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Project Description

New Chance seeks to help teenage mothers acquire educational and vocational credentials and skills so that they can secure jobs offering opportunities for advancement and could thereby reduce, and eventually eliminate, their use of welfare. Those eligible for New Chance include young mothers 16 - 22 years of age who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), had their first child as a teen, and lack a high school diploma or its equivalent.

The New Chance Observational Study is an in-depth examination of parenting behavior in 290 of the 2,322 families studied in the New Chance Demonstration.

Project duration: Aug 1989 - Jul 1997

Sites studied include Chula Vista, California
Inglewood, California
San Jose, California
Denver, Colorado
Jacksonville, Florida
Chicago Heights, Illinois
Lexington, Kentucky
Detroit, Michigan
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Bronx, New York
Harlem, New York
Portland, Oregon
Salem, Oregon
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Sample Characteristics and Sites Studied

2,322 welfare clients and persons at risk of going on welfare.

Sample selected according to eligibility criteria: 16-22 years old; first gave birth age 19 or younger; not pregnant at time of enrollment; high school dropout (94% of sample) or high school graduate/holder of GED with reading scores below ninth-grade level (6% of sample); receiving ADFC (95% of sample) or economically disadvantaged according to Job Training Partnership Act (5% of sample); ability to speak, read, and understand English.

Random sample of 1,553 (67% of sample) in program group (who were allowed to enroll in New Chance) and 769 (33% of sample) in control group (who did not have access to New Chance services but may find alternate services in their communities).

Recent Findings in Brief

06/01/98: New Chance Demonstration: Promises to Keep: Assessing Affective and Behavioral Qualities of Mother-Child Relationships in the New Chance Observational Study

Final Impact Findings:

“The major impact of New Chance on observational measures of affective and behavioral qualities of mother-child relationships was that mothers assigned to the New Chance experimental group, in comparison with those in the control group, showed less coercive and punitive behavior toward their children during the Teaching Task session. This finding was true as an overall difference between the groups as well as within a wide range of baseline subgroups. It seems, therefore, that New Chance did reduce harsh treatment of children by their mothers”(16).

“There were no overall differences between the New Chance experimental group and the control group on more positive observational indices of interaction such as Mother’s Supportive Presence or Quality of Relationship. We did see significant differences within some of the subgroups that may have been indices of lower risk at baseline, such as having only one child at the time of random assignment. Within these lower-risk subgroups, mothers in the experimental group were rated higher on Quality of Relationship than were control group mothers. Although this finding must be interpreted cautiously due to the lack of an overall New Chance impact, it does suggest that mothers who were at lower risk at baseline may have benefited from New Chance not only through the reduction of punitive and coercive parenting behaviors, but also through an increase in positive parenting behaviors”(17).

“One of the major goals of the comprehensive New Chance Program was to have a positive impact on the children. We did not, however, find any overall child impacts at the time of the observational session. In fact, baseline subgroup analyses suggest that for some dyads, particularly those where the mothers faced substantial interpersonal demands at baseline, children of mothers in the New Chance experimental group showed less compliance than children of mothers in the control group. Again, subgroup findings must be interpreted cautiously due to the lack of an overall impact of the New Chance program on Child’s Compliance. This finding suggests that for some families the additional demands of the New Chance Program may have disrupted aspects of the mother-child relationship. Previous research has suggested that multiple maternal stressors may contribute to child behavior problems in the preschool years (Richman, Stevenson, and Graham, 1982) and in the elementary school years (Pianta, Egeland, & Sroufe, 1990). For a small group of families, it is possible that the intensive nature of the New Chance Program compounded the demands in their already stressful lives”(17).

“We found significant continuity of adaptation over time in the Observational Study sample, and within the New Chance experimental group in particular. Our analyses demonstrated that there is continuity of adaptation from the 21 month observation to the 42 month follow-up, with elements of the mother-child interaction predicting both later maternal reports of child behavior and teacher reports of child behavior. Our analyses also established that there is some evidence of significant continuity of adaptation within the New Chance experimental group but not within the control group. Because there are no actual intervention/control differences in child behavior at 42 months, we interpret this finding to indicate that what has changed is not child behavior, but the way in which mothers in the New Chance group perceive and report on their children’s behavior. This does not mean that the intervention effects on maternal report should be discounted as a methodological artifact. Changes in mothers’ perceptions of their children’s behavior may eventually lead to more sensitive interactions, and consequent changes in the relationships. This may be a small step toward improving mother-child relationships”(18).

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