Recent welfare reform legislation requires increased parental work effort and imposes time limits on the receipt of federal assistance. These changes were based in part on assumptions that parental welfare receipt may be negatively related to family processes and children's attitudes and behaviors. Currently, researchers know little about the effects of welfare by itself relative to the effects...

In August 1996, Congress and the president replaced the 60-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a block grant, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), permitting states to experiment with new forms of assistance to low-income families. States seem likely to try increasingly ambitious reforms as they gain experience under their TANF flexibility, at least if...

A pilot study has demonstrated that dynamic feedback systems concepts can be taught to children as young as ten and eleven years old, when nurtured by a teaching strategy that follows Bruner’s emphasis upon the teaching of basic structures. Focusing on the understanding and representation of underlying structures in the area of social studies, the author developed, implemented and evaluated a c...

I test for welfare-induced migration by comparing AFDC participation in border counties to interior counties in the same state. If migration costs are lower for border county residents, border counties on the high-benefit side of a state border should have higher welfare participation relative to the state's interior counties. Border counties on the low-benefit side should have lower welfare pa...

The authors explore how to define a welfare spell and how well surveys measure welfare spells. By comparing survey and administrative data from the Work Pays Demonstration Project in California on the receipt of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), they find that a substantial amount of administrative churning occurs in administrative data. Through a mixing model of several break len...

This study summarizes the State policy with respect to the determination of need in the Federal-State program of AFDC. The areas discussed are the individual State definitions of need, the content of need standard, the types of persons included in the payment, the amount of income and resources allowed recipient families, the method of determining need, and a comparison of State food allowances...