XIII-TANF Research and Evaluation

XIII. TANF Research and Evaluation

Highlights of Major Research and Evaluation Findings
    Welfare Reform and Children: A Synthesis of Impacts in Five States
    Grants to States to Study Welfare Reform Outcomes, with an Emphasis on Current Caseload
Overview of Additional Research and Evaluation Efforts
    Evaluating Welfare Reform
    Promoting Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood
    Employment Retention and Advancement
    Effective Strategies for Serving the Hard to Employ
    Rural Welfare-to-Work Strategies
    Addressing the Needs of Other Special Populations
    Evaluation of the Welfare-to-Work Grants Program
    Poverty Dynamics
    Privatization of Welfare Services
    Improving the Use of TANF and Other Administrative Data

This chapter highlights a number of the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS') key research and evaluation initiatives pertaining to welfare reform and summarizes findings from recent research reports. HHS' research agenda in this area has two main goals:

(1) to contribute to the success of welfare reform by providing timely, reliable data to inform policy and program design and management, especially at the State and local levels where much of the decision-making has taken place; and (2) to inform the Nation of the effects of policies and programs on low-income children, families, communities, and the Nation as a whole.

The research undertaken to achieve these goals is carried out primarily by the Administration for Children and Families' (ACF) Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), also within HHS. OPRE and ASPE carefully coordinate their research agendas with each other and with other government agencies and private foundations. Many projects involve collaboration and partnerships.

The National Academy of Sciences convened a Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs to provide HHS with unbiased scientific recommendations for studying the outcomes of recent changes in the welfare system. In its 2001 report, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition, the Academy applauded HHS' broad-based welfare reform research agenda, while recommending improvements and expansions in data collection and the development of research questions and methodology. In 2002, the Academy released Studies of Welfare Populations: Data Collection and Research Issues, a collection of 14 papers that are intended as a guide and reference tool for researchers and program administrators seeking to improve the availability and quality of data on welfare and low-income populations for State- and National-level analyses.

The U.S. General Accounting Office, in a report titled Program Evaluation: An Evaluation Culture and Collaborative Partnerships Help Build Agency Capacity, identified ACF as one of five Federal agencies that have demonstrated a strong evaluation capacity as evidenced by a commitment to self-examination, data quality, analytical expertise, and collaborative partnerships. The report noted that at ACF, the evaluation of State Welfare-to-Work demonstration programs is part of a network of long-term Federal, State, and local efforts to develop effective welfare policy. It also found that ACF's longstanding collaborative relationship with ASPE contributed to the agency's expertise directly through advising on specific evaluations, as well as indirectly through building the expertise of the larger research community that conducts the evaluations.

This chapter summarizes recent research and evaluation findings and provides an overview of additional research and evaluation initiatives related to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program undertaken by HHS. The next section highlights results from four major research and evaluation projects designed to improve understanding of programs and policies serving low-income families, and the following section provides an overview of additional HHS projects in this area.

Highlights of Major Research and Evaluation Findings

Welfare Reform and Children: A Synthesis of Impacts in Five States

The Project on State-Level Child Outcomes augmented the welfare waiver demonstration evaluations in five States (Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota) to assess the effects of different welfare reform approaches on child well being. As originally conceived, the demonstration evaluations had focused primarily on adult behaviors and outcomes, such as changes in earnings and welfare dependency. This project added detailed data on children and family processes to these evaluations. The primary data source for each State study was a survey that focused mainly on young school-age children (those between the ages of five and twelve at the time of the interview). The follow-up period for the survey varied among the States, ranging from 2.5 to 6.5 years after random assignment. Between the years 2000 and 2002, the individual States participating in the project published their child impact findings. This report, compiled by researchers from Abt Associates, Child Trends, MDRC, and Mathematica Policy Research, synthesizes the results from all five States. The main impact findings from the synthesis are as follows:

There is little evidence that these programs resulted in widespread harm or benefit to young school-age children. Overall, impacts for these children were relatively few in number and small in size. The five programs were more likely to have statistically significant impacts on targeted outcomes for adults (i.e., on employment, earnings, welfare receipt, and income) than on other outcomes for adults, on children's lives, or on children's functioning.
Positive impacts on children's functioning appear to be related to increases in family income. The programs in the two States with the most consistent positive impacts on young school-age children—Connecticut and Minnesota—also increased family income. Florida's program increased family income more modestly, but had neutral, rather than positive, impacts on children.
The programs increased children's participation in child care. This is consistent with the increases in parental employment found across the studies. In some cases, the programs also increased participation in formal settings such as center-based care and before- and after-school programs.
In two of the States—Florida and Minnesota—the programs had the most favorable impacts on young school-age children in more disadvantaged families, such as those with a longer history of welfare receipt or less work experience. Conversely, for young school-age children in families least at risk of long-term welfare dependency, those impacts that did occur were negative. In the three other States (Connecticut, Indiana, and Iowa), there was little difference in the pattern of impacts on young school-age children by the level of family disadvantage.
The programs sometimes had negative impacts on adolescents' school performance. While the studies focused on young school-age children, data on a more limited number of measures on outcomes for adolescents were collected. Some programs reduced the proportion of adolescents performing above the average in school. Additionally, of the three programs that reported information about suspensions, one--the Florida program--increased suspensions from 33 to 41 percent, an 8 percentage point increase. The two programs that measured dropping out of school showed no impacts.

Grants to States to Study Welfare Reform Outcomes, with an Emphasis on Current Caseload

Following up on grants to States to study leavers and applicants (1998-2000), ASPE awarded several grants to States to examine the current caseload. In 2001, ASPE funded five States (California, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, and South Carolina) and the District of Columbia to study the characteristics of their TANF caseloads. Each State is collecting data on personal, family, and community factors that may present barriers to employment among welfare recipients using a standardized telephone survey. Topics covered include physical and mental health, disability, substance abuse, and domestic violence. To assist ASPE in designing the survey instrument, Mathematica Policy Research Inc. developed a summary report, Survey Design for TANF Caseload Project: Summary Report and Recommendations that reviews existing survey questions and scales focused on potential barriers to employment among TANF recipients. Using this report, ASPE tailored a survey instrument for use in the State studies. This core instrument has been approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and States have now completed data collection.

The District of Columbia published its final report, A Study of the District of Columbia's TANF Caseload, in October 2003. The results show that while the majority of DC TANF recipients face multiple employment liabilities, more than half were either working or had worked recently. Several employment challenges are more common among non-workers than workers -- including low work experience, lack of a high school degree/GED, mental health problems, chemical dependency, having a child with health problems and having difficulties with child care; however, low work experience and child care problems stand out as the only individual employment liabilities that are linked with not working, even after separating out the effect on work of other barriers. The remaining grantees continue to work on data analysis and the reporting of results.

These grants complement another study of the current welfare caseload, Families on TANF in Illinois: Employment Assets and Liabilities, released in June 2003. This study examines the characteristics, circumstances, and job readiness of single-parent TANF cases in Illinois. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation supported the development of the survey instrument and the collection of survey data, and ASPE contracted with Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. for the study design, data analysis, and writing of the report. Survey and administrative data cover the personal characteristics and situations, potential challenges for employment, compensating strengths and resources, preparation for employment, and employment outcomes of current TANF recipients.

The Illinois study found that two-fifths of recipients were working, most of them full-time. It also found that their combined earnings and program benefits seldom lifted them out of poverty. Most recipients were found to have significant human capital assets, such as recent work experience and familiarity with common job tasks, but also an array of significant challenges, especially caring for an infant or a family member with special needs, having a child care problem, or poor physical or mental health. Most recipients experience several such challenges, the greater the number of which reduces the likelihood of substantial employment. Since this study used the same core survey instrument as that of the TANF Caseload State grantees, comparison of caseload data across these studies will be possible in the near future.

Overview of Additional Research and Evaluation Efforts

Evaluating Welfare Reform

Over the past decade, HHS has made significant investments in research and evaluation focused on the implementation and impacts of State welfare reform initiatives. These have included projects focused on reforms carried out to test Welfare-to-Work strategies under the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program and a variety of policies to promote work and personal responsibility implemented by individual States under waiver demonstrations, assessments of reforms enacted under TANF, and the projects described above.

Prior to the passage of TANF, 43 States and the District of Columbia obtained waivers of certain program requirements in title IV-A of the Social Security Act (the Act), as authorized under section 1115 of the Act. ACF required an evaluation component as a part of each approved waiver. Continuation of evaluations begun under waivers was permitted but not required under the TANF statute. Twenty States were funded to complete ongoing evaluations, either as originally planned or modified. Funding for these projects continued through FY 2002 when only one State project (Minnesota) received funds. However, a number of States have continued to complete evaluations. During FY 2002, Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont and Virginia released final reports, Montana released an interim report, and Indiana released a report on the impacts of welfare reform on children under this series of grants. Through September of 2003, final evaluation reports were released by Indiana, Minnesota, Montana and Texas (as a series of six reports) on their waiver demonstrations and California issued an interim report. These reports outline lessons learned regarding the implementation of welfare reform programs in terms of work requirements, time limits, and enhanced earnings disregards. Findings from the waiver evaluations are particularly relevant to TANF, since these demonstrations first implemented many of the policies now incorporated under State TANF plans. Additional State reports are expected to be released in 2004 (California, New Hampshire, and Ohio).

ACF also contracted with Abt Associates Inc. to study the demographic and financial characteristics of families applying for assistance under TANF, and recently released a two-part report titled, Study of the TANF Application Process. The first part focused on TANF application policies and procedures and on the content, quality, and format of TANF application data based on surveys of the 54 States and Territories. It found that States often differ on how they define and count TANF application events. As the types of benefits funded by the TANF block grant have expanded, many States include counts of applications for benefits other than ongoing TANF cash assistance in their data on applications, but not necessarily in their data on caseloads. The differences in the definition and measurement of various application events are large enough to compromise the analysis of application data across States. The report finds that the collection of consistent National data for applications would be difficult. The second part of the study focused on TANF application policies and procedures, as well as on the application experiences and outcomes for a sample of families seeking assistance in six selected county and local welfare offices. In the sites with formal diversion policies, diversion was rarely imposed upon or chosen by applicants. In the sites studied, there was far more potential for informal diversion. For example, in five of the sites, from one-quarter to one-third of the research sample decided either not to apply for TANF or not to complete the TANF application process.

ASPE has contracted with Mathematica Policy Research, Inc to examine variations in States' policies, practices, and outcomes regarding the sanctioning of TANF households for failure to comply with work requirements. Previous studies have found wide variation in sanctioning rates across sites and even across offices within a single city. This study uses administrative data supplemented by site visits to improve our understanding of the outcomes for sanctioned families, including welfare exits and re-entries and participation in work activities. The study sites – Illinois, New Jersey and South Carolina – were selected to maximize variation and to leverage the contractor's previous knowledge of sites and experience with the administrative data sets. A review of the existing literature on TANF sanctions, including tables describing State policy choices, has been completed, and a report on the findings is expected in spring 2004.

ACF and ASPE are also attempting to better understand welfare reform in urban areas by supporting The Project on Devolution and Urban Change, a multi-disciplinary, longitudinal study of the implementation and impacts of welfare reform in four large urban areas - Cleveland (Cuyahoga County), Ohio; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, California; and Miami, Florida. All of the sites applied work participation requirements to a larger proportion of the welfare caseload than they had prior to TANF, and succeeded in engaging a higher proportion of recipients in Welfare-to-Work program activities. The most common work activity was unsubsidized employment. Recent findings are as follows:

The combination of employment and welfare status was the most consistent predictor of respondents' health-related outcomes, even after controlling for site differences and demographic characteristics.
Women who were employed at the time of the interview were substantially less likely to have physical or mental health barriers, or to experience material hardships than those who were not working.
Children of working women were also more likely than children of women not working to be healthy.
Nearly all the women who worked faced one or more challenges, such as health problems (theirs or a child's), lack of education, or depression. This suggests that these characteristics are not absolute barriers to employment, but they reduce the probability of stable employment.

This project surveyed prior welfare recipients in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor and welfare-dependent households. Surveys found this to be a disadvantaged population, as respondents and their children consistently did poorly on a range of health outcomes compared to National comparison samples. Nonetheless, about half of the survey respondents were working at the time of the interview, and another quarter had worked at some point in the past two years. However, most had low-wage jobs with earnings that left their families below the poverty level.

Welfare status was closely associated with access to health care. Welfare leavers, especially those who were not working, had significantly greater problems with health care access than current recipients. The most important reason for loss of non-welfare benefits, including food stamps and Medicaid, was failure to appear for TANF eligibility redetermination.

The most recent report synthesized data on welfare reform in Miami from all of the components of the Urban Change study: longitudinal administrative data, survey data, an implementation study, neighborhood indicators, and an ethnographic study. Similar synthesis reports on the remaining site in Urban Change (Los Angeles, CA) will follow over the next year.

Promoting Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood

ACF and ASPE have developed a multi-pronged approach to increasing knowledge in this important subject area. Building on earlier work, late in FY 2002 ACF awarded a contract to Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., to conduct the large-scale Building Strong Families Demonstration and Evaluation Project that will focus on the development and rigorous evaluation of interventions to increase the well-being of children through the promotion of healthy marriage and positive family functioning among interested low-income unwed parents. This project builds on recent research that found that, at the time of the birth of a child, many unwed parents have high hopes of marriage to each other. However, without intervention and supports, only about 10 percent marry within a year.

In FY 2002, ACF also funded several related studies including a study by Abt Associates of the determinants of union formation and analysis of data availability and gaps for future research, The final reports resulting from the Abt study, titled The Determinants of Marriage and Cohabitation among Disadvantaged Americans: Research Findings and Needs and Guide to Data Sources on the Determinants of Marriage and Cohabitation, were released in May 2003. In FY 2002 ACF also funded a study by the Urban Institute that will examine existing and potential settings for healthy marriage services to low-income populations as well as systematic review of the literature on the effectiveness of services to strengthen marriage. A report from the Urban Institute is expected in late 2004.

In addition, ASPE funded the Lewin Group to produce an inventory of State-level policies that support or promote marriage through various means, including media campaigns, special commissions, marriage and relationship preparation and education, youth education and development, divorce laws and procedures, court initiatives, State tax policies, welfare and other related policies, and specialized programs. The report, titled State Policies to Promote Marriage: Final Report, released in September 2002, expands on findings presented earlier under a preliminary report.

ASPE also funded a project with the Lewin Group to examine State efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock births. The final report, titled State Experiences and Perspectives on Reducing Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing, was released in February 2003. In addition to synthesizing existing surveys of related State efforts, the work also involved direct interviews with selected States to better understand changes in State efforts to reduce nonmarital births since passage of PRWORA, challenges or barriers encountered, the types of organizations involved, funding sources, and the potential role of the TANF bonus to reward decreases in illegitimacy.

In FY 2002 ASPE funded a project to examine differences among single- and two-parent family types in the TANF and Food Stamps programs. The project will describe trends in eligibility and participation and the various factors that might be related to those trends. Data from other analyses 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 is using output from various simulation models to describe the participation trends and regression analysis to examine the likely importance of State-level program rules and economic variables, as well as family and individual characteristics. The final report will be released in 2004.

ACF and ASPE also are jointly funding evaluation of the Partners for Fragile Families demonstrations in nine States in order to document the effects of these interventions on poor, young, unwed fathers' employment, child support payments, parenting and family relationships. ASPE and ACF also have funded grants to researchers to conduct additional analysis of data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Survey, a 20-city longitudinal survey of unwed parents beginning at the birth of their child. The findings are usually issued as conference papers or journal articles. Another project jointly funded by ACF and ASPE is a feasibility study to develop options using both administrative and survey data for gathering more complete data on marriage and divorce outcomes.

In FY 2003, ACF funded two additional major evaluation efforts to assess the effectiveness of different approaches to promoting healthy marriages. One evaluation will assess the effectiveness of community marriage initiatives and the other will evaluate interventions to promote healthy marriage and positive family functioning among low-income couples who are married or planning to marry. In addition, in FY 2003 ACF funded a project to document and develop a database based on a range of State and Federal policies relevant for low-income families and analyze the potential effects of the policies alone and in combination based on marital status or living arrangements. ACF also funded a project to examine and assess the state of the art in measuring marriage and couple relationships. Further, in FY 2003 ASPE and ACF jointly funded a project to explore options for the collection of marriage and divorce statistics at the national, State and local levels.

Employment Retention and Advancement

Over the last eight years, ACF has committed research funds to address varied issues related to increasing employment among welfare recipients. ACF's latest major initiative in this area, The Employment Retention and Advancement Evaluation (ERA), builds on earlier experience in order to test experimentally a new generation of approaches to promoting employment retention and advancement.

The goal of this multi-year demonstration and evaluation project is to gain knowledge about how best to help low-income families sustain attachment to, and advancement in, the labor market. ACF and the contractor, MDRC, have worked with participating development sites to fully implement their programs. By the middle of 2003, 15 intervention strategies had been implemented in eight States (California, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, and Texas). A first report on the ERA project was released in October 2002. In early 2004 we released a report that details some of the early lessons learned in implementing employment retention and advancement programs. The report also examines the relationships between TANF and Workforce Investment Act agencies in the provision of retention and advancement services for low-income workers.

All sites are randomly assigning participants to control and experimental groups, and several important variations on the retention and advancement themes are being tried:

Cleveland is experimenting with a cooperative effort between employers and the TANF agency that offers career progression.
New York is attempting to enhance employment retention and advancement among substance abusers.
Texas is offering significant cash incentives to increase participation in its post-employment services program.
Minnesota is providing enhanced services for participants with acute mental health problems.
Eugene, Oregon is targeting newly employed TANF recipients with a variety of flexible education, training, and career development services designed to help participants advance into better jobs.
South Carolina is aggressively reaching out to former welfare recipients who have been off the rolls for at least nine months, attempting to locate and work with prior TANF recipients who may need employment-related assistance in order to avoid recidivism.
Los Angeles, California is testing a variation of "work first" in the form of enhanced job club activities.

Effective Strategies for Serving the Hard-to-Employ

State and local TANF officials and other service providers have expressed the need for more information and guidance as they develop employment-focused strategies to work more effectively with TANF recipients who face substantial barriers to employment. These include adults with substance abuse and/or mental health problems, physical or developmental disabilities, learning disabilities or very low basic skills, those who have experienced domestic violence, or those who have a general history of low and intermittent employment. In many instances, agencies will need new methods and strategies to meet the needs of individuals facing one or more of these barriers in order for them to enter and succeed in the labor market.

ACF, ASPE, and the Department of Labor (DOL) are funding a major evaluation project that builds on lessons from earlier work and is intended to increase knowledge about the most effective strategies for helping hard-to-employ parents find and sustain employment and improve family and child well-being. The project is a multi-year, multi-site effort that has begun with a process of first identifying agencies and organizations already working or interested in working with such parents and then working further with promising sites towards designing and implementing programs that address barriers to employment by using state-of-the art methods and approaches. The evaluation will utilize an experimental design to assess program effectiveness and will document the implementation and operational lessons from the perspective of program operators, administrators, and participants. We began selecting initial sites for participation in the evaluation in mid-2003 and expect to complete the site selection process in 2004.

Rural Welfare-to-Work Strategies

ACF is investing resources to learn how best to help TANF and other low-income rural families enter into and sustain employment. This study will help identify effective rural Welfare-to-Work strategies, operational challenges, and solutions that can be used by State and local TANF agencies and others.

In FY 2000, ACF awarded a contract to Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., for an evaluation of rural Welfare-to-Work strategies employing a random assignment experimental design. The project will assess programs being implemented in Illinois and Nebraska. The evaluation will highlight promising models and determine the effectiveness and cost-benefits of these Welfare-to-Work strategies in rural areas.

The Illinois Future Steps Program, implemented in five counties in southern Illinois beginning in July 2001, has an intensive employment and case management program tailored to people with low incomes.
The Building Nebraska Families Program is an education-based developmental program that began in March 2002 and works with participants in 37 rural counties throughout the State. It provides one-on-one instruction and assistance in clients' homes focused on helping Nebraska's TANF/Employment First clients who have not found or sustained employment through regular program activities get enhanced services.

Addressing the Needs of Other Special Populations

In FY 1999, ACF and ASPE contracted with the Urban Institute to examine critical issues in the screening and assessment of TANF and/or Welfare-to-Work recipients who experience barriers to employment, with a focus on substance abuse, mental health or illness, low basic skills, physical or developmental disabilities (including learning disabilities), and domestic violence. The March 2001 report, Screening and Assessment in TANF/Welfare-to-Work: Ten Important Questions TANF Agencies and Their Partners Should Consider, discusses the important issues and challenges faced by TANF agencies and administrators as they develop screening and assessment strategies for identifying TANF recipients with significant barriers to employment. Three regional meetings were held in 2000 and 2001 to further discuss these issues, and site visits to six States and localities were undertaken to describe local approaches to screening, assessment, and service delivery. Discussion of the site visits is contained in Screening and Assessment in TANF/Welfare-to-Work: Local Answers to Difficult Questions, published in December 2001.

Evaluation of the Welfare-to-Work Grants Program

While the welfare reform law of 1996 heralded a new emphasis on work first and time limits, policy makers also acknowledged that those most likely to remain on welfare would be those with the greatest barriers to employment. Congress created a temporary program, the Welfare-to-Work (WtW) Grants Program administered by the Department of Labor, to provide additional resources targeted at getting the hardest-to-serve members of the TANF population, including the non-custodial parents of children on TANF, into work. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 authorizing the WtW grants program also required HHS to evaluate the program's effectiveness and report findings to Congress. ASPE, the lead for HHS on this project, has worked closely with the Office of Management and Budget, the Departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development, and ACF in designing and implementing the six-year study that began in August 1998.

The evaluation consists of a description of the implementation status and structure of the grantees' programs, an enhanced process and implementation study that describes implementation and operational realities and examines administrative and survey data for a sample of WtW program participants in order to measure changes in their employment and well-being outcomes over time, and a separate process and implementation study of Tribal WtW programs. The evaluation also focuses on sub-populations of particular interest, such as non-custodial parents. The two evaluation reports to Congress required under the law, have been completed. An additional report under the Tribal component of the evaluation will provide information on Tribes' experiences with economic development. Findings to date are as follows:

The Welfare-to-Work Grants Program: Enrollee Outcomes One Year After Program Entry — Report to Congress This report presents findings from the outcomes analysis component of the evaluation. It describes the characteristics and subsequent experiences of enrollees in W-t-W programs in 11 study sites, and addresses the kinds of services enrollees received, their success in the labor market, and their well-being one year after program entry.

Operating TANF: Opportunities and Challenges for Tribes and Tribal Consortia. This report presents the experiences of 10 Tribal grantees in planning, implementing and operating Tribal TANF programs. Among other things, study grantees emphasized the importance of developing a sound Tribal TANF plan, coordinating with state staff, and addressing challenges with reporting program performance.

Implementation of the Welfare-to-Work Program. This report describes the implementation of the WtW program in 11 sites based on information collected through two rounds of site visits in 1999 and 2001, and management information system data maintained by the programs. The programs fell into three general models for delivery of services: Enhanced Direct Employment, Developmental/Transitional Employment, and Intensive Post-Employment Skills Development.

Understanding the Costs of DOL Welfare-to-Work Grants Programs. This report examines the costs of 18 WtW programs in nine in-depth evaluation sites to identify the cost structure of these programs and the factors that influenced their costs. The costs per participant in these programs ranged from $1,887 to $6,641, reflecting differences in the package of services that participants received.

The Evaluation of the Tribal Welfare-to-Work Grants Program: Initial Implementation Findings. This report from the Tribal component of the evaluation documents the socioeconomic circumstances of Tribes, their approaches to implementing WtW and welfare reform, the kinds of work support services offered, and the ways in which WtW funding can help support child care, transportation, and economic development for Tribes.

Program Structure and Service Delivery in Eleven Welfare-to-Work Grant Programs. This interim implementation report shows that WtW grant programs have been innovative despite initial delays in start-up and enrollment; that most WtW services are delivered through highly decentralized systems; that most programs serve all WtW-eligible individuals, but some focus on particular subgroups, such as non-custodial parents or those with particularly difficult barriers to work; that activities are primarily work-focused; and that most WtW administrative agencies are workforce development agencies but often have formal ties with TANF.

Serving Non-custodial Parents: A Descriptive Study of Welfare-to-Work Programs. This study examines 11 WtW grants programs with a focus on serving non-custodial parents, and finds that such programs tend to be more successful when recruitment activities are well-designed, multiple agencies collaborate in service provision, a combination of positive inducements and pressures for participation are present, and a variety of employment support services are made available.

Learning from Tribal Experience: The Evaluation of the Tribal Welfare-to-Work Grants Program. This report describes ways in which Tribes are implementing welfare reform and Welfare-to-Work programs, including integration of services, partnerships with State TANF agencies, provision of support services such as transportation and child care, and responding to low education levels and substance abuse on reservations.

Poverty Dynamics

For Transition Events in the Dynamics of Poverty, ASPE contracted with the Urban Institute to examine transition events associated with people entering and exiting poverty using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The study found that poverty entries and exits changed over the past two decades, with an increase in both poverty entries and exits (i.e., "cycling") in the mid-1990s. Descriptive analysis shows that individuals who experience a shift in household structure (i.e., from a two-parent to a single female household, or vice versa) are the most likely to enter or exit poverty. However, when controlling for important demographic and economic factors, the likelihood of entering or exiting poverty is highest for individuals experiencing employment shifts.

Privatization of Welfare Services

The privatization of welfare services has increased significantly and expanded into new services since passage of welfare reform gave States additional flexibility to design and operate their TANF programs. Despite its increasing popularity, privatizing welfare services poses significant challenges to the State and local government agencies that are responsible for contracting out. A recent ASPE report, Privatization in Practice: Case Studies of Contracting for TANF Case Management, describes the key decisions and activities undertaken in privatizing TANF case management and documents the lessons learned in six study sites from their experiences in privatizing TANF case management. Key topics include (1) the why, what and to whom of privatizing TANF case management; (2) ensuring a fair, effective and competitive procurement process; (3) designing contract performance measures and payment structures; (4) monitoring TANF contractors to ensure accountability; (5) addressing the challenges of service provision under privatization; and (6) some key lessons learned by public welfare agencies as they took on new responsibilities in privatizing TANF case management. Study sites contracted with a variety of organizations, including both for-profits and non-profits (including faith-based organizations), and used a variety of contract types, including pure pay-for-performance, cost-reimbursement, fixed price, and hybrid contracts.

Improving the Use of TANF and Other Administrative Data

ASPE and ACF have been working collaboratively on a series of projects to improve the use of TANF administrative data, both for program management and for research purposes. One such project has developed user-oriented enhancements to ACF/OFA's web-based TANF reporting system that States use to enter aggregate data for TANF and related programs. The enhancements are intended to make the system more useful to the States and others for program management and monitoring. A second project, still underway, concerns disaggregated, micro-level TANF data and the development of a new software tool for use by States in analyzing data for program management and performance measurement. Another series of research projects, funded by ASPE, examines experiences in the low-wage labor market using linked administrative and survey data housed at U.S. Bureau of Census in their Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data program. These data contain linked administrative records on both workers' wages and the employers they work for, as well as detailed information from surveys such as CPS, SIPP and decennial census for a subset of those workers. One recently released paper from this series of projects, The Interactions of Workers and Firms in the Low-Wage Labor Market, presents an analysis of job retention and wage advancement for workers who have a history of persistently low earnings in the past. Another project, currently underway, uses the LEHD to examine similar outcomes for TANF recipients, although this analysis is limited to recipients identified in the decennial census data. HHS is exploring the possibility of adding TANF administrative data to the LEHD in the future, to improve the value of these data for study of TANF recipients and former recipients.