While income level has been consistently linked to family and youth well-being, little is known about the importance of stability in family income. Morris and her colleagues will leverage data from an existing randomized control trial of a conditional cash transfer program—Opportunity New York City-Family Rewards Program (ONYC)—to examine if and how income instability affects family processes and youth school outcomes. ONYC was sponsored by the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) in the Mayor’s Office of the City of New York and conducted by MDRC. The program targeted families with incomes below 130 percent of the federal poverty line who lived in 6 low-income communities in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Manhattan. Families were randomly assigned to an intervention group, which was offered cash incentives, or a control group who was not. The intervention group received cash incentives as rewards for parents’ participation in preventive health care practices, parents’ engagement in work and job training activities, and children’s school attendance and test scores. The original evaluation of ONYC included three components: administrative and survey data on all treatment and control group members (4,800 families, 11,000 children), an embedded in-depth study of 511 ninth graders (funded by the Foundation), and a qualitative study of 40 treatment families. The investigators will use two waves of qualitative data to examine family income and spending patterns, financial planning activities, coping strategies during financial shocks, and reactions during financial windfalls. Morris and colleagues will use qualitative analyses to build theories about how income instability affects youth and then test those theories using administrative and survey data.
Morris and her colleagues will leverage data from an existing randomized control trial of a conditional cash transfer program—Opportunity New York City-Family Rewards Program (ONYC)—to examine if and how income instability affects family processes and youth school outcomes.
