Lisa A. Gennetian

Children and Welfare Reform: A View from an Experimental Welfare Program in Minnesota

Little is known about the effects of the most recent welfare reform initiatives--which include work mandates, time limits, and enhanced earnings disregards--on childrens outcomes. This is partly because the ways in which maternal employment and income affect children more generally are not well understood. This article describes the effects on child development of the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), a welfare program that began prior to 1996 federal welfare reform legislation. The present study utilized MFIPs unique, three-group research design to untangle the effects of different components of the program, and, in turn, discover how each components effects on parents income or employment affected childrens development. This studys findings showed that MFIP increased employment rates and decreased poverty and, according to reports from mothers, children were less likely to exhibit problem behaviors and more likely to perform better and be more highly engaged in school. These findings, based on a total of 879 participants, bolster the long-standing literature that has associated poverty with worse outcomes for children by confirming, in a rigorous experiment, that incremental increases in income for working poor parents bring benefits to children.

How an earnings supplement can affect union formation among low-income single mothers

Using data from an experimental evaluation in two Canadian provinces, we found that offering an earnings supplement to single mothers in place of welfare altered rates of marriage and cohabitation, but that the direction of the effects varied by province. Our findings suggest that research on the relationship between women’s economic well-being and marital decisions at the national level is likely to mask important variation at the local level. After eliminating several explanations for the opposite effects in the two provinces, we propose that local labor markets and local policy contexts are potentially important mediating characteristics of marriage and cohabitation.

Patterns and Determinants of Paternal Child Care During a Child's First Three Years of Life

SUMMARY This paper uses retrospective child care data from the NLSY79 to examine the patterns and determinants of paternal child care during a childs first three years of life. We focus on two-parent families with children whose mothers worked sometime between the childs birth date and the childs third birthday. We find that father care is a fairly stable form of care; the average number of months that father care is used during a year is similar to the duration of other forms of child care. In addition, we find that paternal care is often used in conjunction with other types of child care. We further find that different characteristics predict paternal child care according to the timing and extent of care. For those fathers who are the exclusive providers of child care during the first year of a childs life, the incidence of paternal child care is associated with race or ethnicity and a mothers identification with nontraditional gender roles. In contrast, for those fathers who provide some of total child care during the first three years of a childs life, the incidence of paternal child care is more highly associated with the flexibility of a mothers and fathers work schedule.

Indicators and Policy Decisions: The Important Role of Experimental Studies

Many strong arguments can be made to support the collection of good indicators of children’s well-being and for using such indicators to inform policy and practice. Indeed, indicators such as rates of teen pregnancy, high school graduation, or dropping out can support, contradict, or generally inform public and political opinion about the circumstances of young people today and that is why great effort and resources are expended in collecting and refining child indicator data.1 Indicators, however, are just one of several important tools for policymakers to rely upon when faced with making difficult policy decisions. Indicator data alone cannot provide information or specific guidance about a policy response to a social problem. Experimental studies are a key type of social science research—the “gold standard” method for untangling cause from effect—that can fulfill this role for policymakers and serve as a necessary complement to indicator data to best inform policy decisions. Here we make the case for the role of experimental studies as the link between indicator data (identifying a social policy concern) and policy decisions. We describe how the results from experimental studies can inform policy decisions as well as the choice of which indicators to study. One of the strongest research methods for evaluating the effects of social policy on human behavior is the randomized experiment, also known as random assignment design. Randomization entails using a lottery-like process to assign each eligible sample member to a group that is offered the intervention or a group that is not. This random process ensures that the two groups are the same (in expectation) in all ways, except that one group tests the intervention. Therefore, any statistically significant differences that are subsequently observed between the two groups can be confidently attributed to the intervention. There is a long history of reliance on random assignment designs, especially in the medical community, to pinpoint the success or failure of a treatment (e.g., see Cochrane Collaboration, 2002). Well-designed and properly implemented random assignment studies can also answer questions about the effectiveness of social policy interventions, producing findings that are largely undisputed and easy to interpret. Identifying how an individual is affected by a particular treatment in the multitude of influences that affect their day-to-day lives is complicated. By eliminating all factors except the treatment, randomization is the most rigorous technique for studying cause-and-effect relationships. There were more than 800,000 individuals involved in 220 random assignment studies of new or existing social policies between 1962 and 1997 (Greenberg and Shroder, 1997).