Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt Demonstration (PJAC)

The purpose of the Procedural Justice Informed Alternatives to Contempt Demonstration (PJAC) demonstration project is to assess the feasibility and efficacy of incorporating principles of procedural justice into child support services as a cost-effective alternative to civil contempt proceedings. The PJAC Demonstration will add to the evidence base on innovations in child support practices by evaluating PJAC’s impacts and determining whether the benefits of PJAC services exceed their costs. The PJAC Evaluation includes three key components: an implementation study, an impact study, and a benefit-cost study. The coronavirus pandemic and related economic fallout require modifications to some of the approved data collection approaches and protocols. This nonsubstantive change request is for changes to Instruments 3, 4 and 7. Instrument 3: Staff Interview Topic Guide. Due to travel restrictions, we now plan to complete the remaining interviews by videoconference, as opposed to in-person. The instrument and supporting statements have been updated to reflect this change in mode. Instrument 4: Noncustodial Parent Participant Interview Protocol and Instrument 7: Custodial Parent Interview Protocol. These interviews have already been cleared for in-person or phone modalities; in light of travel restrictions, they will be conducted by phone only. Several questions in the proposed revised interviews would directly touch on aspects of parents’ lives that have likely been affected by the coronavirus. These are employment, relationships with children and the other parent, and changes to how child support agencies and courts handle child support cases. In order to gather sufficient information to understand the effect of the pandemic on these key topics for the evaluation, questions and probes related to coronavirus have been added to the protocols. These questions and probes will allow the research team some insights into (1) how the public health crisis may have affected PJAC treatment and business-as-usual services from the vantage point of parents, thus effecting the treatment contrast for this random assignment study and (2) how the social and economic context of the pandemic may affect employment and family relationships, which may in turn affect child support payments, the evaluation’s main outcome of interest. Estimated average time to complete these interviews will remain the same.

The latest form for Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt Demonstration (PJAC) expires 2023-04-30 and can be found here.

Instrument 1: Staff data entry on participant baseline information

Federal Enterprise Architecture: Community and Social Services - Social Services