Non-Custodial Parent Choices Establishment and PEER Pilots: Preliminary Impact Report

The report presents findings from the preliminary impact study of both the Non-Custodial Parent Choices PEER curriculum enhancement pilot and the Establishment Pilot (NCP Choices-EP). These two pilot programs represented efforts by the Texas Office of the Attorney General to extend and expand upon the original, highly successful Non-Custodial Parent Choices (NCP Choices) program.

This report describes Choice services, illustrates the program design of the establishment pilot (EP) and PEER, and summarizes three prior preliminary implantation assessments of the EP program. The authors described the research design for both programs, provided preliminary program impacts from the first year of implementation of these programs, and explored lessons from the experience of these two program extensions (Abstractor: Website Staff).

“In terms of findings, the EP, which has had a relatively longer follow-up interval, has shown significant positive impacts on all measures of child support collections, including frequency and amount of payments, as well as consistency. In fact, the 18 percentage point gain in any collections represents a near-doubling of the frequency of collections. This set of child support impacts clearly suggests that the establishment pilot, like the enforcement version of NCP Choices it was derived from, is likely to have its strongest effects on child support collections. Although this one positive impact shows promise, there are several reasons one would not expect strong findings from this program at this early date. The first, already noted above, is the low statistical power due to small sample size and short follow-up that makes it likely that only the strongest effects would be detectable this early. Second, and perhaps not as obvious, is that this impact analysis is actually testing for program effects over and above the impact of an already proven successful program. All participants in the PEER study, including both treatment group and control group members, receive the enforcement version of NCP Choices services, a program that has been shown to lead to increased child support and employment rates and reduced TANF, among other findings (Schroeder and Doughty 2009). Indeed, the high monthly average child support reported for both groups in the PEER study, at over $200 per month, suggests that the Choices services in PEER are effective for both the treatment and control groups. Attempts to get another program, any program, to improve upon these positive findings is a fairly tall order. In this context, the fact that child support payment consistency has increased in response to the PEER intervention is an impressive finding” (p.55–56). (Abstractor: Author)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2011
• Author(s): Schroeder, Daniel; Khan, Amna
• Organizational Author(s): The Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at the University of Texas at Austin
• Funding Source: Texas Office of the Attorney General
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies