Abstract

The Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation Project (HtE) is the most ambitious, comprehensive effort to learn what works in this area to date and is explicitly designed to build on previous and ongoing research by rigorously testing a wide variety of approaches to promote employment, health, and improve family functioning and child well-being. The HtE project will “conduct a multi-site evaluation that studies the implementation issues, program design, net impact and benefit-costs of selected programs” designed to help Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients, former TANF recipients, or low income parents who are hard-to-employ. The project is sponsored by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL).

The evaluation involves an experimental, random assignment design in four sites, testing a diverse set of strategies to promote employment for low-income parents who face serious obstacles to employment. The four include: (1) intensive care management to facilitate the use of evidence-based treatment for major depression among parents receiving Medicaid in Rhode Island; (2) job readiness training, worksite placements, job coaching, job development and other training opportunities for recent parolees in New York City; (3) pre-employment services and transitional employment for long-term TANF participants in Philadelphia; and (4) home- and center-based care, enhanced with self-sufficiency services, for low-income families who have young children or are expecting in Kansas and Missouri.

The purpose of this submission is to introduce materials for a 36-month follow-up survey effort in the Rhode Island site that will include materials for both participating parents and their children.

For the 36-month follow-up, we proposed using this survey effort to address three questions: 1) What are the long term effects of a telephonic care management intervention on parents’ depression and general health, as well as their employment, income, and earnings; 2) What are the effects of a telephonic care management intervention for parents’ depression on parents’ parenting and on children’s health, behavior, and development over time; and 3) To what extent can long term intervention effects on children’s development be attributed to changes in their parents’ depressive symptomatology that result from the intervention.