Grant to fund research of welfare and child support

Researchers at the Institute for Research on Poverty have obtained a multi-million dollar grant to study how families are affected by the interaction of welfare and child support systems.

The project’s principal investigators, Maria Cancian, professor of public affairs and social work, and Dan Meyer, professor of social work, are joined by 15 UW–Madison faculty members and researchers from a variety of academic units who will lead various components of the study.

“This is an exciting opportunity for collaboration among faculty from many departments, the state and federal governments,” Cancian says.

The study is an extension of the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation, an exploration of the relationship between child support and welfare that began with the 1997 implementation of Wisconsin Works (W-2), Wisconsin’s TANF program. Wisconsin is the only state where families participating in the cash welfare system also regularly receive all child support paid on their behalf. Other states have systems that use child support payments to offset welfare costs instead of giving payments directly to families.

The new three-year study is funded through the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development with a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The study will include an analysis of long-term outcomes of the various systems, a comparison of families who entered the Wisconsin system before and after W-2, and a look at how national welfare reforms affect child support policies.

The study will also look at the implications that complex family formation patterns will have on welfare and child support polices; how systems in Wisconsin and other states affect various ethnic groups; and how well participants understand policies.

“Research on welfare and child support is particularly critical given changes in American families, and the dramatic restructuring of public support for low-income children,” Meyer says.