Measuring The Impact Of Employment Related Social Programs

The last decade has witnessed a conspicuous alteration in policies protecting unemployed people in modern welfare states. Social policies are increasingly designed to encourage economic independence. Policy makers have introduced a wide range of reforms linking disability, unemployment, and welfare programs cash benefits to work-oriented measures.Welfare policies are being framed by a new emphasis on recipients' obligations, emphasizing that the receipt of benefits creates a responsibility to take action towards becoming self-reliant. The objective is to minimize the duration of dependence or improve the well-being of family or community. Activating the Unemployed addresses this growing interest in work-oriented measures. This represents a shift in the dominant discourse on social welfare from focus on the citizen's rights to social benefits to emphasis on their responsibilities to work and lead an active life. In this volume, a distinguished array of international contributors provide cross-cultural perspectives to analyze recent diverse policy initiatives to activate the unemployed in nine countries-Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Each provides a systematic account of the background, design, implementation, and results of employment-oriented measures. Collectively they permit comparison of organized responses to common problems in the areas of public assistance (welfare), unemployment, and disability, among others. Further chapters seek to broaden perspectives on policy options, the issues raised, and lessons learned in the course of activating the unemployed. This thorough and insightful account addresses significant contemporary issues and concerns about welfare, social security, and unemployment. It will aid policy makers, professionals, and scholars in assessing current trends in welfare in various countries throughout the world.

Textbook on evaluation methodology applied to employment creation-related welfare programmes in the USA - covers data collecting and data analysis procedures and discusses application of cost benefit analysis and other evaluation techniques to the assessment of long run outcomes of vocational training, vocational education and vocational rehabilitation programmes. Bibliography pp. 135 to 139, diagrams and questionnaires.

Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 fundamentally changed the nation's social welfare system, replacing a federal entitlement program for low-income families, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with state-administered block grants, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. PRWORA furthered a trend started earlier in the decade under so called "waiver" programs-state experiments with different types of AFDC rules-toward devolution of design and control of social welfare programs from the federal government to the states. The legislation imposed several new, major requirements on state use of federal welfare funds but otherwise freed states to reconfigure their programs as they want. The underlying goal of the legislation is to decrease dependence on welfare and increase the self-sufficiency of poor families in the United States. In summer 1998, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) asked the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council to convene a Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs. The panel's overall charge is to study and make recommendations on the best strategies for evaluating the effects of PRWORA and other welfare reforms and to make recommendations on data needs for conducting useful evaluations. This interim report presents the panel's initial conclusions and recommendations. Given the short length of time the panel has been in existence, this report necessarily treats many issues in much less depth than they will be treated in the final report. The report has an immediate short-run goal of providing DHHS-ASPE with recommendations regarding some of its current projects, particularly those recently funded to study "welfare leavers"-former welfare recipients who have left the welfare rolls as part of the recent decline in welfare caseloads.

Monograph on the evaluation of social policy programmes in the USA - discusses the application of evaluation techniques and the use of evaluation within the institutional framework (legislative and executive branches), with particular reference to the hew department and the labour administration. References.

This volume, a companion to Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition, is a collection of papers on data collection issues for welfare and low-income populations. The papers on survey issues cover methods for designing surveys taking into account nonresponse in advance, obtaining high response rates in telephone surveys, obtaining high response rates in in-person surveys, the effects of incentive payments, methods for adjusting for missing data in surveys of low-income populations, and measurement error issues in surveys, with a special focus on recall error. The papers on administrative data cover the issues of matching and cleaning, access and confidentiality, problems in measuring employment and income, and the availability of data on children. The papers on welfare leavers and welfare dynamics cover a comparison of existing welfare leaver studies, data from the state of Wisconsin on welfare leavers, and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth used to construct measures of heterogeneity in the welfare population based on the recipient's own welfare experience. A final paper discusses qualitative data.

This paper uses a national evaluation of the Job Corps program as a basis for a discussion of techniques and methods of program evaluation as currently practiced in the United States.