Ticket to Work Evaluation (January 2006)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Ticket To Work Evaluation and this report have benefited greatly from the support and advice provided by our project officer, Paul O'Leary. He helped us set research priorities, get feedback on intermediate findings, and use SSA administrative data files. He also provided very helpful comments on a draft of this report.

Lesley Hildebrand, Miriam Loewenberg, Dawn Phelps, and Jacqueline Agufa worked miracles with the huge administrative data sets that underlie many aspects of this report and the evaluation. Jesse Gregory programmed many of the statistical analyses and Jennifer Chunn conducted extensive analyses of the survey data under a tight timeframe in order to get the early survey findings into this report. Grant Revell and Meredith Edwards helped to interview many Ticket to Work providers and to synthesize our process analysis interviews. Steve Glazerman provided useful comments on the draft. Daryl Hall edited the report, and Sharon Clark led the production effort.

Our data analysis was greatly facilitated by SSA staff, particularly those in the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics within the Office of Policy. They answered our questions and provided guidance about the most appropriate data sets and variables. Several of them also provided data extracts for the evaluation. We would particularly like to acknowledge the assistance provided by Linda Martin, Mary Barbour, Charlie Scott, Joel Packman, Patricia McFadden, Randall Miles, Bill Kearns, Joe Steffens, Jasmin Kakar, Eileen Hull, Bernie Wasiljov, John Saylor, Lou Koontz, Jim Steiner, and Michael Zambonato.

SSA staff from the Office of Operations, the Office of Employment Support Programs within the Office of Disability and Income Support Programs, and the Office of Systems provided detailed comments on a draft of this report. We also received valuable feedback from the Office of the Chief Actuary about our analysis of EN Costs and Revenue.

We want to add a special note of thanks to those individuals who provided the implementation and operational information we used to develop this report, including staff from the SSA central, regional, and field offices, from the Ticket to Work Program Manager, and from the many service providers whose experiences are discussed in this report.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank the more than 7,500 beneficiaries who responded to the National Beneficiary Survey. We hope that this report and the broader Ticket to Work Evaluation will provide information to help make their lives better.