The Women’s Employment Study (WES) is a panel study of women, all of whom received cash welfare and resided in an urban county in Michigan in February 1997. The research team at the University of Michigan conducted five waves of in-home, personal interviews with respondents—Fall 1997, 86 percent response rate; Fall 1998, 92 percent response rate; Fall 1999, 91 percent response rate; Fall 2001, response rate, 90 percent; Fall 2003, 93 percent. No other panel study of welfare recipients has had such high response rates.
The study has been widely recognized by academic researchers and policy analysts as one of the most important of the effects of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act on the well-being of mothers and children. The study is unique in the extent and quality of information it gathers on long-term employment and wage trajectories, on job characteristics, on poverty, family income and experiences of material hardship, and on the human capital, health and mental health of women making the transition from welfare to work and those who have not been as successful in finding and sustaining employment.
For more information please contact: Sheldon Danziger or Sandra Danziger.