Developmental psychologist P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale (IPR-Education and Social Policy) and her collaborators will release a series of reports and policy briefs this summer for their $20 million study "Welfare, Children and Families: A Three City Study."

The four-year study examines the consequences of welfare reform on the well-being of children and families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. The project is following adults as they make decisions about employment, schooling and training, residential mobility, and childbearing. It is also studying children as their families confront the challenges of economic hardship combined with welfare reform, monitoring the children's health and development and use of social services.

The upcoming publications will be based on two components of the project: interviews with about 2,500 low-income families, about half of whom receive welfare money, and additional interviews with a subset of 600 families on child development. The third component of the study is an ethnographic study of 215 families with young children, including 45 families with a child who has a disability.

The first three papers will cover the following topics:

• Rules and Reactions: What the adults in the study know about the new welfare rules and whether they say they have changed their labor force behavior and family lives as a result (available in June).
  
  
• Leaving Welfare: Individuals' patterns of welfare usage and labor market participation during the two years prior to the interviews.
  
  
• Where are the Children?: Typical days of the children of current and former welfare recipients: where they are, who is caring for them, and what activities they engage in.

The research team released its overview and design report in March. The report introduces the issue of monitoring welfare reform; describes other current studies of the topic; and presents the goals of the study, the cities that were chosen, and the conceptual framework.

To request a copy of any of the publications, contact IPR's publications department. The papers will be accessible online from the project's main Web site, www.jhu.edu/~welfare.

Chase-Lansdale's co-investigators are Ronald Angel, the University of Texas at Austin; Linda Burton, Penn State University; Andrew Cherlin and Robert Moffitt, Johns Hopkins University; and William Julius Wilson, Harvard University.