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The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 fundamentally changed the nation's social welfare system, replacing a federal entitlement program for low-income families, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), with state-administered block grants, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. PRWORA furthered a trend started earlier in the decade under so called "waiver" programs-state experiments with different types of AFDC rules-toward devolution of design and control of social welfare programs from the federal government to the states. The legislation imposed several new, major requirements on state use of federal welfare funds but otherwise freed states to reconfigure their programs as they want. The underlying goal of the legislation is to decrease dependence on welfare and increase the self-sufficiency of poor families in the United States. In summer 1998, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) asked the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council to convene a Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs. The panel's overall charge is to study and make recommendations on the best strategies for evaluating the effects of PRWORA and other welfare reforms and to make recommendations on data needs for conducting useful evaluations. This interim report presents the panel's initial conclusions and recommendations. Given the short length of time the panel has been in existence, this report necessarily treats many issues in much less depth than they will be treated in the final report. The report has an immediate short-run goal of providing DHHS-ASPE with recommendations regarding some of its current projects, particularly those recently funded to study "welfare leavers"-former welfare recipients who have left the welfare rolls as part of the recent decline in welfare caseloads.

Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.

This volume, a companion to Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition, is a collection of papers on data collection issues for welfare and low-income populations. The papers on survey issues cover methods for designing surveys taking into account nonresponse in advance, obtaining high response rates in telephone surveys, obtaining high response rates in in-person surveys, the effects of incentive payments, methods for adjusting for missing data in surveys of low-income populations, and measurement error issues in surveys, with a special focus on recall error. The papers on administrative data cover the issues of matching and cleaning, access and confidentiality, problems in measuring employment and income, and the availability of data on children. The papers on welfare leavers and welfare dynamics cover a comparison of existing welfare leaver studies, data from the state of Wisconsin on welfare leavers, and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth used to construct measures of heterogeneity in the welfare population based on the recipient's own welfare experience. A final paper discusses qualitative data.

Beginning in 2006, the Census Bureau embarked on a program to reengineer the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to reduce its costs and improve data quality and timeliness. The Bureau also requested the National Academies to consider the advantages and disadvantages of strategies for linking administrative records and survey data, taking account of the accessibility of relevant administrative records, the operational feasibility of linking, the quality and usefulness of the linked data, and the ability to provide access to the linked data while protecting the confidentiality of individual respondents. In response, this volume first examines the history of SIPP and reviews the survey's purpose, value, strengths, and weaknesses. The book examines alternative uses of administrative records in a reengineered SIPP and, finally, considers innovations in SIPP design and data collection, including the proposed use of annual interviews with an event history calendar.

Policy makers need information about the nationâ€"ranging from trends in the overall economy down to the use by individuals of Medicareâ€"in order to evaluate existing programs and to develop new ones. This information often comes from research based on data about individual people, households, and businesses and other organizations, collected by statistical agencies. The benefit of increasing data accessibility to researchers and analysts is better informed public policy. To realize this benefit, a variety of modes for data accessâ€" including restricted access to confidential data and unrestricted access to appropriately altered public-use dataâ€"must be used. The risk of expanded access to potentially sensitive data is the increased probability of breaching the confidentiality of the data and, in turn, eroding public confidence in the data collection enterprise. Indeed, the statistical system of the United States ultimately depends on the willingness of the public to provide the information on which research data are based. Expanding Access to Research Data issues guidance on how to more fully exploit these tradeoffs. The panel's recommendations focus on needs highlighted by legal, social, and technological changes that have occurred during the last decade.

Disparities in health and health care across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds in the United States are well documented. The reasons for these disparities are, however, not well understood. Current data available on race, ethnicity, SEP, and accumulation and language use are severely limited. The report examines data collection and reporting systems relating to the collection of data on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic position and offers recommendations.

Recent trends in federal policies for social and economic programs have increased the demand for timely, accurate estimates of income and poverty for states, counties, and even smaller areas. Every year more than $130 billion in federal funds is allocated to states and localities through formulas that use such estimates. These funds support a wide range of programs that include child care, community development, education, job training, nutrition, and public health. A new program of the U.S. Census Bureau is now providing more timely estimates for these programs than those from the decennial census, which have been used for many years. These new estimates are being used to allocate more than $7 billion annually to school districts, through the Title I program that supports educationally disadvantaged children. But are these estimates as accurate as possible given the available data? How can the statistical models and data that are used to develop the estimates be improved? What should policy makers consider in selecting particular estimates? This new book from the National Research Council provides guidance for improving the Census Bureau's program and for policy makers who use such estimates for allocating funds.

The Panel on Estimates of Poverty for Small Geographic Areas was established by the Committee on National Statistics at the National Research Council in response to the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994. That act charged the U.S. Census Bureau to produce updated estimates of poor school-age children every two years for the nation's more than 3,000 counties and 14,000 school districts. The act also charged the panel with determining the appropriateness and reliability of the Bureau's estimates for use in the allocation of more than $7 billion of Title I funds each year for educationally disadvantaged children. The panel's charge was both a major one and one with immovable deadlines. The panel had to evaluate the Census Bureau's work on a very tight schedule in order to meet legal requirements for allocation of Title I funds. As it turned out, the panel produced three interim reports: the first one evaluated county-level estimates of poor school-age children in 1993, the second one assessed a revised set of 1993 county estimates; and the third one covered both county- and school district-level estimates of poor school-age children in 1995. This volume combines and updates these three reports into a single reference volume.

To derive statistics about crime â€" to estimate its levels and trends, assess its costs to and impacts on society, and inform law enforcement approaches to prevent it - a conceptual framework for defining and thinking about crime is virtually a prerequisite. Developing and maintaining such a framework is no easy task, because the mechanics of crime are ever evolving and shifting: tied to shifts and development in technology, society, and legislation. Interest in understanding crime surged in the 1920s, which proved to be a pivotal decade for the collection of nationwide crime statistics. Now established as a permanent agency, the Census Bureau commissioned the drafting of a manual for preparing crime statisticsâ€"intended for use by the police, corrections departments, and courts alike. The new manual sought to solve a perennial problem by suggesting a standard taxonomy of crime. Shortly after the Census Bureau issued its manual, the International Association of Chiefs of Police in convention adopted a resolution to create a Committee on Uniform Crime Records â€"to begin the process of describing what a national system of data on crimes known to the police might look like. Report 1 performed a comprehensive reassessment of what is meant by crime in U.S. crime statistics and recommends a new classification of crime to organize measurement efforts. This second report examines methodological and implementation issues and presents a conceptual blueprint for modernizing crime statistics.

This volume contains the full text of two reports: one is an interim review of major census operations, which also assesses the U.S. Census bureau's recommendation in March 2001 regarding statistical adjustment of census data for redistricting. It does not address the decision on adjustment for non-redistricting purposes. The second report consists of a letter sent to William Barron, acting director of the Census Bureau. It reviews the new set of evaluations prepared by the Census Bureau in support of its October decision. The two reports are packaged together to provide a unified discussion of statistical adjustment and other aspects of the 2000 census that the authoring panel has considered to date.