Comparing Long-Term Employment Programs in Welfare Programs: Portland, Oregon, Early 1990s

This report focuses on outcomes from an analysis of findings related to a NEWSS initiative for welfare recipients in Portland, Oregon. The analysis involved roughly 4,000 adults who were randomly assigned to the Portland NEWWS site. This sample includes 3,500 individuals assigned to the program group and 500 individuals assigned to the control group, who were subject to a full five-year embargo on receiving program services. This long-term longitudinal study compares program participants against the control group 20 years after the treatment group received services.

The research team used two analysis methods. First, the team created average employment and earnings outcomes covering the full 20-year follow-up period to get a sense of how individuals fared overall. The team then estimated impacts on these outcomes for subgroups of individuals, based on their characteristics before they entered the study. Second, the team used a more innovative approach—combining sequence and cluster analyses—to examine the 20-year labor market trajectories of individuals in the program group, as well as to qualitatively assess any differences between the common trajectories of those individuals and those of individuals in the control group. By using multiple approaches, these analyses not only shed light on the long-term outcomes of the NEWWS study, but they also offer some new thinking on how to examine long-term outcomes. The findings also provide insights into whether future evaluations of similar programs should consider using these methods.

The researchers identified the following findings:

• NEWWS led to a general increase in average 20-year earnings of individuals in the program group compared with those of individuals in the control group, particularly for certain subgroups with less attachment to the labor force at study entry.
• The NEWWS intervention, however, did not appear to change the common employment and earnings trajectories of individuals receiving welfare, nor did it seem to change the proportion of individuals who ended up on a particular trajectory.

The researchers proposed the following recommendations and suggestions:

• More modern approaches to policy and programs, including career pathways initiatives, could help put more individuals on positive employment trajectories long term.
• The analyses showed that individuals in each of the three identified employment and earnings trajectory clusters had similar demographic characteristics, suggesting that the clusters likely could not have been identified through more conventional analyses. (Conventional analyses typically use such demographic characteristics to define subgroups.) This was true for both the control group and the program group, suggesting that these methods did bring a “value added” to the study of social programs using randomized controlled trials. Researchers should consider using these approaches in the future.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2022
• Author(s): Schaberg, K.; Jones, D.
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Justin Venneri
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies