|
Policy Framework
In the debate preceding passage of the federal welfare law of 1996, the anticipated effects of welfare time limits on families took center stage. Proponents thought imposing time limits would spur people to find work and become economically self-sufficient, while critics feared the time limits would cause severe material hardship by pushing people off welfare even when they could not earn enough to support their families.
Operated from 1994 through 1999 as a pilot program in Escambia County (Pensacola) under waivers of pre-1996 welfare rules, Florida’s Family Transition Program (FTP) was one of the first welfare initiatives to impose a time limit on receipt of cash assistance. For this reason — and because Escambia was the first place in the country where people reached a time limit and actually had their benefits cancelled — FTP was an important test case for states and localities across the country. MDRC’s rigorous evaluation of the program, which was conducted under contract to the State of Florida, examined its operation and its effects on families over a four-year period.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
FTP imposed a time limit of 24 out of 60 months on most families’ receipt of cash welfare and a time limit of 36 out of 72 months for those who were least job-ready. To help recipients — most of them single parents — prepare for, find, and keep jobs, it also offered an unusually rich array of services and incentives, including:
- Mandatory employment-related, social, and health services
- Intensive case management
- A modest financial work incentive that increased the portion of recipients’ earnings that could be disregarded in calculating cash benefits
- Extended transitional child care assistance for recipients who left welfare for work
- A Parental responsibility mandate that, among other things, required recipients to make sure their children attended school
With an overarching goal to learn how this package of work-promoting policies would influence parents and their children, the study had three main components:
- An implementation analysis that examined how the local welfare agency put FTP into practice, which was critical to interpreting the program’s impacts and identifying successful practices
- An impact analysis that used a random assignment research design to assess FTP’s effects on a range of outcomes, including employment and earnings, public assistance receipt, family income and poverty, and children’s well-being
- A benefit-cost analysis that compared the program’s financial pros and cons from the perspective of government budgets and the perspective of FTP enrollees
Florida’s current statewide welfare program includes many of FTP’s features but also differs from it in key ways.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The published findings from the FTP evaluation are based on data collected from about 2,800 welfare recipients and applicants who entered the study between mid-1994 and early 1995. Each one was randomly assigned to one of two groups: the FTP group, whose members were subject to the program’s requirements and time limit and eligible for its services and incentives, or the Aid to Families with Dependent Children group, which remained in the traditional welfare system.
Because people were assigned to one or the other group at random, the two groups did not differ at the outset of the study. Therefore, any differences between them that emerged during the study’s four-year follow-up period can be attributed to FTP.
The data sources for the evaluation included administrative records of cash assistance receipt, food stamp receipt, and quarterly earnings; field research conducted in FTP offices; FTP records; fiscal data; surveys of study members and local welfare staff; and ethnographic interviews with study members. In the surveys and interviews, study members were asked to report a wide range of information — for instance, any difficulties they experienced in securing food for themselves and their children, their experiences with and impressions of the welfare system, and their children’s performance in school.
Findings
Findings from MDRC’s evaluation of Florida’s Family Transition Program Project can be found in The Family Transition Program: Final Report of Florida’s Initial Time-Limited Welfare Program.
|
|
