Under the new state welfare programs, low-income families will face serious time limits and work expectations. Will these programs successfully engage welfare recipients in the labor force, with material and emotional benefits for all family members? Or will they adversely affect the stability and well-being of some families, and especially of their children? At this point, we have virtually no systematic information about the effects of welfare reforms and the new welfare programs on participating families; all we know is that participation in the welfare system is drastically decreasing nationwide, and particularly in Wisconsin. Further, we know little about the families that have left the welfare system--a population hard to track.

The intent of this project is to develop a quantitative portrayal, over a period of one year, of the life experiences of approximately 1,200 families who applied for participation in W-2. The research sample is probabilistically drawn from the population of families who applied for W-2 in Milwaukee during the period March through July 1999. The primary sources of research data are two survey interviews, the first administered at the time sample members applied for W-2 and the second one approximately a year later (April through August 2000). A secondary source will be an abstract of administrative data collected by the State of Wisconsin, concerning the W-2 program histories of sample members.