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Welfare reform is often seen as a tool that can be used to do much more than raise earnings and reduce dependence on government assistance. FSA, for example, sought to bring about a sea change in people's attitudes toward welfare receipt. Some policymakers believe that reducing welfare use will have positive spillover effects on poor families, such as increases in marriage rates, reductions in out-of-wedlock childbearing, and alleviation of a range of social problems that they see as being linked to welfare use. None of the NEWWS programs were designed to change family circumstances directly. Furthermore, even the five years of follow-up data collected in NEWWS might not be sufficient to detect such changes.
All 11 NEWWS programs, however, reduced welfare receipt -- in some cases dramatically -- and increased employment and earnings. As a result, the effects that the programs had on several aspects of family circumstances can be examined to shed light on whether decreasing welfare use and increasing work can indirectly affect other aspects of family life.
At the time of study entry, all the NEWWS sample members were single mothers. Over the five-year follow-up period, roughly equal proportions of those in the control and program groups married, indicating that none of the programs had an impact on marriage. Several of the programs did, however, increase the proportion of sample members who cohabited with a partner. Similarly, most of the programs did not affect the proportion of single mothers who added a new baby to their household over the five years through birth, marriage, adoption, or foster care or the proportion whose households included extended family members or other adults. Finally, in only one site -- Grand Rapids -- were there effects on housing; compared with control group members, members of the program groups moved more often (to obtain better housing), and HCD group members were more likely to own homes.
At the five-year follow-up point, NEWWS program group members were less likely than control group members to report having experienced domestic abuse of a physical nature during the prior year. (There were no differences between the groups on measures of nonphysical abuse and job-related harassment.) The rates at which people reported having experienced physical abuse during the last year of the follow-up period ranged from 19 percent to 22 percent among control group members; the programs decreased these rates by 3 to 6 percentage points. There is some evidence that these reductions were fostered by increases in employment -- which may have raised people's self-esteem or self-efficacy, ameliorated family stress, or simply reduced the amount of time spent with partners -- and by caseworkers' attention to support services. Notably, NEWWS did not try to identify women who might be in imminent danger related to abuse. For some women, work may lead to greater safety. For others, especially those in imminent danger of abuse, employment may not have such positive effects, which may make it difficult for them to work or comply with welfare-to-work program requirements.
When people leave welfare for work, they run the risk of losing health care coverage, because they will immediately or eventually lose their Medicaid coverage and often are not offered or cannot afford private insurance -- which they would most likely get through their employer -- to replace it. Transitional Medicaid is available to families for up to one year after they leave welfare, but this benefit has been underused, probably because many newly employed welfare recipients are not aware of their eligibility for it. Some of the NEWWS programs decreased health care coverage two years into the study period, but none affected adults' or children's coverage at the end of the five years. Because the programs increased employment, however, they did lead to a shift from public to private coverage at the five-year follow-up point. Only two programs increased the use of Transitional Medicaid but, at the end of the five years, neither program had led to an overall rise in health care coverage.
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During the two decades before FSA's passage, mothers receiving welfare who had children under age 6 were generally not subject to the participation and work requirements of welfare-to-work programs. With FSA's passage came the advent of mandatory participation in welfare-to-work activities for mothers with young children. Because the new mandate's implications for young children caused considerable concern in the early 1990s, the children in NEWWS who were preschool-aged at the time of random assignment were examined especially closely. The well-being of children of other ages was also examined in NEWWS. The passage of PRWORA, which imposed participation mandates on mothers with children as young as age 1 (or even younger, at states' option), renewed concern about the effects of welfare reform on children. The NEWWS findings suggest the following conclusions.
In a group of children who were preschool-aged at study entry and were studied in depth, the well-being of program group children differed from that of control group children on only a small number of measures. At the two-year follow-up point, the few impacts found occurred predominantly in the area of cognitive functioning, with some programs improving these outcomes. The impacts did not persist, however, through the later years of the follow-up period. At five years, the few impacts on young children were largely in the area of social skills and behavior (such as being sensitive to others, making friends, and fighting or arguing with others). Overall, the impacts were not consistently favorable or unfavorable -- that is, they were favorable for some programs and unfavorable for others -- and varied in size. Very few impacts were found on measures of children's health or safety at two years or five years, although most of those found were unfavorable.
As noted earlier, program and control group members in NEWWS were eligible for similar child care benefits while they worked or participated in work-related activities. But program group members' greater participation in work-related activities and their higher employment levels were expected to create a greater need for child care. As the NEWWS programs' impacts on employment diminished over the follow-up period, so did their effects on use of child care. During the first two years, the majority of the programs produced moderate to large increases in child care use. But by the end of the five years, only the Portland program was still elevating use of child care relative to the control group level. Notably, about half of the NEWWS programs increased use of transitional child care (available to recipients for up to one year after they leave welfare), largely because they increased both the number of people leaving welfare for work and the number of people who actually received this benefit once they became eligible for it.
For children who at study entry were under 3 or over 5, whose outcomes were measured in NEWWS using a more limited set of measures than were preschool-aged children's outcomes, few impacts on well-being were found. Some impacts, however, were found on academic outcomes (such as grade repetition, dropping out of school, and being suspended or expelled from school) for children who were adolescents at study entry. Although these impacts were found in only about half of the programs for which data were available, they were predominantly unfavorable. In Riverside, for example, about 4 percent of adolescent children of control group members had ever repeated a grade in school; both programs there increased this rate by 3 to 4 percentage points. Adolescents' academic functioning may have been especially vulnerable to the employment gains and income losses found for mothers of adolescents in several of the programs.
Some early proponents of education-focused welfare-to-work programs hypothesized that such programs might benefit children more than employment-focused ones because parents who attended education or training classes would become more involved in their children's schoolwork and serve as role models for succeeding in school. This hope was not realized in the NEWWS programs. The impacts on children -- whether the young children studied in depth or the children of all ages studied using a more limited set of measures -- did not vary according to whether the programs had an employment focus or an education focus. Both types of programs had few effects on children.
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National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies
(NEWWS)
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Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation
(ASPE)
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
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