Welfare Reform And The Well-Being of Children

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests the continuation of a study of the consequences for children's health and well-being of the changes brought about by the 1996 welfare reform legislation. Studies of children by this research team and others, although raising some concerns, have not found the severe declines in health and well-being that many feared. However, the investigators raise several reasons why the situation could change in the near future as the economic climate changes, more families reach welfare time limits, and more families attempt to be self-sufficient in the long run. They therefore argue that further study is needed. Support is requested for two surveys. The first is a third wave of interviews with a longitudinal sample of over 2,000 children and their caregivers in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. In the first year of this project, beginning in fall 2003, the investigators propose to design and pretest the third wave of interviews. They will field the third wave in fall 2004, at the beginning of the second year of the project. The third wave will therefore commence five and one-half years after the first wave began in 1999 and four years after the second wave began in fall 2000. The investigators propose to process and code the data rapidly and to produce a unified public use file with all three waves of data by the end of the third year of the project in August 2005. They do not request funds for data analysis. The second survey would take place in 2007, when the investigators propose to select a new birth-cohort of children and to interview them and their caregivers, using the same sampling frame as that of the original cohort. The investigators argue that new cohorts of children and their caregivers, who will experience welfare reform from an earlier age than those who had already partly grown up under the pre-reform system, may make different decisions and experience different outcomes. They therefore argue that the availability of two cohorts drawn from an identical sampling frame would provide a quasi-experimental comparison of the effects of welfare reform. A unified public use file of the survey data from both cohorts would be produced by the end of the fifth year of the project.