Florida's Family Transition Program (FTP) Analysis Data, 1994-1999

Résumé 0

Florida's Family Transition Program (FTP), which operated until late 1999 in Escambia County (which includes the city of Pensacola), limited most families to 24 months of welfare receipt in any 60-month period (the least job-ready were limited to 36 months of receipt in any 72-month period). The program also provided an unusually rich array of services, supports, and financial work incentives designed to help welfare recipients prepare for, find, and keep jobs. Florida's current statewide welfare program includes similar time limits and financial work incentives, but differs from FTP in other key respects; thus, the evaluation is not assessing the state's current program. To assess what difference FTP made, the evaluation compared the experiences of two groups: the FTP group, whose members were subject to the program, and the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) group, whose members were subject to the prior welfare rules. To ensure that the groups would be comparable, welfare applicants and recipients (most of them single mothers) were assigned at random to one or the other group. Because the two groups had similar kinds of people, any differences that emerged between the groups during the study's follow-up period can reliably be attributed to FTP rather than to differences in personal characteristics or changes in the external environment. These differences are known as program impacts. The study focused on about 2,800 people who were assigned to the FTP and AFDC groups in 1994 and early 1995, tracking each person for at least four years after they entered the study. The FTP evaluation differs in one key respect from many earlier random assignment studies, in which individuals subject to a mandatory welfare-to-work program were compared to people in a "control group" that was not required to participate in employment services (but could do so voluntarily). In this case, many members of the AFDC group were subject to such mandates, in accordance with rules that existed before FTP began. Thus, the study is assessing what difference FTP made above and beyond the effects of Florida's pre-existing welfare-to work program.