These data were collected to evaluate the effectiveness of CASAWORKS for Families (CWF), a multiservice intervention designed to move substance abusing women on welfare to sobriety and self-sufficiency by addressing their substance abuse, domestic violence, employment, and basic needs. Conducted at 11 sites across the country, the evaluation was designed as a repeated measures, pre-during-post field evaluation with no pre-specified control or comparison groups. The results of this evaluation were primarily intended to guide a proposed second-stage experimental study of the effectiveness of an enhanced and refined CWF model.
When the potential participant presented herself at the CWF site, a research technician administered a specially modified version of the Addiction Severity Index (ASI), referred to as the Welfare to Work ASI (WTW-ASI). This version retained the ASI 5th edition as the core instrument but added questions in an addendum. The baseline WTW-ASI measured the severity of problems in nine areas: employment, medical status, alcohol use, drug use, legal status, family and social relationships, children and child care, basic needs, and psychiatric symptoms. In addition, the four-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), the Parenting Dimensions Inventory (PDI), and the Posttraumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale (PDS) were used to assess depression, parenting style, and posttraumatic stress disorder, respectively. The PDI, CES-D, and a follow-up version of WTW-ASI were also administered 6 and 12 months after intake.
Two instruments were used at baseline and at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months postbaseline to record the services provided by CWF: Welfare to Work version of the Treatment Services Review (TSR-WTW) and Case Management Review (CMR). The former mostly collected data on the number of treatment services received, such as doctor visits, therapy sessions, and days of inpatient treatment in the prior 30 days, while the latter collected data on the activities of the case management sessions and topics covered with the case managers. Activities recorded by the CMR included working on self-sufficiency plans, arrangement of follow-up services, skills development, crisis response, and advocating for the client. Topics covered included employment, substance abuse, mental health, domestic violence, parenting and child care, basic needs, life skills, and social support.
In order to compare the characteristics of the CWF clients with the general population of women who received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the study also collected WTW-ASI data from women in the general TANF population in the CWF locales regardless of their substance-use status.
CWF sample: Mothers aged 18 years and over who (1) had a substance abuse problem, (2) had physical custody of at least one child, (3) were receiving (or would imminently receive) TANF, (4) were not receiving Social Security Income (SSI), (5) were not already enrolled in a substance abuse treatment program , and (5) were willing to participate in the CWF intervention.
General TANF sample: Women aged 18 years and over on TANF.
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) recruited community organizations to participate in the CWF evaluation. Altogether, eleven sites in nine states were selected from a pool of more than 30 applicants:
These sites were funded for a 3-year period to recruit 100 qualified women each and to work with CASA centrally and their collaborating organizations locally in developing and delivering the comprehensive CWF intervention.
Screening and referral procedures relied on referrals from caseworkers at the site's local welfare offices and other sources. Of the 962 women who were actually referred to the CWF sites only 673 were eligible according to the selection criteria.
The general TANF sample comprises 157 women who were recruited from local welfare offices in eight of the CWF locales. There was no substance-use requirement for these women.
ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:
Welfare to Work Addiction Severity Index (WTW-ASI)
Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (4-item CES-D)
Parenting Dimensions Inventory (PDI)
Posttraumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale (PDS)
Welfare to Work Version of the Treatment Services Review (TSR-WTW)
Case Management Review (CMR)
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