Rural Welfare to Work Strategies Demonstration Evaluation Project

V. CONCLUSIONS

This document has synthesized available knowledge and, where appropriate, drawn inferences from studies about the ways that welfare reform is likely to affect rural welfare to work strategies. Current research shows the conditions that rural welfare recipients are likely to face and some ways that they differ from urban welfare recipients.

What is most remarkable, perhaps, is the relative dearth of systematic, evaluative information about rural welfare to work strategies. For several reasons, the population and the subject have received very little attention from the welfare research industry:

The low number of welfare recipients in rural areas creates methodological challenges that evaluations cannot easily accommodate. The low figures mean that participants cannot be assigned to treatment and control groups that are large enough to draw statistically meaningful conclusions from.
The diversity of rural areas impedes researchers’ ability to “control” for environmental conditions.
The low incidence of rural welfare participation means that rural welfare matters are less likely to generate public and political attention than urban welfare matters.
The resources required to produce statistically valid findings about rural welfare matters are probably substantially higher, relative to the size of the population that could be affected by those findings.
Until ACF began the rural welfare to work strategies initiative, the federal government (traditionally a major sponsor of important welfare-related research) had paid scant attention to welfare operations in rural settings.

Although we have tried to exploit available information and make plausible inferences where little research on rural matters has been conducted, we are struck by the long list of questions that remain unanswered. Foremost among them is: What set of strategies is most likely to produce economic self-sufficiency, for what types of welfare recipients, and under what conditions? Additional unanswered questions include the following:

Why is the use of cash assistance in rural areas less than in urban areas?
Are rural areas using TANF (or other) funds to help create stable, good-paying jobs? If so, how?
How prevalent are barriers to employment among rural TANF populations? How available are services to address their needs?
Is child support a problem for rural welfare recipients? If so, what approaches to obtaining child support are successful?
What is the extent of nontraditional work hours in rural areas, and what are communities doing to help welfare recipients with issues related to working during nontraditional hours (e.g., child care, transportation)?
How are micro-businesses and home-based businesses faring for TANF participants in rural areas? Has telecommuting become an employment option?
How are rural communities establishing cooperative ventures to achieve welfare to work success? Are joint ventures more successful than single-focus approaches?
What kinds of transportation options are most successful in helping rural welfare recipients get to appointments, jobs, training, and child care?
To what extent have rural communities demonstrated a commitment to welfare reform? How is this evident?
How do rural welfare agency staff differ from their urban counterparts, and what effect does this difference have on TANF participants’ ability to achieve economic self-sufficiency?

Answers to these questions can help policymakers, program planners, and community members as they work to accomplish the goals of welfare reform.

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