Welfare Reform, Family Structure, and Child Well-Being

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed project uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD) to examine how the pre- and post-1996 welfare reforms affect the family structures in which children live, parental behavior toward children, and children themselves. This research makes three major contributions to the existing literature in this area: 1) We will examine the impact of welfare policies on a wide range of family structure outcomes, moving beyond simple comparisons of single- and married-parent families. Specifically, we focus on marriage, doubling up, and living with a biological father as our key family structure measures. 2) We will examine impacts of welfare policies on child well-being (e.g., behavior, activities, health, and school achievement) and on parenting behavior (e.g., monitoring of children), outcomes that have not typically been examined with nationally-representative data. 3) We will use data from 1994 to 1999, spanning the pre- and post-PRWORA era. In doing so, we will employ three types of models relating changes in welfare policies to changes in family outcomes: across-state, within-state, and within-family models. The use of multiple models draws on both SIPP and SPD data and allows us to examine the robustness of our results across several types of analyses.