My Shortest Blog Entry Ever

Many arguments about science are not about science at all.

Ron Haskins' new book: Show Me The Evidence

"Our nation's social programs, especially ones for children and families, do not work," so said Ron Haskins in a talk today at the Brookings Institution. In his talk, Haskins noted a fact that few people seem to know regarding government programs: that "80-90% of programs are not working." He added, "Experience shows that most social programs produce modest or no impacts that last."

Ron Haskins is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, which just published his new book called Show Me the Evidence: Obama's Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy. In his book (written with colleague Greg Margolis), Haskins writes about strategies that could turn the dismal reality of ineffective government policies and programs around. Their book focuses on the Obama Administration's emphasis on increasing the reliance on research and evidence in the development, testing, and refinement of social policy.

I have known Ron Haskins for a long time. He is as fine of a thinker in family policy circles as I have ever known. He was one of the architects of the 1996 welfare reform law--a Republican who demonstrates that it is possible to work across parties and ideology to improve how things are done.

If you are interested in such things, I can recommend this book and also the presentation today from Brookings. Following Haskins talk, there is a panel discussion featuring notables Peter Orszag, Jason DeParle, Melody Barnes and numerous others. The presentation is available at the Brookings site.

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Sawhill and Venator on The Hopes of Marriage Traditionalists vs. Village Builders

Isabel Sawhill is an economist at Brookings who has just published an important book on the changes in families in the U. S. over the past decades (Generation Unbound, 2014). She describes how we’ve arrived at a nation that, increasingly, is made up of drifters versus planners when it comes to sex, childbearing, and parenting. Her book details the large consequences of these changes, including covering the staggering increases in the number of children born outside of marriage and being raised by single parents.

Sawhill wrote a recent piece that appeared in the New York Times, entitled Beyond Marriage, in which she talks about both the problem and her belief in solutions involving long-acting birth control methods that could change the default from people having children without planning to people needing to plan to have children. As you can imagine, elements of those ideas are controversial. But her description of the issues and problems is not controversial. She unflinchingly describes the massive ways our society has changed (for many but not all people, of course) when it comes to family formation and the wellbeing of children. Drifting, indeed, has become common, and drifting, like sliding, does not bode well for relationship transitions that are fundamentally life-altering (and, in this case, life creating).

In a piece on the Brookings site, What Liberals and Conservatives Are Missing in the Marriage Debate, Sawhill and Joanna Venator contrast the hopes of liberals and conservatives for what we could possibly do about the declines in marriage as a foundation for childbearing and childrearing. As they note, “Traditionalists” hope to bring marriage back and “Village Builders” hope to increase the supports and resources around single parent families in order to make up for some of what is lost in terms of resources available to parents and children.

Sawhill and Venator make this compelling point along the way. They write:

“…for every child removed from poverty by a social program, another one is entering poverty because of the breakdown of the family. The growth in single parent families since the 1970s has caused child poverty to rise by roughly 5 percentage points as much as the poverty-reducing effect of some of our biggest safety net programs, such as Food Stamps.”

Here’s the nifty graphic from the Brookings piece that illustrates that quote.

Sawhill and Venator write cogently about the reasons for pessimism when it comes to what either Traditionalists or Village Builders hope for at this point. The one thing I appreciate above all else in Sawhill’s recent arguments is that she’s dealing with reality. I want to be an optimist about marriage, but I’m not. Don’t get me wrong on this point. I think marriage is the best path for the greatest number of people. Among many reasons, marriage is powerful for child outcomes because, historically, marriage set a strong(er) context of commitment around a couple before there was a family. (See my prior post here or at the Institute for Family Studies on this crucial point.)

So, while I am pessimistic in a number of ways about marriage, I work toward the vision of the optimists when it comes to the institution. But the cultural trends are huge. Along with my concerns about the future of marriage, I am as or more pessimistic about our society having enough resources to, in any realistic way, support strategies sufficient to cope with the massive changes we now confront. Even if we did a lot more than we now do—as Sawhill wishes we were doing—I don’t see how such efforts can make up for what is increasingly left out of the equation for a growing number of children and families, which is a settled commitment between two partners before they become parents together (that sounds like marriage, I know).

I’m left with three beliefs about the problems Sawhill identifies in the recent pieces and in her book. One, I think we should continue to try to strengthen and support marriage, which includes figuring out how to counter the cultural trends that push people away from believing what is obvious: that a prior settled commitment between two parents makes a real difference for children. Two, I believe we should accept that government programs won’t be able to make up for the ways children will have differential resources and opportunities in life as a result of how families form. Should we invest in programs try to make up for what is lacking? I think so, but hopefully in thoughtful ways; which is another point that Sawhill addresses in identifying the need for increasing efforts that are geared toward self-sufficiency. Third, you may or may not feel ready for it, but it’s clear we are going to be having the cultural and societal discussion Sawhill directly addresses in her argument for one way to change the default from drifting to planning when it comes to how children enter this American life. Be thinking, because thinking and talking is on the agenda.

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Understanding Why Marriage is Associated with Positive Child Outcomes: Commitment, Signaling, and Sequence

by Scott Stanley

Why is marriage associated with positive child outcomes when compared to non-marriage? In The Marriage Effect: Money or Parenting?, Kimberly Howard and Richard Reeves argued that the primary mechanisms through which marriage benefits children are based on income and parenting quality. Emily Badger wrote a piece on their work with a title that captured what the take-away was for many: Children with married parents are better off— but marriage isn’t the reason why. While I agree with a number of their points, I believe something substantial is missing in Howard and Reeves’ overall argument. Brad Wilcox outlined one set of concerns. My focus here is in a different direction—on the development and timing of commitment.

Howard and Reeves unflinchingly declare that there are substantial advantages for children raised by married parents compared to others. While I think the notion of “settled science” is conceptually dangerous, this fact seems broadly recognized.[i] Howard and Reeves are particularly interested in two questions: (1) “is it the marriage itself that matters?” and (2) if not, what do we do to help? Their findings show that the association between marriage and positive child outcomes may be substantially accounted for by greater income and more engaged parenting among marrieds. Based on this, they argue that intervention efforts should focus on parenting and not on marriage, per se.

I respect this logic. My colleagues and I have long argued that relationship oriented interventions should focus on variables that are dynamic (i.e., putatively changeable) rather than those that are relatively static.[ii] That may seem obvious, but people sometimes misunderstand why prevention-focused experts will put more emphasis on variables of lessor predictive power that are arguably dynamic (e.g., the number of sexual partners) than on variables that account for more variance but are immutable (e.g., race). Knowledge of static risk factors is nonetheless also important because it points to where to concentrate efforts to help people. For example, while there has been a lot of press on the meager outcomes from recent federal studies on relationship education provided to couples at lower incomes, there is some good news about who may benefit the most related to relatively static risk factors.[iii]

Marriage: a Mere Commitment Device?

Emily Badger quotes Reeves on the income and parenting engagement points: 

"Those two factors taken together explain most of the better outcomes for the children of married couples," Reeves says. "Not all. But most. And I think the takeaway here is not to mistake a commitment device – which marriage is – for an explanatory device."

The argument is further clarified in this quote from Howard and Reeves in their original piece: “Is it marriage itself that matters, or is marriage the visible expression of other factors, that are the true cause of different outcomes? And if so, which ones?”

I think this argument shows a serious under-appreciation for the importance of “visible expressions” of commitment. Signals of commitment are important across a wide swath of societal life because people will often make better decisions with clearer information about the level of motivation in others,[iv] and signals about commitment are, arguably, of great importance in the development and maintenance of romantic and family relationships.[v] Reeves seems to be arguing that the signal value of marriage is not as consequential as behaviors such as parenting, but what that view fails to account for is how marriage has most typically been a potent signal of commitment with a distinct placement regarding the sequence and timing of childbearing. At the root of it, what is signaled by marriage is a commitment comprised of “us with a future.”[vi] Sure, reality has very often been messier than the tidy ordering of love, marriage, and a baby carriage; and many marriages do not go the distance. But marriage is likely, in some large respect, explanatory regarding child outcomes because marriage most often is a strong and credible signal of commitment prior to childbirth.

Put another way, Howard and Reeves seem to focus on childrearing (parenting) with little emphasis for the role marriage often plays in sequencing of commitment and childbearing. I believe that the quality of the parenting a child will receive is situated in the context of the level of commitment his or her two parents have to parenting together. Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox.com highlighted one key part of this puzzle related to that idea of “together”:

There is a common-sense reason to why this bump is so great. A pair of mediocre married parents will have way more time to spend with their kids than even an exceptionally devoted single dad . . .

Even here, there may be an under-appreciation for how (and if) the partnership to parent formed in the first place. The fact is that marriage is associated with a far greater likelihood that a child’s parents will continue to parent together than other contexts.[vii] At one end of a spectrum are parents who married before the child arrived, where those children have a relatively high likelihood of receiving extensive co-parenting. At the other end of this spectrum would be children born to parents who had not developed much, if any, commitment to each other beforehand, much less a commitment to parent a child together before having one. Those children, on average, have more of an uphill climb in life, and, as Howard and Reeves note, economic and social mobility are impacted. Such children are not disadvantaged because they don’t have a parent who cares, but because they are going to land, on average, the furthest from having the economic and social capital of two people pulling together to start them off in life. One can argue that the benefits of having two committed parents can exist apart from marriage. I agree. So why would I argue that marriage has special explanatory value regarding child outcomes?

Back to signals and sequence.

While not always, and perhaps less so now than before, marriage serves as a strong signal that two people are tacitly committed to raising a family together. Further, and for more complex reasons than I want to develop here, signals are the most informative when they are fully under the control of those sending them—by which I mean, when the behavior has fewer prior constraints so that it reflects something true about the individual. That means that signals about commitment are more informative before a child arrives than after because having a child increases life constraints. When marriage precedes two people having a child, the question of intention about a shared long-term time horizon was settled before things got messy with baby drool and poop. For couples with this foundation already in place, even unplanned and mistimed children are still landing in a relatively rich context regarding bi-parental commitment. One can (and should) believe that various socio-economic disadvantages govern a lot in this big lottery of life, but we should not lose sight of how sequence plays a consequential and causal role in child outcomes.

I am far from alone believing this. I think the greatest change in families impacting children in this era is that so many are born into low commitment contexts. This seems to be exactly the point that Isabel Sawhill argues in her forthcoming book, Generation Unbound: Drifting Into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage. In her New York Times piece on 9-14-2014, she wrote:

We’ve been worrying about these trends for years, and wondering: Can marriage be restored as the standard way to raise children? As much as we might welcome a revival, I doubt that it will happen. The genie is out of the bottle.

I would love for Sawhill to be wrong about marriage, but I share her pessimism. Further, by arguing for what is needed, Sawhill draws attention to what is increasingly missing.

What we need instead is a new ethic of responsible parenthood. If we combine an updated social norm with greater reliance on the most effective forms of birth control, we can transform drifters into planners and improve children’s life prospects.

In her book and article, Sawhill focuses a lot of attention on complex issues related to birth control. I will sidestep that issue for now to focus on drifting versus planning. This is familiar territory for me and my colleagues. Whether you think about drifting versus planning or sliding versus deciding,[viii] the underlying point is that it matters how and when (and if) intention forms when it comes to the consequences of life altering transitions such as having a child. Commitments are decisions, and decisions support the strongest follow-through.

What about Howard and Reeves’ finding about engaged parenting? They note that “It is plausible that parents who commit to each other through marriage may also have a stronger joint commitment to raising their children.” That’s exactly what I believe is being given short shrift in the current discussion. In fact, I suspect that their parenting variable is partly a proxy for the mutual commitment to parent that is implicit in marriage.

While I can see plenty of value in efforts to provide more education about parenting to both couples and single parents, I also believe we need to work to increase the odds that children are born into high commitment contexts. Such efforts might include helping people better understand how sliding into having a child together, in a relationship with an unclear future, leads to worse outcomes for adults and children. Emphasizing this reality may be unpalatable to some who worry that such messages can be retroactively stigmatizing for those who are already downstream from consequential drifting. If so, the importance of emphasizing this may be as controversial to some as Isabel Sawhill’s suggestions about birth control are to others. Either way, it does not reflect how life really works to ignore sequence as we all grapple with solutions.

Marriage is, indeed, fading in front of our eyes, and with it goes a lot of signal clarity about commitment in the context of sequence. Maybe those elements can be constructed behaviorally on a broad scale, but we should recognize the difficulty we face in trying to make up for the loss of something with real explanatory power.

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[i] Sawhill, I. V. (2014). Generation unbound: Drifting into sex and parenthood without marriage. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. 
[ii] e.g., Stanley, S. M. (2001). Making a case for premarital education. Family Relations, 50(3), 272-280.;  Markman, H. J., Stanley, S. M., & Blumberg, S. L. (2010). Fighting for your marriage. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. NOTE: It is a separate and challenging matter in social interventions to demonstrate that the variables targeted are the mechanisms of change. 
[iii] Who Benefits Most from Family-Strengthening Efforts?
[iv] The seminal paper by Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence is: Spence, A. Michael. (1973). Job Market Signaling. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355-374. In his Nobel award speech, Spence noted that that “the information carried by the signal can be productive itself. This will occur if there is a decision that is made better or with greater efficiency, with better information.” I believe this is relevant to the points I make here (though I make no claim to understanding all of the nuances of Spence’s work).
[v] Rowthorn, R. (2002).  Marriage as a signal.  In A. W. Dnes and R. Rowthorn (Eds.), The Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce (pp. 132 - 156).  New York: Cambridge University Press.; Nock, S.L.  (2009). The Growing Importance of Marriage in America.  In H. E. Peters and C. M. Kamp Dush (Eds.), Marriage and Family: Perspectives and Complexities (pp. 302-324). New York: Columbia University Press.; Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Whitton, S. W. (2010). Commitment: Functions,formation, and the securing of romantic attachment. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 2, 243-257.
[vi] Jones, W. H., & Adams, J. M. (1999).  Handbook of interpersonal commitment and relationship stability.  New York: Plenum.;  Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Whitton, S. W. (2010). Commitment: Functions, formation, and the securing of romantic attachment. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 2, 243-257.
[vii] Sawhill, I. V. (2014). Generation unbound: Drifting into sex and parenthood without marriage. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. 
[viii] Stanley,S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs. Deciding:Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55, 499-509.

Some Good News in Who Benefits from Family-Strengthening Programs

Whatever your political views, you likely share in concerns many hold over the difficulties facing socially and economically disadvantaged families in the U.S. But can the government do anything to directly help such families through family-strengthening efforts? Despite all you might have heard to date, there is some good news emerging from recent studies and my goal here is to describe that news.     

The U.S. Administration for Children and Families, specifically the Office of Family Assistance (OFA), is currently invested in three specific components of family strengthening, including efforts to a) improve the quality and stability of the relationships of couples with children, b) increase father involvement for those with fragile relationships with their children, and c) increase the quality of co-parenting between adults who have children in common but who are no longer in an ongoing relationship. My focus here is on research on the first of these types of efforts, as there has been considerable attention to the results of two major federal evaluations of programs aimed to help couples with low incomes and other disadvantages.

The large, multi-site studies were called Building Strong Families (BSF) and Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM). I believe these studies received so much attention, in part, because they were connected with the somewhat controversial, government-funded efforts over the last twelve years to provide relationship education in support of the goals in the welfare reform law of 1996 to promote two-parent families. These two studies produced disappointing results, which have been lamented among those who support such efforts and trumpeted by those who are critical of such efforts. I think the trumpets have mostly carried the day.

But there is some good news for supporters of relationship education in recent findings, including within those two federal studies. Specifically, it is becoming clear that ethnic minority couples benefit at least as much or more than other couples from such programs. Some have suggested that this would not be the case because such programs were originally designed and tested with mostly middle-class, white couples.[i] Further, there is newly published evidence that, within the BSF study data set, the participants who were the most socially and economically disadvantaged benefitted the most in terms of impacts on relationship quality.

Before describing in more detail what I see as relatively encouraging, I will first describe a bit of background on these important federal studies and their findings to provide context for those who know little about them.

Building Strong Families (BSF) was a study of unmarried couples in the transition to parenthood, whereas Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) was a study of married couples. Both projects focused on couples at lower incomes, generally under 200 percent of the poverty line. In both cases, couples in multiple cities were randomly assigned to either receive or not receive a substantial program of relationship education and other couple support services, all designed to strengthen these families with regard to couples’ relationship quality, child outcomes (including father involvement), and stability. While there are some disagreements about the results, it is fair to say that the overall evidence suggested largely non-significant (BSF) or small (SHM) program impacts.

As a way to provide a bit more detail, allow me to give two brief summaries of the findings, as if from the perspectives of people who were either more or less encouraged by the results.  

             Less encouraged. The overall findings for BSF showed no evidence of positive impacts on couples’ relationships and father involvement. There were even some modest negative impacts in some sites. While there was a modest positive impact on child behavior, there were no other overall positive effects on child wellbeing. For SHM, while there was a range of statistically significant positive impacts, the impacts were modest. Further, these particular programs were expensive—much more so than most all historical efforts involving relationship education. In both cases, there was precious little evidence of positive impacts related to child outcomes. There were some very tiny positive impacts for children in the SHM study, but tiny is tiny.

             More encouraged. In the BSF study, one site (Oklahoma) did a particularly impressive job of getting couples in and through services—far outperforming other sites in this respect. The other sites did not, for the most part, get a lot of couples through much of the planned services. Across the whole study, only 55 percent of couples attended any of the relationship education services. Only Oklahoma demonstrated a range of significant and positive impacts on couple relationship outcomes at the 15-month assessment.[ii] While these impacts faded at the 36-month assessment, the children born to couples in the program group were 20% more likely than children born to couples in the control group to have lived continuously with both parents until that 3-year point—also, only in the Oklahoma site.[iii] In SHM, couples showed statistically significant gains at the 12-month assessment and these gains, while small, were largely maintained out to the 30-month assessment. In a field where most policy evaluations of social programs show no significant, lasting impacts, some see this as promising even as the need for improvement is obvious.[iv]

That’s the skinny version of what happened. There are detailed reports and endless commentary on the internet, if you want more information.[v] The dominant story across the media about these studies is that nothing worked. However, there was some good news in how SHM sites learned from experiences in the BSF study, and thus achieved far greater participation and follow-through among couples than BSF sites did. That is, by including strategies to reduce barriers to participation and reinforce attendance, SHM enabled more disadvantaged couples to attend a substantial amount of program services. That is encouraging.

Before moving on, I should mention that there is a whole world of research on relationship education that I am not attempting to cover here, with studies showing generally stronger, positive effects. Further, some experts in that field have been dismayed that so much attention has been focused on BSF and SHM in recent years. I will, however, retain a similarly narrow focus in order to cover findings related to social and economic disadvantage.

The Response of the Most Disadvantaged Couples

To my knowledge, with one exception, the only analyses done to date on the BSF data set have been conducted by the professional evaluation team hired by the Administration for Children and Families to conduct the study. The exception lies in analyses conducted by Paul Amato at Penn State. Amato has approved access to the BSF data set out to the 15-month assessment point, and he has just published a paper with important analyses from that data set.[vi]

Amato sought to assess whether couples at greater disadvantage received more, similar, or less benefits in BSF than other, less disadvantaged couples did. He analyzed outcomes related to both relationship stability (whether couples broke up) and relationship quality.  His method, which was different from any other analysis I have seen to date in this field, was to create a “disadvantage index” based on eleven factors in order to assess whether having a high or low score on this index affected how much couples benefited from the programs. I will quote from Amato’s paper regarding the list of factors going into this index (p. 347):

(a) the mother was less than 20 years old,

(b) the father was less than 20 years old,

(c) the mother did not have a high school degree,

(d) the father did not have a high school degree,

(e) the father was unemployed at baseline,

(f) the father earned less than $10,000 in the last year,

(g) the mother received public assistance in the last year (TANF, food stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP, SSI, SSDI, or WIC),

(h) the mother had one or more children from a previous relationship,

(i) the father had one or more children from a previous relationship,

(j) the mother or father reported no one to care for the baby in an emergency (excluding the partner),

(k) the mother or father reported no one to borrow money from in an emergency (excluding the partner). I [Amato] omitted mothers’ income from the index because the majority of mothers were not in the labor force.

While I need to skip over some technical detail here, I want to note that Amato approached the analyses in a particularly robust way. He tested his findings for what we call sensitivity to various specifications. Essentially, he tried the analyses with various sites left in or out and with various indicators of disadvantage in or out. The findings were robust across such tests.

Before testing for the program impacts, Amato found what one would expect: “The relationship risk variable revealed that higher disadvantage scores were associated with less support and affection, more destructive conflict, less constructive conflict, less trust in partner, more intimate violence, and lower overall relationship quality” (p. 350). Thus, the risk index captures risk as it was designed to do. The important question is, did their level of disadvantage matter for how much benefit couples received in the BSF intervention model? While disadvantage level did not matter for how the program affected couples’ stability (their odds of breaking up), when it came to relationship quality, those with more disadvantage received the most positive impact from the programs.

Quoting from Paul Amato’s paper: 

One of the major criticisms of BSF programs for unmarried couples (and federally funded marriage education programs for low-income couples) is that educational interventions are not effective for disadvantaged populations (Johnson, 2012; Karney & Bradbury, 2005). It is reasonable to imagine that poor couples are so overwhelmed by financial problems and everyday stress that they are unresponsive to relationship education programs and see them as largely irrelevant to their lives. If this were the case, then the most disadvantaged couples – those most at risk of relationship problems – would receive the least benefit from programs like BSF. This study, however, suggests the opposite: Contrary to the notion that disadvantaged couples do not benefit from relationship education, these couples may be the main beneficiaries of these services, provided that they are able to keep their unions intact. (p. 353)

Keep in mind, these results are for the 15 month follow-up. It is possible that if the same analyses are one day repeated for the 36 month follow-up, this same result would not be found. It is not unusual in this field to find impacts in an earlier period that fade by the time a later follow-up is conducted.

In contrast to these encouraging findings from Amato’s paper, results from a meta-analysis working its way toward publication suggest that the very poorest couples receive the least benefit from such programs. (I have the author’s permission to mention what I know about the analyses.)  I believe, however, that the type of analysis in this other study is far less sensitive to addressing the question Amato tested. Nevertheless, the findings from this other study align more closely with the arguments made by the researchers noted in Amato’s quote above, who have suggested that severe economic hardship may interfere with couples’ ability to benefit from such efforts. It is not hard to imagine that chaos and stress would interfere with learning new strategies in one’s relationship. On the other hand, when studies in this field do analyze whether impacts vary based on levels of prior risk, those at greater risk often get the most benefit. There is a lot of complexity here for researchers in the field to sort out.

Amato’s analyses are serious and thoughtful, and he obtained a potentially important finding that is not at all evident from the primary analyses conducted with the BSF data set. That takes nothing away from the main results in BSF (pooled across sites) that are legitimately disappointing for reasons about which serious people may not agree. But Amato’s analyses are encouraging, and perhaps even provocative, for suggesting that such services may actually provide the most benefit, on average, to couples with some of the greatest disadvantages in life. In fact, Amato goes so far as to imply that if the BSF study had recruited substantially more disadvantaged couples, the overall findings across the study would have been positive (p. 353).  

Amato’s findings are not unprecedented. They are the most sophisticated version of a type of finding that has been obtained before, wherein those who are more disadvantaged receive at least as much, and sometimes more, benefit from relationship education services than others.[vii] Amato notes that this is generally the case for various social programs (p. 353). What he found is also consistent with other studies focused on family strengthening that find positive impacts for programs given to highly disadvantaged couples and families. For example, Phil and Carolyn Cowan and their colleagues have demonstrated positive impacts from a program focused on father involvement in a study with low-income families, with a particularly large representation of Mexican American families (67 percent of participants). They found significant, positive impacts on couple relationship quality, father engagement, and children’s problem behaviors.[viii]

The Response of Ethnic Minority Couples

On to other encouraging news I want to share. In both the BSF and SHM studies, the evaluators were able to examine if the minority group with the largest representation got more or less impact than other couples. The largest minority group in BSF was African-American couples, and the largest minority group in SHM was Hispanic/Latino couples. (Because of the nature of the studies and the program sites, there was a relatively small percentage of Hispanic/Latino couples in BSF and a relatively small percentage of African-American couples in SHM; hence, the analyses for differential impact focused on the larger groups within each study.)

For the earlier assessment points in both BSF and SHM (15 and 12 months, respectively), there was evidence that the minority couples in the intervention groups received more benefit than other couples. That is, in BSF, African-American couples benefitted more than other couples.[ix]  In SHM, Hispanic couples benefitted more than other couples.[x]  I do not wish to exaggerate these findings in any way, but the pattern was found in both studies. However, the pattern did not hold up at the longer-term assessments in either study (36 months for BSF and 30 months for SHM).

Overall, these findings suggest that minority couples may have responded relatively more positively to the programs, on average, than other couples. That some positive effects fade is not a particularly unusual finding in studies of social interventions. I believe these findings may suggest an important, positive response to the interventions but also portray the need for something more and something continuing. An important question for the field lies in figuring out what those “somethings” look like in the lives of those interested in, and responsive to, such efforts.

A Related Finding on Ethnicity from Another Major Data Set

In one of our studies, we find an even more striking finding than what was found in BSF and SHM regarding impacts for ethnic minority couples. This particular study, funded by NIH,[xi] would be the single largest randomized trial in the history of the relationship education field if it were not for BSF and SHM. We have been evaluating the impact of a version of the intervention we have developed, refined, and tested over many years, called PREP[xii]  (the Prevention and Relationship Education Program). Adaptations of PREP were also used in some of the sites in the BSF and SHM studies.

My colleagues and I have worked with all branches of the military over the years. We have worked most closely with military Chaplains, who have a strong tradition of providing various relationship education services to military families. In our most recent paper from this project, we present analyses of impacts at two years following program delivery by U.S. Army chaplains. This paper is forthcoming in the same journal as Paul Amato’s paper mentioned above.[xiii] While we had found modest evidence of positive impacts on relationship quality post-intervention, two years later we found no evidence of sustained impacts on relationship quality. On the other hand, at the same two-year follow-up, we found that couples assigned to the intervention were significantly less likely to have divorced than couples in the control group.[xiv] This result has some parallels to the BSF results for Oklahoma, with some relationship quality impacts earlier on and a stability impact later on.[xv]

More to the purpose here, we found that minority couples received a far larger divorce reduction impact from the intervention than non-minority couples. Minority couples in the intervention group were about one-fourth as likely to divorce by the two-year point as minority couples in the control group. We also found a trend suggesting that couples who felt the most economic strain had larger divorce reduction impacts, and this economic strain effect was independent from the minority effect. Such positive impacts may well fade with longer-term follow-ups (or other positive impacts may emerge), but the existing findings at two years were striking in the degree to which minority couples received the greatest benefit in terms of divorce reduction. This, too, is good news, and it adds to the accumulating evidence that ethnic minority couples benefit at least as much, and sometimes more, from relationship education services as do other couples.

Research in this field marches on. Amidst the ongoing concerns and arguments, I believe there is some good news to consider as the field continues studying how to foster relationship stability and quality, both in general and specifically with those individuals and families who face great disadvantages. I believe it is good news that the Administration of Children and Families is moving systematically on a program of research to support increasing effectiveness in family-strengthening efforts.   

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Disclosure:  I (along with many colleagues such as Howard Markman) have played a substantial role in the development of a variety of relationship education approaches that were used in some of the sites in the BSF and SHM studies, and that are also used in a number of the projects funded by the government around the U.S. I receive income from our company called PREP. Further, I have been a long-time adviser for the efforts in Oklahoma. Of greater weight for me is the fact that I do believe in trying to build on promising studies, practices, and program models in the areas I focus on here. You are entitled, of course, to disregard any of my viewpoints based on these facts, but I hope those with serious interest would grapple with the ideas and consider where they may have inherent merit.

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[i] Johnson, M. D. (2012). Healthy Marriage Initiatives: On the need for empiricism in policy implementation. American Psychologist, 67(4), 296-308. (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2012-08242-001); See also: Hawkins, A. J., Stanley, S. M., Cowan, P. A., Fincham, F. D., Beach, S. R. H., Cowan, C., Rhoades, G. K., Markman, H. J., & Daire, A. P. (2013). A more optimistic perspective on government-supported marriage and relationship education programs for lower income couples: Response to Johnson (2012). American Psychologist, 68(2), 110-111. (http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/68/2/110?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+apa-journals-amp+%28American+Psychologist%29)

[ii] Devaney, B., & Dion, R. (2010). 15-Month impacts of Oklahoma's Family Expectations Program. Washington DC: Mathematica Policy Research. (http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/redirect_PubsDB.asp?strSite=PDFs/Family_support/BSF_15month_impacts.pdf)

[iii] This finding is in the final report for the BSF analyses at 36 months. P. 29 “At the three-year follow-up, 49 percent of BSF children in Oklahoma had lived with both parents continuously, compared with 41 percent of children in the control group (Table A.7b).” An 8% difference over 41% for control group is a 20% increase. Citation: Wood, R. G., Moore, Q., Clarkwest, A., Killewald, A., & Monahan, S. (2012). The long-term effects of Building Strong Families: A relationship skills education program for unmarried parents. Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation.  Washington D. C. (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/bsf_36_mo_impact_report.pdf)

[iv] http://family-studies.org/can-we-strengthen-marriages-results-of-the-supporting-healthy-marriage-evaluation/

[v] For example: Wood, R. G., Moore, Q., Clarkwest, A., Killewald, A., & Monahan, S. (2012). The long-term effects of Building Strong Families: A relationship skills education program for unmarried parents. Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation.  Washington D. C. (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/bsf_36_mo_impact_report.pdf); Lundquist, E. Hsueh, J., Lowenstein, A. E., Faucetta, K., Gubits, D., Michalopoulos, C., & Knox, V. (2014). A family-strengthening program for low-income families: Final impacts from the Supporting Healthy Marriage evaluation. OPRE Report 2014-09A. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/resource/the-supporting-healthy-marriage-evaluation-a-family-strengthening-program-for-low-income-families-final-impacts-from-the)

[vi] Amato, Paul R. (2014). Does social and economic disadvantage moderate the effects of relationship education on couples? An analysis of data from the 15-month Building Strong Families evaluation. Family Relations, 63, 343-355. doi: 10.1111/fare.12069. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fare.12069/abstract)

[vii] Rauer, A. J., Adler-Baeder, F., Lucier-Greer, M., Skuban, E., Ketring, S. A., & Smith, T. (2014). Exploring Processes of Change in Couple Relationship Education: Predictors of Change in Relationship Quality. Journal of Family Psychology, 28(1), 65-76. (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2014-04342-001); Stanley, S. M., Amato, P. R., Johnson, C. A., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Premarital education, marital quality, and marital stability: Findings from a large, random household survey. Journal of Family Psychology, 20(1), 117-126. (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2006-03561-013)

[viii] Cowan, P., Cowan, C., Pruett, M., Pruett, K., & Wong, J. (2009). Promoting fathers' engagement with children: Preventive interventions for low-income families. Journal of Marriage & Family, 71(3), 663-679. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2009.00625.x/abstract)

[ix] See page xv: Wood, R. G., McConnell, S., Moore, Q., Clarkwest, A., & Hsueh, J. (2010). The Building Strong Families Project. Strengthening unmarried parents' relationships: The early impacts of Building Strong Families. Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. Washington D. C. (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/strengthen/build_fam/reports/unmarried_parents/15_impact_exec_summ.pdf)

[x] See page ES-7: Hsueh, J., Alderson, D. P., Lundquist, E., Michalopoulos, C., Gubits, D., Fein, D., & Knox, V. (2012). The Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation: Early Impacts on Low-Income Families.  Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation.  Washington D. C. (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/early_impacts_low.pdf)

[xi] This project is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD048780. My comments here are solely my own responsibility and do not represent any official views of the National Institutes of Health.

[xii] The actual intervention manuals and materials are not available on the web but the general principles in PREP are most easily accessible in various books we have published, e.g.: Markman, H. J., Stanley, S. M., & Blumberg, S. L. (2010). Fighting for Your Marriage. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[xiii] You can write to me to request a copy of the forthcoming paper if you wish. The citation is: Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., Loew, B. A., Allen, E. S., Carter, S., Osborne, L. J., Prentice, D., & Markman, H. J. (in press).  A randomized controlled trial of relationship education in the U.S. Army: 2-year outcomes. Family Relations.

[xiv] The divorce reduction impact held for the pooled analysis, but it was clearly driven by the larger of two sites—a site that was comprised of units much more involved in combat operations and high operational tempo, which also had younger married couples. The divorce reduction impact was non-existent for a smaller site where couples were older, more established, and not similarly as involved in major combat operations. Again, this is consistent with studies in the field where, when a difference emerges, couples at higher risk tend to get greater benefits from such services.

[xv] It is well recognized in this and other fields that one type of positive result can influence the odds of obtaining a different type of positive  result when one result (divorce) causes people to be missing for analysis of the other outcome (relationship quality). Researchers at Mathematica (the company that conducted the BSF evaluation) have written a paper on the depth of the challenges involved in resolving this dilemma in outcome studies. There is nothing approaching an ideal or perfect solution because data that are missing for meaningful reasons related to the goals of an intervention are simply not replaceable. See: McConnell, S., Stuart, E. A., & Devaney, B. (2008).  The Truncation-by-Death Problem: What to do in an experimental evaluation when the outcome is not always defined. Evaluation Review, 37(1), 157-186. (http://erx.sagepub.com/content/32/2/157.full.pdf) 

Pew Chart of the Week (from New York Times)

This is an amazing chart.  (Click here for Pew Piece!)

Check out the contrast in how costs are soaring for things like education, childcare, vehicle maintenance, and food while crashing for electronic toys. You likely sort of knew this, but the chart (produced by the New York Times) is dramatic and clear.

Quoting from comments in the Pew piece:

The differences, though, show up in services — particularly the sort of services (education, health care, child care) that enable people to find and keep better-paying jobs and, over time, move themselves and their families up the socioeconomic ladder.

“Without a doubt, the poor are far better off than they were at the dawn of the War on Poverty,” James Ziliak, director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research, said in the Times story. But relative to middle- and upper-income Americans, he added, “they have also drifted further away.”

Men Aren’t Going Away, But What Will We Do With Them?

There were several thought provoking pieces getting a lot of play right now related to the increasing disconnection of both working class and disadvantaged men from jobs and family responsibilities. I will give you the links to the three pieces, a highlight from each, and then make a simple point.

Naomi Cahn and June Carbone wrote a piece in Slate:  JustSay No: For white working-class women, it makes sense to stay single mothers. Cahn and Carbone argue that, for many women with young children, it makes little sense to marry any man, including the father of their child, because the men available are not great candidates for making the lives of these women any better.

KJ Dell’Antonia writes a blog called Motherlode for the New York Times, and she digs in on some of the arguments Cahn and Carbone make. Her piece, entitled Working-Class FathersShouldn’t Be So Easily Dismissed, is excellent.  Here’s the part that I think is crucial:  

These are not foolish women or bad men. More and more young women are already making the choice to raise children alone, but while that choice may be rational, we as a society should hesitate before embracing it as a way forward or even accepting it as a done deal. In respecting the decision makers, we let both the causes and the costs of the choice off the hook, and risk normalizing a situation that presents real consequences for the overstressed mothers, the uninvolved fathers and the children caught up in their wake.

The implications of writing off these men are huge.

Here’s one more article if you want to complete the trifecta; these three pieces are a good bet to get you thinking about what’s happening to working class and disadvantaged men.

Michael Jindra is an anthropologist who wrote a piece for the blog of the Institute for Family Studies, entitled Why Working-Class Men are Falling Behind. He aims at the nexus of issues affecting the opportunities of scores of young men in our society: family structure, education, and declining industrialization. In all three of these domains, there are declines in tools and structures that bring about positive socialization. Jindra also discusses how trends in entertainment—especially video games—may be crowding out the abilities of boys to take advantage of what opportunities they might have (e.g., reading). Of course, video games, while a common focus for young men from all walks in life, are also going to be a way to cope with a world of lost opportunity through some semblance of adventure or impact—even if the impacts are based in the modeling and practicing of atrocious behavior (e.g., Grand Theft Auto).

My favorite section from his piece is this:

All of these things mentioned above—early reliance on stimulating entertainment, lower educational attainment, disconnection from families and role models, and the attractions of different, “edgy” subcultures—contribute to a widening gulf between those more connected to family, work, and society, and those without these commitments. While men are losing connections, women continue to participate in the labor force, attend religious services more often, and belong to other community and civic organizations. This is partly because many have dependent children and need to support them, whereas men can to a large extent avoid this responsibility.

Connection to children can foster responsibility behavior in other domains, and this seems to be largely happening now for women but less and less for men.

It is easy to think of all these themes as merely reflecting the opportunities and choices of individuals. But I think we are watching some negative trends of historic proportions, with men being increasingly disconnected from roles and responsibilities regarding work and family. I have long thought of this simple fact: When men do not have positive roles to play in society, they do not just sit around and do nothing. Many get in trouble. Not all, but many. This concern applies to women as well, but the trends right now seem especially concerning for men.

We need to keep talking a lot about men. These are not just changes in individual lives that are unfolding but changes in important aspects of how society functions. I do not have any simple suggestions, though my diagnosis is that we are seeing both a real net loss of opportunities compared to the past while at the same time seeing the failure of institutions such as family and schools that serve to structure how individuals can benefit from the opportunities life presents.

To use a play on the words from the title of Hanna Rosin’s work and book, there is a growing problem because there really is not going to be an end to men.

A Brief Piece on How Government Policy Disincentives Punish Marriage for Low Income Couples

AEI's Pethokoukis put out this brief piece on how government policies discourage marriage among those who are economically disadvantaged: Here’s exactly how marriage penalties discourage marriage

The piece gives you a quick example of the type of policy that I referred to in my last post (below, related to Annie Lowrey's article) as having negative consequences for those low income couples who would like to be married. Hard to fathom how we have a government that cannot address such things and build more rational models of incentives.

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About Those Controversial “Marriage” Programs Funded by the Government

The fur is flying once again around questions of the wisdom and effectiveness of the government funded efforts to increase and strengthen two parent families through the use of relationship education strategies. I believe that things have heated up, in part, because this issue about relationship education has now intersected with this year’s political debate about the nature of poverty and income inequality. That is too bad because politically-infused rhetoric is not conducive to the type of smart policy discussions that need to be sustained to actually make a difference in the lives of real people.

In this post, I am going to link to four articles that exemplify the issues being debated right now. My goal here is to focus in on a few specific points raised in the four articles, particularly related to the subject of government funded initiatives providing relationship education. Links are provided if you want to find and read the pieces I reference.

First up, Kay Hymowitz wrote a broad, thoughtful piece entitled How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids (New York Times on February 8^th, 2014). She covers a lot of important ground. I like how she challenges some of the deeply held viewpoints of liberals and conservatives. I also like how she embraces the bi-directionality of how poverty impacts families and how romantic and sexual relationships impact poverty. I think, for some people, the latter point may get uncomfortably close to how marriage might play some causal role in poverty. For example, romantic and sexual relationships impact childbearing and also the odds of succeeding in marriage, which, in turn, all influence poverty. I believe that discussions about poverty and family policy/programs that do not embrace the obvious and complex ways that causation flows both ways are unproductive; it is better to embrace than ignore complexity when it is relevant.

Next up is a piece by Annie Lowrey, in the New York Times Magazine: Can Marriage Cure Poverty? (February 4^th, 2014). Lowrey’s piece is excellent though I think it is slightly marred by the way she caricatures conservatives. But she gets some crucial points right. First, non-marriage is linked with poverty in some profound ways, and the only real debate on that subject is not if but how. Second, she acknowledges that there is some positive news in the recent, large-scale government funded evaluations testing relationship education strategies with unmarried couples in poverty. Third, she directly addresses the topic of the unbelievably dumb disincentives within government policies that punish disadvantaged couples as they try to get ahead. That’s a topic for another day, but the disincentives are probably growing and that makes me fear for our future.

On the other hand, Lowrey tilts pretty far to the unidirectional viewpoint that poverty drives problems in family structure and marriage without addressing the ways romantic partnering and sexual relationships contribute to disadvantage and risk. Hymowitz, as I noted above, digs in on this important issue while also addressing aspects of the complexity of marriage for some among the disadvantaged.

I raise these particular issues here because I want draw attention to one type of relationship education that has been utilized in some of the government supported efforts that gets little or no attention in the typical discussions. There have been a lot of services focused on helping individuals, not couples, make relationship choices that are designed to foster their odds of achieving their own life goals (including, eventually, marriage if desired) while also improving the lives of their children. Such individually-oriented relationship education is founded on the awareness that the economic, mental, and physical wellbeing of adults is deeply impacted by what happens in their love lives. Anyone close to the challenges confronting those with immense disadvantages recognizes that landing with a wrong, poorly matched, or dangerous partner can completely upend any other progress in life. Does any of this type of work get acknowledged in public discourse about government funded relationship education? Rarely. On the ground, I see liberals and conservatives united around the obvious rationality of such strategies. We do need robust evaluations of such services (they are pretty new and innovative), but the goals are important and some of the work is immensely thoughtful. 

Instead of showing any awareness of some of the innovative work being attempted, what is often suggested or implied in media stories is that government funded relationship education efforts are focused primarily on getting people in poverty to get partnered-up in marriage because that will magically cure all the ills of poverty, family functioning, and individual wellbeing. Right. Of course it will. And, of course, that’s how most of the people working on the ground in such efforts think. Magic beans, Jack.

If your sarcasm meter is not functioning, let me clarify: I’ve been around this work for a long time. I do not know anyone deeply involved who thinks so simplistically about this work. In fact, on the broader subject of thoughtfulness, I have been fortunate to be in scores of meetings with diverse scholars and experts grappling with complex issues about helping people—meetings where what happens is a lot more substantive than implied, for example, by a critic in one of the upcoming pieces I link to below who refers to “mucking around in people's lives.”

Related to complexity and thoughtfulness, I also want to suggest that anyone who wants to be taken seriously in discussing relationship education and government policies needs to think carefully about the types of outcomes that would be positive in different situations. For example, there are many cases wherein a good outcome of relationship education amounts to a damaging or destructive relationship coming to an end—not ending in marriage. Marriage is a public and private good, desired by many, but that does not mean any marriage to anybody. Strategists and workers on the ground level seem to have wholly accepted the goal of fostering healthy relationships and marriage; this fact seems to elude most critics of the efforts. This point also highlights just one of the reasons why it may be quite challenging to interpret simple statistics about marriage and divorce rates at the macro level as part of these discussions. 

Moving on to the other two articles. Both deal evidence of effectiveness of services provided to couples in some of the most intensive type of government efforts, with a particular focus on two large, federally funded, multi-site studies of program impacts for comprehensive services provided to disadvantaged couples who are either unmarried and having a child (The Building Strong Families Study: BSF) or married with children (The Supporting Healthy Marriage Study: SHM).

One lengthy piece was written by Thomas Bartlett of The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Great Mom & Dad Experiment (January 20^th, 2014). There are some elements of Bartlett’s piece that I take issue with, but, for this type of policy discussion, the piece seems to me to be relatively fair. He does a good job describing a range of complex issue and areas of serious disagreement among some of those who have thought about these issues. Another piece also covers a good deal of ground. It’s by Emily Alpert Reyes of McClatchy News: Federal Programs to Improve Marriage Don't Work (February 10, 2014). As with others here, there are complex issues raised in this piece that I may come back to in a later piece, but I mention both of these pieces here because I want to wrap up this post by making three points related to those two large government studies noted above. Many commentators of these two studies discuss the results as if there were no impacts at all. Sometimes, modest impacts are acknowledged but with an assumption that, surely, the government would not and should not continue to fund programs in any area where there were similarly modest findings in large, randomized trials.

In making these points, I take nothing from the fact that the actual findings and implications are complex.

1.  The one site among eight in the BSF study (Family Expectations in Oklahoma City) that successfully delivered a serious “dose” of the services to the participating couples demonstrated a range of statistically significant, positive impacts at the 15 month follow-up. Further, there was a statistically significant impact on family stability (a 20% increase) at the 3 year point follow-up. It is true that there was an absence of evidence for other types of significant impacts. However, obtaining a relatively large impact on a core, long-term outcome of policy significance (family stability) seems pretty important. Such an outcome is rare in this type of study.

2. Those conducting the large, SHM study, learned a great deal from the BSF study. As a result, all eight sites in that study delivered a substantial dose of the services to most couples in the program groups. What did they find? The results from the 12 month follow-up showed statistically significant, though small, impacts on a number of variables related to marital quality. (There are findings coming out soon on the 3 year follow-up.)   

3. Most large-scale studies of most government programs find no impacts. In 1987, a sociologist deeply acquainted with government evaluations, Peter Rossi, came up with The Iron Law of Evaluation, which he stated thusly: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.” Translation? In most such studies, one can expect no significant impacts; yet there were interpretable, significant impacts in the two studies noted above of these early efforts.  

I could list a wide variety of government programs and services that have poor evidence of effectiveness but that, nevertheless, receive vastly greater funding than the nascent attempts to help individuals and couples in their relationships. There are also many smaller studies, including some with very strong methodology, that show consistent evidence of positive impacts from relationship education. (Not my topic today.)

Am I pleased with modest impacts of those two large studies? No. As someone who works in this field, I see the current studies as promising, but like many others, I want to see us learn from current efforts and strengthen impacts.

In all of this, I have been puzzled by calls to defund what seem to me to be, by historical standards, promising findings coming early in a relatively new arena for government involvement. Why don’t the same critics explicitly call for defunding services and programs that receive hundreds of times the funding, services that happen to have long trails of meager or non-significant findings? I cannot read the minds of others, but I think some of the answer comes back to where I started. I think some of the energy currently rushing into this space, but certainly not all, is really about other issues.   

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Disclosure:  I think that just about everyone (but not everyone) writing and commenting on these matters has some type of bias or values animating their arguments, and it is worth considering what those may be when thinking through the points being bandied about. I try to be very above board, so here is my disclosure. You should know that Howard Markman and I (and a host of colleagues) have developed a variety of relationship education approaches that were used in some of the sites in the BSF and SHM studies and that are also used in a number of the projects funded by the government around the U.S. I receive income from our company called PREP. Further, I have been a long-time adviser for the efforts in Oklahoma. Of greater weight within me is the fact that I do believe in trying to build on promising studies, practices, and program models in these areas I focus on here. You are entitled, of course, to disregard any of my viewpoints based on these facts, but I hope those with serious interest would grapple with the ideas and consider where there may be inherent merit.

Reference for Rossi:  Rossi, P. H. (1987). The Iron Law of Evaluation and other metallic rules. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, 4, 3-20.  (for an interesting piece on this, click here)