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 8th, 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
4th, 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 20th, 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.
* *
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)
