Welfare Reform And The Well-Being of Children

说明（申请人提供）：本申请要求继续研究1996年福利改革立法所带来的变化对儿童健康和福利的影响。这个研究小组和其他人对儿童的研究虽然引起了一些关注，但并没有发现许多人担心的健康和幸福的严重下降。然而，调查人员提出了几个原因，说明为什么随着经济气候的变化，越来越多的家庭达到福利期限，越来越多的家庭试图在长期内自给自足，这种情况可能在不久的将来发生变化。因此，他们认为需要进一步研究。请求为两项调查提供支助。第一个是第三波访谈，纵向抽样调查了波士顿、芝加哥和圣安东尼奥低收入社区的2,000多名儿童及其照顾者。在该项目的第一年，从2003年秋季开始，调查人员建议设计和预先测试第三波访谈。他们将在2004年秋季，即项目第二年开始时，进行第三次浪潮。因此，第三波将在第一波于1999年开始后五年半开始，第二波于2000年秋季开始后四年开始。调查人员提议迅速处理数据并进行编码，并在2005年8月项目第三年结束前制作一个统一的公众使用档案，其中包括所有三波数据。他们不要求为数据分析提供资金。第二次调查将于2007年进行，届时调查人员建议选择一个新的出生儿童群组，并使用与最初群组相同的抽样框架，对他们及其照顾者进行访谈。研究人员认为，新一代的儿童和他们的照顾者，谁将经历福利改革从更早的年龄比那些谁已经部分成长在前改革制度，可能会作出不同的决定，并经历不同的结果。因此，他们认为，从一个相同的抽样框架中抽取的两个队列的可用性将提供福利改革效果的准实验性比较。到项目第五年结束时，将制作一个统一的公众使用的两组调查数据档案。

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.