Welfare Reform and
Its Effects on Children and Families
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Ronald Angel, a professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, is a principal investigator on Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study. The $20 million, 4-year project, which has sweeping public policy implications for the future, is funded through a $12 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD), with additional support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, the Kronkosky Foundation, and other private sources. His investigation is focusing on San Antonio, Texas, one of three cities (along with Boston and Chicago) selected as a site. Angel joined the project by invitation of colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where the program is being administered. The JHU investigators wanted to broaden racial/ethnic diversity in their study sample through the inclusion of a large southern or southwestern city with distinctly contrasting demographics and welfare policies. With a population that is 56% Hispanic, San Antonio, the 11th largest city in the nation, was considered an excellent choice. "We didn't want cities from just the east coast or the midwest . . . the rust belt cities," Angel explains. "San Antonio has some real differences. It's Hispanic, and, unlike Boston, there are no concentrations of poor white families in neighborhoods. That's the contrast." 
To collaborate on the project Angel recruited Laura Lein, an ethnographer in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Social Work at UT Austin. Lein has worked extensively in San Antonio over several years. Both Ronald Angel and Laura Lein are nationally recognized experts on poverty in the United States. Angel, whose past work has focused heavily on Hispanic populations, is co-author (with his wife Jacqueline, a faculty member of UT's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs) of two recent books: Painful Inheritance: Health and the New Generation of Fatherless Families (1993) and Who Will Care for Us?: Aging and Long-term Care in a Multicultural America (1997). Lein co-authored Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (1997) with noted sociologist Kathryn Edin. 
This landmark study represents the most ambitious initiative yet to monitor short- and long-term consequences of the 1996 Federal Welfare Reform Act. With recent changes to state assistance programs, the new policies have transformed welfare from an open-ended, matched entitlement to one that is temporary, capped, and linked to a paid-job requirement. The program is implemented unevenly from state to state. Many central questions remain unanswered. How will families survive as mothers move from the home to the workplace? Who will care for the children? Will parents face increased pressure? Will the traditional community anchors--churches, clinics, shelters, food banks--be overwhelmed? How will child-bearing and family mobility be affected? Will people fare better in some states than in others? Welfare, Children, and Families will address these questions through its multi-faceted, in-depth approach. The project will follow 2,800 families (half receiving cash welfare payments) with a targeted child in the 0-4 or 10-14 years age group, and will track the children and their caregivers for four years as welfare reform evolves. Particular attention will be given to the children's mental, developmental, and physical well-being. One of the projects will give investigators the opportunity to interact with approximately 800 children, ages 2 to 4, using videotaping and coding of caregiver-child interactions, time-diary studies, interviews with fathers and father figures, and observations of child-care settings. Project investigators will conduct comparative ethnographic studies in each city to assess how, over time, changes in welfare policy influence neighborhood resources and affect the daily lives of welfare-dependent and working-poor families and children. The information gathered from this project will assist service providers as they begin to interpret the results of welfare reform and to adapt programs to the changing needs of the disadvantaged populations in this country. By Rae Nadler-Olenick,
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