Abstract
This paper examines the effects of Opportunity New York City–Family Rewards, the first holistic conditional cash transfer (CCT) program evaluated in the USA, on adolescents’ mental health and problem behavior (key outcomes outside of the direct targets of the program) as well as on key potential mechanisms of these effects. The Family Rewards program, launched by the Center for Economic Opportunity in the Mayor’s Office of the City of New York in 2007 and co-designed and evaluated by MDRC, offered cash assistance to low-income families to reduce economic hardship. The cash rewards were offered to families in three key areas: children’s education, family preventive health care, and parents’ employment. Results that rely on the random assignment design of the study find that Family Rewards resulted in statistically significant reductions in adolescent aggression and rates of substance use by program group adolescents as well as their friends, relative to adolescents in the control condition, but no statistically significant impacts on adolescent mental health. One possible mechanism for the benefits to adolescent behavior appears to be time spent with peers, as fewer adolescents in the program group spent time with friends and more adolescents in the program group spent time with family. Findings are discussed with regard to their implication for conditional cash transfer programs as well as for interventions targeting high-risk youth.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We present OLS for both continuous as well as binary and categorical outcomes, to ease interpretation. Results from probit and logistic regression models show substantively the same results as those presented here.
Other studies on this sample, including the companion study (Aber et al. 2016), have used p < 0.10 (p < 0.05 in each tail) to determine significance, given convention in policy and education science. In this paper, consistent with other studies in the prevention science field, we treat p < 0.05 (p < 0.025 in each tail) as statistically significant.
Despite differences in impacts for adolescent academic outcomes for those adolescents who were more and less academically prepared for school, there were no statistically significant differences in the impacts on these mental health or problem behavior outcomes for these subgroups; nor by child gender (findings available from the authors).
References
Aber, J. L., Morris, P. A., Wolf, S., & Berg, J. (2016). The impact of holistic conditional cash transfers on parental financial investment, adolescent time use and educational processes and outcomes. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 9, 334–363.
Adato, M., & Bassett, L. (2007). What is the potential of cash transfers to strengthen families affected by HIV and AIDS? A review of the evidence on impacts and key policy debates. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (Draft report prepared for the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and AIDS).
Behrman, J. R., Parker, S. W., & Todd, P. E. (2005). Long-term impact of the oportunidades conditional cash transfer program on rural youth in Mexico (Discussion Paper No. 122). Ibero-America Institute for Economic Research.
Berg, J., Morris, P., & Aber, L. (2013). Two-year impacts of a comprehensive family financial rewards program on children’s academic outcomes: Moderation by likelihood of earning rewards. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 6, 295–338.
Brechwald, W. A., & Prinstein, M. J. (2011). Beyond homophily: A decade of advances in understanding peer influence processes. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 21, 166–179.
Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2006). The bioecological model of human development. In R. M. Lerner (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical models of human development (6th ed.). New York: Wiley.
Burton, L. M. (1997). Ethnography and the meaning of adolescence in high-risk neighborhoods. Ethos, 25, 208–217.
Chase-Lansdale, P. J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (Eds.). (1995). Escape from poverty: What makes a difference for children? New York: Cambridge University Press.
Costello, E. J., Compton, S. N., Keelre, G., & Angold, A. (2003). Relationships between poverty and psychopathology: A natural experiment. Journal of the American Medical Association, 290, 2023–2029.
Dishion, T. J., & Tipsord, J. M. (2011). Peer contagion in child and adolescent social and emotional development. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 189–214.
Duncan, G. J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (Eds.). (1997). Consequences of growing up poor. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Fiszbein, A., & Schady, N. (2008). Conditional cash transfers: Reducing present and future poverty. Forthcoming, World Bank.
Gaubert, J. M., Knox, V., Alderson, D. P., Dalton, C., Fletcher, K., & McCormick, M. (2010). Early lessons from the implementation of a relationship and marriage skills program for low-income married couples. New York: MDRC.
Gennetian, L. A., Magnuson, K., & Morris, P. A. (2008). From statistical associations to causation: What developmentalists can learn from instrumental variables techniques coupled with experimental data. Developmental Psychology, 44, 381.
Gennetian, L. A., Castells, N., & Morris, P. A. (2010). Meeting the basic needs of children: Does income matter? Children and Youth Services Review, 32, 1138–1148.
Gershoff, E. T., Aber, J. L., & Raver, C. C. (2005). Child poverty in the United States: An evidence-based conceptual framework for programs and policies. Applied Developmental Science, 269–324.
Gertler, P. J. (2004). Do conditional cash transfers improve child health? Evidence from PROGRESA’s control randomized experiment. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 94, 336–341.
Greenberg, D. M., Dechausay, N., & Fraker, C. (2011). Learning together: How families responded to education incentives in New York City’s Conditional Cash Transfer program. Available at SSRN 2031255.
Haynie, D. L., & Osgood, D. W. (2005). Reconsidering peers and delinquency: How do peers matter? Social Forces, 84, 1109–1130.
Isakson, K., & Jarvis, P. (1999). The adjustment of adolescents during the transition into high school: A short-term longitudinal study. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 28, 1–26.
Johnson, T., & Fendrich, M. (2005). Modeling sources of self-report bias in a survey of drug use epidemiology. Annals of Epidemiology, 15, 381–389.
Loeber, R., & Dishion, T. (1983). Early predictors of male delinquency: A review. Psychological Bulletin, 94, 68.
Milligan, K., & Stabile, M. (2007). The integration of child tax credits and welfare: Evidence from the Canadian National Child Benefit program. Journal of Public Economics, 91, 305–326.
Morris, P., Aber, J. L., Wolf, S., & Berg, J. (2012). Using incentives to change how teenagers spend their time: The effects of New York City’s conditional cash transfer program. New York: MDRC.
O’Donogue, T., & Rabin, M. (1999). Doing it now or later. American Economic Review, 89, 103–124.
Orpinas, P., & Frankowski, R. (2001). The aggression scale: A self-report measure of aggressive behavior for young adolescents. Journal of Early Adolescence, 21, 50–67.
Ozer, E. J., Fernald, L. C., Manley, J. G., & Gertler, P. J. (2009). Effects of a conditional cash transfer program on children’s behavior problems. Pediatrics, 123, e630–e637.
Patterson, G. R., & Stouthamer-Loeb, M. (1984). The correlation of family management practices and delinquency. Child Development, 55, 1299–1307.
Pettit, G. S., Laird, R. D., Dodge, K. A., Bates, J. E., & Criss, M. M. (2001). Antecedents and behavior-problem outcomes of parental monitoring and psychological control in early adolescence. Child Development, 72, 583–598.
Prinstein, M. J., Boergers, J., & Spirito, A. (2001). Adolescents’ and their friends’ health-risk behavior: Factors that alter or add to peer influence. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 26, 287–298.
Rawlings, L. B. (2005). A new approach to social assistance: Latin America’s experience with conditional cash transfer programmes. International Social Security Review, 58, 133–161.
Reynolds, C. R., & Kamphaus, R. W. (1992). Behavior assessment system for children: Manual. Circle Pines: American Guidance Service.
Riccio, J. A., Dechausay, N., Greenberg, D. M., Miller, C., Rucks, Z., & Verma, N. (2010). Toward reduced poverty across generations: Early findings from New York City’s conditional cash transfer program. New York: MDRC.
Riccio, J., Dechausay, N., Miller, C., Nunez, S., Verma, N., & Yang, E. (2013). Conditional cash transfers in New York City: The continuing story of the opportunity NYC-family rewards demonstration. New York: MDRC.
Roeser, R. W., Eccles, J. S., & Strobel, K. R. (1998). Linking the study of schooling and mental health: Selected issues and empirical illustrations at the level of the individual. Educational Psychologist, 33, 153–176.
Roeser, R. W., Eccles, J. S., & Freedman-Doan, C. (1999). Academic functioning and mental health in adolescence: Patterns, progressions, and routes from childhood. Journal of Adolescent Research, 14, 135–174.
Rooke, S., Thorsteinsson, E., Karpin, A., Copeland, J., & Allsop, D. (2010). Computer‐delivered interventions for alcohol and tobacco use: A meta‐analysis. Addiction, 105, 1381–1390.
Skoufias, E. (2005). PROGRESA and its impacts on the welfare of rural households in Mexico. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. (No. 139). IFPRI Research Report.
Stattin, H., & Kerr, M. (2000). Parental monitoring: A reinterpretation. Child Development, 71, 1072–1085.
Thelen, E., & Smith, L. B. (1998). Dynamic systems theories. In W. Damon (Ed.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical models of human development (pp. 563–634). New York: Plenum.
Tobler, N. S., Roona, M. R., Ochshorn, P., Marshall, D. G., Streke, A. V., & Stackpole, K. M. (2000). School-based adolescent drug prevention programs: 1998 meta-analysis. Journal of Primary Prevention, 20, 275–336.
Wolf, S., Aber, J. L., & Morris, P. A. (2013). Drawing on psychological theory to understand and improve antipoverty policies: The case of conditional cash transfers. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 19, 3.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
This paper was supported in part by the William T. Grant Foundation with a grant to the first two authors and from the New York City for Economic Opportunity (CEO) to MDRC for the core and embedded study evaluations of Opportunity NYC. We thank staff members at Seedco and the Neighborhood Partner Organizations in delivering the program, staff at Decision Information Resources, Inc., for collecting the data, and at MDRC, many individuals who worked on various aspects of the core and embedded studies, most notably James Riccio, David Greenberg, Nandita Verma, and Edith Yang. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Morris, P.A., Aber, J.L., Wolf, S. et al. Impacts of Family Rewards on Adolescents’ Mental Health and Problem Behavior: Understanding the Full Range of Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program. Prev Sci 18, 326–336 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-017-0748-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-017-0748-6