
What are the effects of the individual broad components of welfare reform on the well-being of the low income population and subpopulations of interest? What are the effects of specific detailed strategies within each of the broad program components on the well-being of the lowincome population and the subpopulations of interest what works and for whom?
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From page 50... ...
ASSESSMENT The set of welfare reform projects under way at the present time is impressive in its scope, volume, and diversity. The number of projects is unprecedented compared to any prior era of welfare reform evaluation such as, for example, the evaluation efforts following the landmark 1981 and 1988 legislation referred to in Chapter 1.
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From page 51... ...
With respect to the evaluation questions of interest, most are being addressed by one or more research studies in the set we discussed in Chapter 2. The overall effects of PRWORA and welfare reform have been addressed in the caseload and econometric modeling literature, in which the effects of individual broad components have also been studied.
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From page 52... ...
We recommend therefore that ASPE take a more proactive and public role in this regard. Recommendation 3.1 The panel recommends that ASPE take primary responsibility for publicly defining the questions of interest for welfare reform research and evaluation, identifying emerging issues for social welfare programs, and defining alternative detailed strategies and policies that address the what-works-and-for-whom questions.
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From page 53... ...
Recommendation 3.2 ASPE should produce an annual report to Congress that, among other things, presents a comprehensive list of the important questions to be addressed in welfare reform research, describes how those questions are being addressed in the overall landscape of welfare reform studies, and explains how its own research agenda relates to those questions and to other studies under way.
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