[...]... 316 PART III QUALITATIVE DATA 11 The Right (Soft) Stuff: Qualitative Methods and the Study of Welfare Reform 355 Katherine S Newman PART IV WELFARE LEAVERS AND WELFARE DYNAMICS 12 Studies of Welfare Leavers: Data, Methods, and Contributions to the Policy Process Gregory Acs and Pamela Loprest 387 13 Preexit Benefit Receipt and Employment Histories and Postexit Outcomes of Welfare Leavers Michele Ver... Michele Ver Ploeg 415 14 Experienced-Based Measures of Heterogeneity in the Welfare Caseload Robert A Moffitt 473 Appendix: Agenda of the Workshop on Data Collection for Low-Income and Welfare Populations 501 Index 507 STUDIES OF WELFARE POPULATIONS Introduction Robert A Moffitt, Constance F Citro, and Michele Ver Ploeg Academic and policy interest in the U.S welfare system has increased dramatically over... of administrative data; (2) issues of access and confidentiality; (3) problems in measuring employment and income with administrative data compared to survey data; and (4) the availability of administrative data on children Issues in the matching and cleaning of administrative data are discussed by Goerge and Lee The authors begin by noting the importance of “cleaning” administrative data in a comprehensive... INTRODUCTION The Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs of the National Research Council was formed in 1998 to review the evaluation methods and data that are needed to study the effects of welfare reform Sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the U.S Department of Health and Human Services through... interim and final reports (National Research Council, 1999, 2001) Early in its deliberations, particularly after reviewing the large number of socalled welfare leaver” studies studies of how families who left the TANF rolls were faring off welfare the panel realized that the database for conducting studies of welfare reform had many deficiencies and required attention by policy makers and research. .. 8 Access and Confidentiality Issues with Administrative Data Henry E Brady, Susan A Grand, M Anne Powell, and Werner Schink 9 Measuring Employment and Income for Low-Income Populations with Administrative and Survey Data V Joseph Hotz and John Karl Scholz 10 Administrative Data on the Well-Being of Children On and Off Welfare Richard Barth, Eleanor Locklin-Brown, Stephanie Cuccaro-Alamin, and Barbara... and accuracy of matching variables The authors discuss deterministic and probabilistic record linkage as well as data quality issues in such linkage The paper concludes with a number of recommendations on the cleaning and linking of administrative data Brady, Grand, Powell, and Schink discuss access and confidentiality issues with administrative data in their paper and propose ways for increasing researcher... governing data access and confidentiality Finally, the authors recommend more use of masking methods as well as institutional mechanisms such as secure data centers to facilitate responsible researcher access to and use of confidential administrative data Hotz and Scholz review the measurement of employment and income from administrative data and discuss why and whether measures taken from administrative data. .. from survey data Employment and income are, of course, two of the key outcome variables for welfare reform evaluation and hence assume special importance in data collection They find that there often are differences in administrative and survey data reports of employment and income and that the differences are traceable to differences in population coverage, in reporting units, in sources of income,... that neither survey nor administrative data offer The paper by Newman discusses the use of qualitative data for investigating welfare and low-income populations Newman notes that qualitative data can assist in helping to understand the subjective points of view of families in these populations, provide information on how recipients understand the rules of the welfare system, uncover unexpected factors . Cataloging-in-Publication Data Studies of welfare populations : data collection and research issues : Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare. Methods and the Study of Welfare Reform 355 Katherine S. Newman PART IV WELFARE LEAVERS AND WELFARE DYNAMICS 12 Studies of Welfare Leavers: Data, Methods, and