Offering One-on-One Economic Stability Services as Part of HMRE Programming: Evidence from the Empowering Families Program

This report expands on findings from the Empowering Families impact report, which examined the program’s overall impacts after one year (Wu et al. 2021). It explores the likely contribution of the program’s one-on-one employment counseling and financial coaching services to impacts on economic outcomes most likely to be directly affected by these services. We conducted this analysis by comparing the outcomes of Empowering Families participants who engaged in one-on-one economic stability services to those in the control group who would have likely engaged in them if they had been offered access to the program. The report also provides information on participants’ level of participation in one-on-one economic stability services and the costs of these services. Earlier reports provided detailed information on the program’s design, implementation, and overall impact.

We learned the following about Empowering Families’ one-on-one employment counseling services:

• Among those who enrolled in the program, 33 percent of women and 28 percent of men met with an employment counselor. The cost of offering one-on-one employment counseling was about $1,600 per couple—about 15 percent of the program’s total programmatic cost per couple.
• Empowering Families had no impact on the outcomes most likely to be directly affected by one-on-one employment counseling—including monthly earnings and hours worked per week. In addition, there were no impacts on these outcomes among the roughly 3 in 10 participants who met with an employment counselor.

We learned the following about Empowering Families’ one-on-one financial coaching:

• Among those who enrolled in the program, 52 percent of couples met with a financial coach. The cost of offering one-on-one financial coaching was just over $500 per couple—about 5 percent of the program’s total cost.
• Empowering Families improved the outcomes most likely to be directly affected by one-on-one financial coaching—including the frequency with which participants experienced economic hardships and participants’ perceptions of whether they were better off financially than they were a year ago. In general, the impacts on these outcomes were larger among couples who met with a financial coach.

We used a quasi-experimental approach to compare those in the Empowering Families program group who engaged in one-on-one economic stability services to those in the control group who would have likely engaged in them if they had been offered access to the program. The analysis makes use of program participation data, a baseline survey that was administered at the time of study enrollment, and a one-year follow-up survey.

We found that one-on-one employment services had relatively low take-up among Empowering Families participants. We also found that the cost of offering these services was substantial, representing about 15 percent of total program costs. In addition, when we examined labor market outcomes, we found no impact for the overall sample or for the subset of participants who received one-on-one employment counseling. These results suggest that the one-on-one employment counseling services offered by Empowering Families did not improve the labor market outcomes of participants. HMRE programs serving similar populations might want to take note of the low take-up of these services, the cost and complexity of implementing them, and the lack of evidence of their effects when considering incorporating one-on-one employment services into their program model.

When we examined one-on-one financial coaching, a different picture emerged. Take-up was still relatively low, but higher than the take-up for employment counseling. In addition, these services were substantially less expensive than employment counseling, representing less than 5 percent of total program costs. Moreover, when we looked at the outcomes most closely associated with financial coaching—economic hardship and money management skills—we found evidence of program impacts among the full sample. Further, our quasi-experimental analysis suggested that these impacts—particularly the impact on economic hardship measures—were larger for the couples who met with a financial coach. This suggestive evidence, along with the relatively modest cost of these services, supports the promise of offering financial coaching in HMRE programs serving couples with low incomes and suggests efforts to improve take-up of these services could be worthwhile.

Future research should examine whether other HMRE programs with strong financial literacy components have similar success in improving the economic well-being of their participants. In addition, because the Empowering Families study was not designed to isolate the effect of the one-on-one economic stability services, these results rely on a quasi-experimental approach to do so. Future random assignment studies of similar programs could be designed to measure the separate effect of one-on-one economic stability services without relying on quasi-experimental methods.

Wu, April Yanyuan, Julius Anastasio, Quinn Moore, and Robert G. Wood. “Offering one-on-one economic stability services as part of HMRE programming: Evidence from the Empowering Families program.” OPRE Report 2022-310, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, 2022.

Wu, April Yanyuan, Quinn Moore, and Robert G. Wood. “Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education with Integrated Economic Stability Services: The Impacts of Empowering Families.” OPRE Report 2021-224. Washington, DC: U.S.  Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, 2021.