Suchergebnisse

Background: In the early 1970s, most researchers thought that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) could not be used to measure the effectiveness of large-scale operating welfare reform and employment programs. By the mid-1970s, the Supported Work Demonstration showed that, under certain conditions, this was both feasible and valuable. However, the experimental design was simple; a multi-arm test had been rejected as unrealistic. Within 10 years, a three-arm design was implemented in San Diego to assess both a welfare-to-work program's overall impact and the contribution of a specific component. Less than 10 years later, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS)/National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS) study used a more complex design to determine the relative effectiveness of two strategies operated in the same locations: one emphasizing getting a job quickly and the other requiring basic education. In San Diego and JOBS/NEWWS, the tested reforms emerged from political processes and were funded through regular program budgets. In both cases, researchers inserted multi-arm RCTs into operating welfare offices, trading control over the treatment for scale (thousands of people) and real-world conditions. Both RCTs were successfully implemented. Objectives and Results: This article examines why multi-arm designs were attempted, how they were structured, why public administrators cooperated, what various actors sought to learn, and how the researchers determined what strategies the different experimental arms ended up to truly represent. The article concludes that these designs provide convincing evidence and can be inserted into operating programs if the studies address questions that are of keen and immediate interest to state or local program administrators and researchers.

Large-scale, randomised social experiments remain rare in Britain despite random assignment being widely regarded as the gold-standard evaluative methodology. Random assignment involves randomly allocating potential programme recipients to one or more groups that receive a service and others that do not. One perceived impediment to randomised social experiments is the practical difficulty of implementing them in the field. This article reports on research on the implementation of the largest randomised social policy experiment yet undertaken in Britain – the Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) evaluation. Such 'evaluations of evaluations' rarely have been done within randomised experiments, and the article highlights some of the tensions between operational realities and research ambitions in such experiments and suggests ways that researchers can attempt to resolve these tensions in the context of real-world programmes and institutions.

AbstractOver the past two decades, federal and state policymakers have dramatically reshaped
the nation's system of cash welfare assistance for low-income families. During this
period, there has been considerable variation from state to state in approaches to
welfare reform, which are often collectively referred to as "welfare-to-work
programs." This article synthesizes an extraordinary body of evidence: results from
28 benefit-cost studies of welfare-to-work programs based on random assignment
evaluation designs. Each of the 28 programs can be viewed as a test of one of six
types of welfare reform approaches: mandatory work experience programs, mandatory
job-search-first programs, mandatory education-first programs, mandatory
mixed-initial-activity programs, earnings supplement programs, and time-limit-mix
programs. After describing how benefit-cost studies of welfare-to-work programs are
conducted and considering some limitations of these studies, the synthesis addresses
such questions as: Which welfare reform program approaches yield a positive return on
investments made, from the perspective of program participants and from the
perspective of government budgets, and the perspective of society as a whole? Which
approaches make program participants better off financially? In which approaches do
benefits exceed costs from the government's point of view? The last two of these
questions coincide with the trade-off between reducing dependency on government
benefits and ensuring adequate incomes for low-income families. Because the
benefit-cost studies examined program effects from the distinct perspectives of
government budgets and participants' incomes separately, they address this trade-off
directly. The article thus uses benefit-cost findings to aid in assessing the often
complex trade-offs associated with balancing the desire to ensure the poor of
adequate incomes and yet encourage self-sufficiency.