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The other 51 percent not receiving welfare were working poor or unemployed. Approximately 83 percent of the caregivers - usually a biological mother - were 39 years old or younger; and nearly all had at least one child 2 to 4 years of age. For primary caregivers, common physical health conditions included diabetes, heart disease, severe obesity and arthritis accompanied by mental health concerns such as depression, anxiety or stress.
For children, the researchers also found a range of serious conditions such as severe chronic asthma, seizures or leading poisoning coupled with depression, autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD , for example.
Co-author Skinner, who directed the disability component, found similar challenges with 83 percent reporting concurrent physical and mental health problems in both the primary caregiver and at least one child. However, these efforts take a physical and emotional toll. Caregivers worked despite having serious health problems, but frequently, they reported having lost or resigned from jobs because of health-related responsibilities. Also caseworkers did not always provide clear and consistent information about individual programs, and differed in their expectations whether the adult's health problems qualified for an exemption from the work requirements or an extension of TANF eligibility, Burton notes.
Get all the help you can. Make sure you're getting everything you're entitled to: You can no longer afford to live life plus pay the house upkeep on your reduced income Sell the house, move into something you can afford, invest extra proceeds from the sale, and enjoy life more Emotional attachment to something You are not willing to part with something you can no longer afford: If you don't, you'll never overcome your financial problems Your problem may not be listed above or it may be more complex.
Do I need to eat out this much? Do I need to spend on entertainment or hobbies this month? Could I pack a lunch for work rather than buy one? To overcome financial problems and solve your difficulties for good, you need to determine what your priorities are. Some might be clear-cut financial priorities, e. Others might be lifestyle-goals, based on your values, e. Setting clear priorities for yourself makes it easier to make tough financial decisions.
Your first goal may be to create a budget to get a specific problem under control. For instance, one of your short term goals may be to reduce your expenses and pay off your smallest credit card balance. A medium term goal could be to pay off your credit card debt. The solution to financial problems is often to reduce expenses, increase income, or do some combination of both. Big changes are always much harder than small changes so to accomplish your goals, identify small steps you can take to achieve them.
Once that one debt is paid off, you put all of the extra funds towards eliminating the next debt. Re-evaluate your lifestyle, create a budget and follow it. If employed, see if you can get a 2nd job or more overtime.
Adjust expectations and learn to live on what you earn rather than what you're used to; use cash, not credit. Parents didn't budget for the increased expenses and the drop in income during maternity leave. In addition, tailoring questions to accommodate the language of specific population subgroups is feasible with computer-assisted interviewing systems.
Comprehension difficulties are best identified and repaired through the use of selected pretesting techniques such as cognitive interviewing or expert panel review e.
above problems for years on end. They may have no idea Families living in this type of income bracket have to . or any very low-income families because. Low-income families are getting terrible financial advice online . “You start to think, 'I can solve my short-term problems and then move on.
Requesting respondents to paraphrase the question in their own words often provides insight into different interpretations of a question; similarly, the use of other cognitive interviewing techniques such as think-aloud interviews or the use of vignettes can be useful in identifying comprehension problems as well as offer possible alternative wording options for the questionnaire designer. Many of the questions of interest in surveying the welfare population request that the respondent report on retrospective behavior, often for periods covering several years or more e.
Some of these questions require that the respondent date events of interest, thus requiring episodic retrieval of a specific event. Other questions request that respondents provide a numeric estimate e. As noted earlier, response strategies are often a function of the behavioral complexity experienced by the respondent; however, the strategy used by the respondent can be affected by the wording of the question. Although both responses based on episodic enumeration and estimation are subject to measurement error, the literature suggests that questions which direct the respondent toward episodic enumeration tend to suffer from errors of omissions underreports due to incomplete memory searches on the part of the respondent, whereas responses based on estimation strategies result in both inclusion and exclusion errors, resulting in greater variance but unbiased population.
The findings from Mathiowetz and Duncan illustrate the difference in reports based on estimation strategies as compared to episodic enumeration. In contrast, when respondents had to report the months and years of individual spells of unemployment requiring episodic enumeration more than 60 percent of the individual spells of unemployment were not reported. Several empirical investigations have identified means by which to improve the reporting of retrospective information for both episodic enumeration and estimation-based reports.
These questionnaire design approaches include:. Work in the field of cognitive psychology has provided insight into the structure of autobiographic information in memory. Event history calendars have been found to be effective in reducing response error related to the reporting of what, when, and how often events occurred Freedman et al. Whereas traditional survey instruments ask for retrospective reports through a set of discrete questions e. If the question items of interest require the dating of several types of events, the literature suggests that the use of event history calendars will lead to improved reporting.
The use of an event history calendar is most beneficial if the questionnaire focuses on the dating and sequencing of events and behaviors across several life domains. In some cases, the questionnaire contains a limited number of questions for which the respondent must provide a date or a correct sequence of events. In these cases, studies have indicated that the use of landmark dates can improve the quality of reporting by respondents Loftus and Marburger, Landmark events are defined as either public or personal landmarks; for some of these, the respondent can provide an accurate date personal landmark.
Landmarks are effective for three reasons: If the information has not been encoded in memory, the response quality will be poor no matter how well the questions have been constructed. For some information, the most efficient and effective means by which to improve the quality of the reported data is to have respondents access records. Several studies report an improvement in the quality of asset and income information when respondents used records e.
Two factors often hinder questionnaire designers from requesting that respondents use records: Although in some cases interviewers have been observed discouraging record use Marquis and Moore, , studies that request detailed income and expenditure information such as the SIPP and the National Medical Expenditure Survey, have both reported success in encouraging respondents to use records Moore et al.
Record use by respondents is directly related to the extent to which interviewers have been trained to encourage their use by respondents. For telephone interviews, the fear is that encouraging record use may encourage nonresponse; a small body of empirical literature does not support this notion Grondin and Michaud, One form of record to consider is the prospective creation of a diary that is referenced by the respondent during a retrospective interview.
Any free-recall task, such as the enumeration of all sources of income, is a cognitively more difficult task than the task of recognition, such as, asking the respondent to indicate which of a list of income sources is applicable to his or her situation. Consider the two approaches taken in examples 1 and In the first example, the respondent must process all of the items together; most likely after the first or second item on the list was read, the respondent failed to hear or process the remaining items on the list.
Hence the list does not provide an effective recognition mechanism. In the second example, the respondent is given time to process each item on the list individually the entire list consists of 20 items. Simple behavioral experiences are relatively easy to report even over long reference periods whereas complex behavioral experiences can be quite difficult to reconstruct. For example, the experience of receiving welfare benefits continuously over a month period is quite different from the experience of receiving benefits for 8 of the 12 months. The use of filter questions to identify those for whom the behavioral experience is complex would permit the questionnaire designer to concentrate design efforts on those respondents for whom the task is most difficult.
Those with complex behavioral experiences could be questioned using an event history calendar whereas those for whom the recent past represents a steady state could be asked a limited number of discrete questions. When respondents are asked to report a frequency or number of times an event or a behavior occurred, they draw on different response strategies to formulate a response. The choice of response strategy is determined, in part, by the actual number or frequency as well as the regularity of the behavior.
Rare or infrequent events often are retrieved through episodic enumeration in which the respondent attempts to retrieve each occurrence of the event. Such strategies are subject to errors of omission as well as misdating of the event by the respondent. When the event or behavior of interest occurs frequently, respondents often will use some form of estimation strategy to formulate a response. These strategies include rule-based estimation recall a rate and apply to timeframe of interest , automatic estimation drawn from a sense of relative or absolute frequency , decomposition estimate the parts and sum , normative expectations, or some form of heuristic, such as availability heuristic based on the speed of retrieval.
All estimation approaches are subject to error, but a well-designed questionnaire can both suggest the strategy for the respondent to use and attempt. For example, if the behavior or event of interest is expected to occur on a regular basis, a question that directs the respondent to retrieve the rule, and apply the rule to the time frame of interest, and then probes to elicit exceptions to the rule may be a good strategy for eliciting a numeric response.
Current versus Retrospective Reports. Current status most often is easier to report, with respect to cognitive difficulty, than retrospective status, so it is often useful to consider beginning questions concerning current status.
Information retrieved as part of the reporting of current status also will facilitate retrieval of retrospective information. Questions for which the source of the measurement error is related to perceived sensitivity of the items or the socially undesirable nature of the response often call for the use of question items or questionnaire modes that provide the respondent within greater sense of confidentiality or even anonymity as a means for improving response quality. The questionnaire designer must gauge the level of sensitivity or threat or elicit information on sensitivity or threat through developmental interviews or focus groups and respond with the appropriate level of questionnaire modifications.
The discussion that follows attempts to provide approaches for questions of varying degrees of sensitivity, moving from slightly sensitive to extremely sensitive or illegal behaviors. Sudman and Bradburn provide a checklist of question approaches to minimize threat from sensitive questions. Among the suggestions made by the authors are the use of open questions as opposed to closed questions so as to not reveal extreme response categories , the use of longer questions so as to provide context and indicate that the subject is not taboo, the use of alternative terminology e.
For sensitive questions, one of the most consistent findings from the experimental literature indicates that the use of self-administered questionnaires results in higher reports of threatening behavior. For example, in studies of illicit drug use, the increase in reports of use was directly related to the perceived level of.
Alternative modes could involve the administration of the questions by an interviewer, with the respondent completing the response categories using paper and pencil, or administration of the questionnaire through a portable cassette and self-recording of responses.
More recently, face-to-face data collection efforts have experimented with CASID in which the respondent reads the questions from the computer screen and directly enters the responses and ACASI, in which the questions can be heard over headphones as well as read by the respondent. The latter has the benefit of not requiring the respondent to be literate; furthermore, it can be programmed to permit efficient multilingual administration without requiring multilingual survey interviewers.
In addition, both computer-assisted approaches offer the advantage that complicated skip patterns, not possible with paper and pencil self-administered questionnaires, can be incorporated into the questionnaire. Similar methods are possible in telephone surveys, with the use of push-button or voice recognition technology for the self-administered portion of the questionnaire.
Two techniques described in the literature provide researchers with a means of obtaining a population estimate of an event or a behavior but not information that can be associated with the individual. Both were designed initially for use in face-to-face surveys; it is feasible to administer an item count approach in a telephone or self-administered questionnaire. The randomized response technique is one in which two questions are presented to the respondent, each with the same response categories, usually yes and no. One question is the question of interest; the other is a question for which the distribution of the responses for the population is known.
Each question is associated with a different color. An example is as follows: A box contains beads, 70 percent of which are red, 30 percent of which are blue. When shaken, the box will present to the respondent one bead only seen by the respondent. Depending on the color, the respondent will answer one of the following questions: Red question Have you ever had an abortion?
The item count method is somewhat easier to administer than the randomized response technique. Respondents are asked to simply provide the number of behaviors in which they have engaged without indicating the specific behaviors. The difference in the number of behaviors between the two lists provides the estimate of the behavior of interest.
The major disadvantage of either the randomized response technique or item count method is that one cannot relate individual characteristics of the respondents with the behavior of interest; rather one is limited to a population estimate. The empirical literature addressing response errors specifically among the low-income or welfare population is limited. However, if we couple those limited findings with results based on studies of the general population, some principles of questionnaire design to minimize response error emerge. At the risk of appearing to provide simple solutions to complex problems, we speculate on some guidelines to assist in the construction of questionnaires targeted at the low-income or welfare populations.
Complex versus simple behavioral experience. One finding that is consistent throughout the literature indicates that complex behavioral experiences are more difficult to retrieve and report accurately than simple behavioral experiences. Despite this, questionnaire designers tend to treat all potential respondents the same, opting for a single set of questions for many questions, such as a single question or set of questions concerning annual earnings or amount of program support.
One means by which to attempt to improve the reporting for those persons for whom the task is most difficult is to adopt, as suggested by Schaeffer , the use of filter questions to determine the complexity of the experience, offering different follow-up questions for those with simple and complex behavior.
For example, the person who has been employed continuously at a single job or unemployed continuously during a particular reference period easily can be identified and directed toward a different set of questions concerning earnings than the individual who has held several jobs, either concurrently or sequentially. Similarly, one can ask the respondent whether the amount of income from a particular income support program varies from month to month, with follow-up questions based on the response. Simple, single-focus items often are more effective than complex, compound items.
Whenever possible, a question should attempt to address a single concept. Although these questions often are constructed so as to minimize the number of questions read to the respondent and therefore minimize administration time , we speculate that the use of several shorter questions is more effective, both from the perspective of administration time as well as the quality of the data. An Adult Basic Education class for improving basic reading and math skills?
Reduce cognitive burden whenever possible. Regardless of the population of interest, we know that, from a cognitive perspective, some tasks are easier to perform than others. Several means by which this can be accomplished include:.
Phrase tasks in the form of recognition rather than free recall. Request information that requires estimation rather than episodic recall. For example, asking for the total number of jobs held during the reference period of interest requires less cognitive effort than asking for the starting and ending date of each job. If the latter information is needed to address analytic needs,. Request information in the format or metric used by the respondent. For example, earning information may be best reported when the most salient or most rehearsed metric is used by the respondent.
For example, the findings by Borus and Smith that indicated a single broad-based question yielded a more accurate reporting by low-income respondents than a series of questions that required event-history type reconstruction of earnings simply may indicate that annual earnings are well rehearsed and more easily accessible to respondents than earnings related to any one job.
One means by which to determine whether to ask the respondent about annual earnings, monthly earnings, or hourly earnings is to ask the respondent how he or she is best able to respond. Focus on reference periods that are salient to the respondent. The 6-month period prior to exiting welfare may not necessarily be a particularly salient reference period, even though the date of termination of benefits may be quite salient. For reference periods that may not be salient to the respondent, the use of calendars or other records coupled with the identification of landmark events within the reference period may aid retrieval of information and the dating of events and behaviors.
Provide the respondent with assistance in how to perform the task. For the most part, respondents rarely perform the task we are asking them to tackle. Instructions and feedback throughout the process can clarify the task for the respondent as well as provide feedback for appropriate respondent behavior. Instructions indicating that the questionnaire designer is interested in all spells of unemployment, including short spells lasting less than a week, provides an instruction to the respondent as well as additional time for the respondent to search his or her memory.
Should the respondent provide such information, appropriate feedback would indicate that such detailed information is important to the study. Other forms of instruction could focus the respondent on the use of a calendar or other types of records. In addition, we know from the literature that use of additional probes or cues stimulates the reporting of additional information.
When there is interest in eliciting information from the respondent concerning short spells of employment or unemployment or odd or sporadic sources of income, repeated retrieval attempts by the respondent in response to repeated questions may be the most effective approach. In some cases, the provision of some information may be preferable to no information from the respondent.
The concepts of interest for many surveys of the low-income and welfare populations are fairly complex, for example, distinguishing among the various income support programs or determining whether sporadic odd jobs count as being employed. As indicated in several of the studies reviewed, research directed toward improving the comprehension of survey questions is greatly needed. For those developing questionnaires, this implies the need for iterative testing and pretesting, focusing on the interpretation of questions among members of the population of interest.
The empirical literature provides evidence of both reasonably accurate reporting of earnings, other sources of income, and employment as well as extremely poor reporting of these characteristics on the part of household respondents. The magnitude of measurement error in these reports is in part a function of the task as framed by the question. Careful questionnaire construction and thorough testing of questions and questionnaires can effectively identify question problems and reduce sources of error. Public Opinion Quarterly LoSciuto Effect of interview mode on self-reported drug use. Black On the Job Training.
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