Introduction: Welfare Reform:
Preliminary Research and Unanswered Questions

Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D.
National Center for Policy Research on Women and Families

Ariel Kalil
University of Chicago

    This article summarizes the 1996 welfare reform act and introduces a set of key questions that remain unanswered as initial results concerning the effects of welfare reform are being analyzed and discussed by policymakers and researchers. We introduce the collection of articles presented in this issue of the Journal of Social Issues, which are devoted to the topic of welfare reform and its potential ramifications for the well-being of families. The articles are grouped into three broad areas that represent major topics of interest to researchers, policy analysts, and others concerned with how welfare reform affects the lives of women and families: the politics of welfare reform, barriers to employment, and the impact of welfare reform on family life.

Welfare Reform, Barriers to Employment, and Family Life

    In 1996, President Clinton signed a new welfare policy into law, resulting in dramatic changes in the employment choices facing poor families. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) ended the federal guarantee of cash assistance to unemployed single parents with dependent children and replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF requires recipients to participate in work or work-based activities in order to receive cash assistance. AFDC, legislated in the 1930s as an income maintenance program for widows and children, had evolved over 60 years into a program that primarily served families headed by divorced, separated, or never-married mothers. Under AFDC, the federal government automatically provided cash assistance to every qualified family. It now provides a block grant to each state, and states have more flexibility in determining how that money is spent. However, the federal law places new restrictions on welfare; most notably, there is a 5-year lifetime limit on the receipt of welfare benefits, and most adults can receive welfare for no more than 2 consecutive years (Greenberg & Savner, 1996). Thus, most recipients will be required to find a paying job in the labor market within 2 years of entering the TANF program, and the 5-year lifetime limit will begin to affect some welfare families in the near future.

    As the welfare rolls have plunged dramatically in most states, President Clinton and many other political leaders have proclaimed welfare reform a success. Advocates for the poor, however, continue to express their concerns about what happens to families who have lost their welfare benefits, and policy experts question whether the adults who are working because of welfare reform will be able to stay in those jobs and support their families (Danziger, 1999). Many welfare analysts refer to the initial success as the easy part: The difficulties will arise, they claim, when the state agencies try to move the hard-core unemployed into the work force (Card & Blank, 2000).

    Ultimately, the long-term success of welfare reform depends on whether the state agencies are able to move long-term recipients from welfare to work and whether the parents who have been on welfare, most of whom are single mothers, will be able to keep the jobs they find. Previous research has suggested that permanent moves from welfare to work may be difficult for many single mothers (Edin & Lein, 1996; Harris, 1996). Since there have never been such strict work requirements before, however, it has been impossible to know what will happen when the incentives to find and keep a job suddenly became much stronger. There has much speculation, but little information upon which to base predictions, about what is likely to happen when low-income single mothers no longer have the option of choosing welfare instead of a low-paying, inconveniently located, or otherwise undesirable job (Corcoran, Danziger, Kalil, & Seefeldt, 2000).

    Empirical research findings on the impact of welfare reform on women and their families are just becoming available. The purpose of this Journal issue is to examine the impact of welfare reform on families, with particular attention to the barriers to work that some welfare recipients may face. The contributors to this issue represent a diversity of academic disciplines (e.g., anthropology, psychology, public policy, social work, sociology) and institutional affiliations (e.g., academic research institutions, policy research organizations). The articles are grouped into three broad areas that represent major topics of interest to researchers and policy analysts committed to assessing how welfare reform affects the real lives of women and families.

The Politics of Welfare Reform

    The issue begins with an introduction to the policy landscape leading up to welfare reform and a primer on how welfare is being implemented across the states. Diana Zuckerman, drawing on her experiences as a congressional legislative staffer and White House policy advisor during the years preceding welfare reform and her work for a nonprofit advocacy organization during the year of welfare reform, describes the behind-the-scenes strategies and decisions surrounding the passage of PRWORA. She explains why research and data had such limited impact on the policy debate and the legislative process. In the next article, LaDonna Pavetti, a nationally recognized expert on welfare reform, describes in detail the new TANF requirements and the philosophy behind a "work first" approach to conditional cash assistance. She discusses how the social contract represented by TANF differs from the previous welfare system and presents hypothetical case studies illustrating how recipients in several different states would fare under the state-specific policies. Together, these two articles lay the foundation for the empirical research articles that follow. They provide a valuable introduction to the issue of welfare reform and the ways that states have responded to the federal law.

Barriers to Work

    The next set of articles focuses on barriers to work, with particular emphasis on barriers related to psychological functioning, stressful interpersonal relationships, and problems resulting from the limited availability of adequate child care. Most discussions of barriers to work among welfare recipients have focused on demographic characteristics, such as limitations in schooling, training, and work experience. We agree that these characteristics could limit welfare mothers' employment and wages. Many policymakers, however-and until recently, many researchers-have ignored factors such as depression, substance abuse, and domestic violence that are problems experienced by many welfare families and can hinder long-term employment prospects (Kalil et al., 1998). Evidence presented in these articles suggests that these problems may be overrepresented in the low-income and welfare populations, particularly among long-term welfare recipients. Unless the state agencies charged with implementing welfare reform address these factors, a vulnerable group of welfare recipients may be unable to negotiate the new system.

     There is considerable evidence that psychiatric disorders are associated with lower rates of employment and lower socioeconomic status in the general population (Jayakody, Danziger, & Kessler, 1998). Current welfare policies, however, generally do not recognize these associations and instead assume that welfare recipients are similar to the general population in their psychological status and functioning. Articles by Rukmalie.

     Jayakody and Dawn Stauffer and by Sandra Danziger, Ariel Kalil, and Nathaniel Anderson address this issue. Jayakody and Stauffer use national data to examine the prevalence of psychiatric disorders among low-income single mothers. Their analysis establishes that welfare recipients are significantly-but not dramatically-more likely to suffer from several major psychiatric disorders, including major depression, than low-income single mothers who are not welfare recipients. Moreover, the likelihood of working is 25% lower for those with a psychiatric disorder. Danziger, Kalil, and Anderson examine in greater detail how psychological functioning and other potential barriers to employment in a welfare sample affect women's ability to work. Danziger et al. conducted interviews among welfare recipients during the early stages of welfare reform in Michigan. By collecting longitudinal data, their article provides some of the earliest objective research information available on the prevalence and impact of various types of barriers to work among women under welfare reform. Both articles recommend realistic policy solutions to address psychological problems in the context of welfare reform.

     The next article, by Richard Tolman and Jody Raphael, reviews the research that has been conducted on an important issue facing a substantial number of welfare recipients: domestic violence. Despite 2 decades of research about domestic violence and its effect on the physical and psychological health of women, analysts have only recently examined domestic violence in welfare populations. Little attention has been focused on the effects of violence on women's labor force participation or on how women's experiences of domestic violence affect family processes. Tolman and Raphael, two leading experts on the topic, review the literature in this area and discuss potential policy solutions, such as the Family Violence Amendment to PRWORA, that are intended to aid women transitioning from welfare to work.

     Next, Julia Henly and Sandra Lyons draw on qualitative and quantitative data to examine the complex relationship between child care barriers and employment among welfare recipients. These authors illustrate that the tensions between work and parenting are particularly difficult for low-income parents, who have limited resources and access to safe, affordable child care. Their article describes, from the perspective of welfare recipients, the child care options and preferences associated with using formal versus informal care arrangements. The picture painted is complex and helps to illustrate the trade-offs that mothers make in trying to juggle multiple roles and secure a safe caretaking environment for their children.

Welfare Reform and Family Life

     The third section of the issue focuses on how welfare reform and welfare-to-work transitions affect family life. A major political goal of welfare reform was to change the "culture of welfare" from one that supposedly encouraged teen out-of-wedlock childbearing and discouraged employment to one that promoted marriage, work, and traditional family living arrangements. In this way, the conservative rhetoric went, society could attack the root cause of many of the problems of the poor (Mead, 1992). In reality, the transition from welfare to work has potential benefits for mothers and children but may also have harmful effects on family functioning. Developmental theory suggests that educational accomplishments, the completion of a training program, and enhanced employment prospects for welfare mothers would improve their self-esteem, motivation, and sense of personal control. These improvements could lead to better parenting and concomitant improvements in the social, cognitive, and emotional adjustment of their children. On the other hand, such transitions could cause stress, increase financial strain, or result in poor child care arrangements (Menaghan & Parcel, 1995; Moore & Driscoll, 1997).

     Researchers know little about welfare-reliant families' actual views of the new reforms and their attitudes toward the future and equally little about the impact of the transition from welfare to work on child development. Two articles in this section draw on qualitative data to examine maternal and adolescent attitudes toward welfare, work, and future economic success. Rebekah Levine Coley, Ann Kuta, and Lindsay Chase-Lansdale provide a fascinating glimpse into how African American adolescents view their future and their role in the welfare system under welfare reform. These authors contrast the stereotypes of welfare families and children with the views actually held by low-income girls in welfare families. For example, some proponents of welfare reform had asserted that AFDC undermined families by discouraging work, compromising family stability, and encouraging negative behaviors toward work among children. Coley et al. illustrate how the attitudes of urban, low-income African American girls do not support the stereotypes upon which welfare reform was based.

     In the second qualitative data article, Ellen Scott, Andrew London, and Kathryn Edin draw on data from a new, multicity study of welfare reform being conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation to describe welfare-reliant women's job aspirations and women's confidence in their ability to manage the new work mandates. Two key assumptions underlying PRWORA are that almost all recipients can get and keep jobs and that regular work will eventually lead to a living wage and self-sufficiency. Scott et al.'s article suggests that women do perceive that they will be able to obtain a job and that they view employment as a positive outcome of welfare reform. This article also indicates, however, that the job aspirations of these women are, for the most part, realistically modest and that without access to further education they are unlikely to rise above the gender-constrained low-wage labor market and lift themselves out of poverty.

     The next two articles in this section describe the potential effects of welfare reform on developmental outcomes of children and adolescents in welfare families. Sandra Hofferth, Julia Smith, Vonnie McLoyd, and Jonathan Finkelstein test various competing hypotheses about welfare reform and family functioning using a newly available data set representing the nation's children. The data from this data set provide important guidance regarding how changes in welfare and employment status over time might be associated with changes in children's behavior and achievement. The overall picture is mixed, with results suggesting some negative and some positive outcomes. In general, the best outcomes were observed among families that were able to remain off welfare once they had left, whereas poorer outcomes were observed among those in the process of leaving welfare.

     In the next article, Ariel Kalil and Sandra Danziger describe how adolescent mothers are faring under welfare reform. Drawing on new data gathered in the context of welfare reform, their study addresses the specific requirements directed at unmarried teenage mothers that were passed under PRWORA. Specifically, unmarried minor mothers are now required to live with a parent or adult guardian and to attend school in order to receive cash welfare assistance (Levin-Epstein, 1996). Kalil and Danziger explore the young women's well-being on a number of different dimensions, including economic well-being, psychological functioning, and school success. They examine factors associated with these characteristics, focusing on the ways in which new welfare requirements might promote or impede them.

     The section concludes with an article on a critical policy issue: the potential increase in the number of children referred to Child Protective Services (CPS) in the wake of welfare reform. Advocates have been especially concerned that the sanctions imposed on families for noncompliance with work requirements may increase financial strain among families, thereby potentially increasing child abuse and neglect charges. Similarly, increased employment without adequate child care arrangements could lead to decreased supervision and charges of neglect. Diana Romero, Wendy Chavkin, and Paul Wise conducted a national telephone survey of state CPS directors. Results suggest that CPS caseloads have increased in the wake of welfare reform; specific TANF sanctions most likely to be referred to and investigated by CPS include children's school attendance, maternal positive drug test, and teen parent school and living arrangement mandates. Romero et al.'s article also describes how the administrative goals of the two social programs (TANF and CPS) may be at odds and how this could affect the well-being of parents and children.

     The issue concludes with an article by Diana M. Zuckerman that describes how welfare reform has evolved in the last few years as well as several unsuccessful efforts to make it more generous. This final article also describes the most recent studies regarding the economic impact of welfare reform on families and integrates those findings with the research results described in the issue. It concludes with a brief overview of warning signs of potential problems resulting from welfare reform and of the crucial questions that still need to be answered.

     In summary, the articles in this issue represent a wide range of perspectives that together provide a comprehensive introduction to the meaning and impact of welfare reform for low-income families in the United States. The current research provides only a preliminary view, because it has been only 3 years since PRWORA became law. The most important unanswered questions have to do with the long-term impact of welfare reform. Although it is too soon to draw conclusions about welfare reform's success or failure, this Journal issue on welfare reform will provide important information about what is known and what needs to be examined in the future.

 

References

Card, D., & Blank, R. (2000). Finding jobs: Work and welfare reform. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Corcoran, M., Danziger, S. K., Kalil, A., & Seefeldt, K. (2000). How welfare reform is affecting women’s work. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 241–269.

Danziger, S. H. (1999). Economic conditions and welfare reform. Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Edin, K., & Lein, L. (1996). Making ends meet: How single mothers survive welfare and low-wage work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Greenberg, M., & Savner, S. (1996). A detailed summary of key provisions of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Block Grant of H.R. 3734. Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy.

Harris, K. (1996). Life after welfare: Women, work, and repeat dependency. American Sociological Review, 61, 407–426.

Jayakody, R., Danziger, S., & Kessler, R. (1998). Early-onset psychiatric disorders and male socio-economic status. Social Science Research, 27, 371–387.

Kalil, A., Corcoran, M., Danziger, S. K., Tolman, R., Seefeldt, K., Rosen, D., & Nam, Y. (1998). Getting jobs, keeping jobs, and earning a living wage: Can welfare reform work? Discussion paper no. 1170–98, University of Wisconsin, Institute for Research on Poverty, Madison, WI.

Levin-Epstein, J. (1996). Teenage parent provisions in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy.

Mead, L. (1992). The new politics of poverty: The nonworking poor in America. New York: Basic Books.

Menaghan, E. G., & Parcel, T. L. (1995). Social sources of change in children’s home environments: The effects of parental occupational experiences and family conditions. Journal of Marriage & the Family, 57, 69–84.

Moore, K. A., & Driscoll, A. (1997). Low-wage maternal employment and outcomes for children: A study. Future of Children, 7, 122–127.

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-193, Title 1, Sec. 103 (1996) [On-line]. Available: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=104_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ193.104

    DIANA M. ZUCKERMAN is the President and Director of the National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families. She is a psychologist who was formerly a researcher and faculty member at Vassar, Yale, and Harvard before moving to Washington, D.C., to work on Capitol Hill. Zuckerman worked on federal health and social issues as a professional staff member in the House of Representatives and the Senate between 1983 and 1995 and as a senior policy advisor for the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1996. During and since the welfare reform legislative process, she has worked as a national policy director for nonprofit women’s advocacy and research organizations.

    ARIEL KALIL is an Assistant Professor at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan. Her primary research interests include adolescent development in diverse social contexts. She is especially interested in the emotional and economic well-being of teen mothers in multigenerational households. Her current projects focus on welfare reform and family well-being and also on patterns of downward mobility in middle-class families and their effects on adolescents’ occupational and educational expectations.

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