Content by Keyword: Poverty and Measurement

Current Status: This project is a supplement to an ongoing four-year study of the implications of welfare reform for low-income families living in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio (a summary of the study is available at < http://www.jhu.edu/~welfare> ). The broader study is being undertaken by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Pennsyl

Current Status: ASPE and other federal agencies contributed funds in 1998 and 1999 to award a grant to the Urban Institute to deepen our understanding of the impact of recent changes in Federal laws on immigrant families and children by conducting a large-scale study of immigrants and their communities in Los Angeles and New York City. See Resul

Current status: ASPE awarded approximately $807,000 in grants in FY 1999 to support seven researcher-initiated proposals to study important questions related to the outcomes of welfare reform. Through these grants, we are supporting efforts to analyze a variety of information about low-income individuals (both adults and children) and their famili

Current status: One of the Congress's major objectives in providing welfare outcomes money to ASPE over the last several years is to measure outcomes for a broad population of low-income families, welfare recipients, former recipients, potential recipients, and other special populations affected by state TANF policies, including diversion practice

Thirteen states and large counties received funding in September 1998 to study the outcomes of welfare reform on individuals and families who leave welfare. Some of the grants also included studies of families who applied for cash welfare but never enrolled and families who appear to be eligible but not enrolled. See < http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/l

How Low-Wage Working Families Cope as Parents and Workers

National Academy of Sciences Panel Study on Welfare Outcomes

Researcher Initiated Grants on Welfare Outcomes

Following are descriptions of projects ASPE funded in FY 2000 from the targeted appropriation to study welfare outcomes.

1. In FY 1999, an additional $837,000 was awarded for continuations and extensions of several of the FY 1998 projects. Also funded in FY 1999 were leavers studies in Iowa, Texas, and Contra Costa County, California, as well as several applicant/diversion studies.

This project organized into a data archive the Characteristics Surveys of AFDC recipients (which were carried out every two years from 1967 through 1979) and the annual AFDC Quality Control administrative data (collected from 1982 through 1996). These data facilitate comparisons between the TANF program and its predecessor AFDC program to analyze

ASPE undertook three related projects using the newly available source of welfare reform data collected through the Emergency TANF Data Report (ETDR): (1) working with the Administration for Children and Families' Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, to improve the collection, storage, and release of these data; (2) doing cross-sectional

This project promoted state efforts to develop and monitor indicators of the health and well-being of children as welfare reform and other significant policy changes occur. Capacity building was the fundamental goal of the project. It has been very successful in getting states to look seriously at their capacity to assess trends in children's well

In 1999, 29 percent of TANF cases were child-only families in which only children received the benefits. We know from earlier data (1998) that in about 40 percent of these families the children are living with adult relatives who are not their parents (and benefits are paid only on behalf of the children under their care), while in the remaining 6

Since 1997, HHS, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice have been funding the Urban Institute under a cooperative agreement to study the impact of recent changes in Federal laws on immigrant families and children and to profile immigrants with regard to their health, employment, economic circumstances and participation in gove

In fiscal year 1997, ASPE funded the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty to conduct an administrative data study of the outcomes of families who left AFDC in Wisconsin during 1995. The reports produced during the first study provided useful early results for the Department on the short-term economic and employment outcomes of

The Conference Report accompanying the 1998 targeted appropriation specified that the Department assess the potential for using food stamp administrative data to look at welfare "leavers" and nonparticipants at the national level. Historically, almost all of the households that received AFDC/TANF also participated in the Food Stamp Program.

Welfare caseload numbers released in August showed that the number of welfare recipients has decreased from 14.1 million in January 1993 to 6.3 million in December 1999 - a drop of 56 percent, or 7.8 million. Nearly three-quarters of this overall decline has occurred since the welfare reform law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Re

Conference Report language accompanying the targeted welfare outcomes research funding for Fiscal Years 1998 and 1999 urged the Department to submit its research plan to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to receive guidance on research design and recommendations for further research. Accordingly, we have provided over $1 million to the NAS to