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Employment coaching involves trained staff working collaboratively with participants to help them set individualized goals directly or indirectly related to employment and providing motivation, support, and feedback as participants work toward those goals. Unlike most traditional case managers, coaches work in partnership with participants and do not tell the participants what goals they should pursue or what action steps to take in pursuing them. Recently, there has been growing interest among policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and others in using employment coaching to assist Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other adults with low incomes.

To learn more about the potential of employment coaching, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) funded an experimental impact study of four employment coaching programs conducted as part of the Evaluation of Employment Coaching for TANF and Related Populations. The impact study evaluated the effectiveness of each program on study participants' self-regulation skills, employment, earnings, and other measures of personal and family well-being during the 21 months after participants enrolled in the study. Data and documentation for the longer term follow-up, 48 to 67 months after study enrollment, are forthcoming.

The four employment coaching programs included in the evaluation are:

• Family Development and Self-Sufficiency (FaDSS), which serves TANF recipients and their family members in Iowa. Participation in FaDSS is voluntary and most coaching sessions occur in the participant's home.
• Goal4 It!TM, which provides employment coaching to TANF recipients in Jefferson County, Colorado in lieu of traditional case management. Receipt of TANF benefits is conditional on participation in either Goal4 It! or traditional case management.
• LIFT, which is a voluntary coaching program operated in four U.S. cities. Most coaching is conducted by unpaid student interns from Master of Social Work programs.
• MyGoals for Employment Success (MyGoals), which is a voluntary coaching program that served recipients of public housing assistance in Baltimore, Maryland, and Houston, Texas.

The impact study addressed the following primary research questions:

Do the coaching programs improve the outcomes of adults with low incomes?

Specifically:

• Do the coaching programs affect participants' intermediate outcomes related to self-regulation and other skills associated with labor market success?
• Do the coaching programs affect participants' employment and economic security outcomes?
• How do the impacts of the coaching programs change over time?
• Are the coaching programs more effective for some groups of participants than others?

Between February 2017 and November 2019, about 4,300 adults who were eligible for one of the four employment coaching programs and who consented to participate in the evaluation were randomly assigned either to (1) a program group that had access to employment coaching, or (2) a control group that did not have access to employment coaching but could receive other services available in the community. The effectiveness of each employment coaching program was assessed based on differences in average outcomes between program and control group members. Impacts were estimated during two follow-up periods: at 9 to 12 months after study enrollment (depending on the program; Moore et al. 2023) and at 21 months after study enrollment (Moore et al. forthcoming).

To estimate the impacts of employment coaching, the study used data from: (1) a baseline survey or form administered to study participants at the time of study enrollment, (2) follow-up surveys administered to study participants approximately 9 to 12 months after study enrollment, and again approximately 21 months after study enrollment, (3) administrative employment and Unemployment Insurance records from the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH), and (4) administrative records from state and local agencies on participation in public assistance programs.

The employment coaching restricted-use data collection includes nine files with data from these sources, excluding administrative and Unemployment Insurance records from the NDNH. Some of the files include data for a single program, while others combine data for more than one program. A user guide provides documentation for each file.

Long-term data will be added to this study homepage in the future.

This data collection contains the first four waves of the Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYFP), conducted in 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992. The Iowa Youth and Families Project was developed from an initial sample of 451 7th graders from two-parent families in rural Iowa. The study was merged with the Iowa Single Parent Project (ISPP) to form the Iowa Family Transitions Project in 1994, when the target youth were seniors in high school. Survey data were collected from the target child (7th grader), a sibling within four years of age of the target child, and both parents. Field interviewers visited families at their homes on several occasions to administer questionnaires and videotape interaction tasks including family discussion tasks, family problem-solving tasks, sibling interaction tasks, and marital interaction tasks.

The Household Data files contain information about the family's financial situation, involvement in farming, and demographic information about household members.

The Parent and the Child Survey Data files contain responses to survey questions about the quality and stability of family relationships, emotional, physical, and behavioral problems of individual family members, parent-child conflict, family problem-solving skills, social and financial support from outside the home, traumatic life experiences, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use, and opinions on topics such as abortion, parenting, and gender roles. In addition, the Child Survey Data files include responses collected from the target child and his or her sibling in the study about experiences with puberty, dating, sexual activity, and risk-taking behavior.

The Problem-Solving Data files contain survey data collected from respondents about the family interactions tasks.

The Observational Data files contain the interviewers' observations collected during these tasks.

Demographic variables include sex, age, employment status, occupation, income, home ownership, religious preference, frequency of religious attendance, as well as the ages and sex of all household members and their relationship to the head of household. Demographic information collected on the parents also includes their birth order within their family, the ages and political philosophy of their parents, the sex, age, education level, and occupation of their siblings, and the country of origin of their ancestors.

This survey of adult management tasks began in 1995 as part of a larger national project (MIDUS) to investigate the patterns, predictors, and consequences of midlife development in the areas of physical health, psychological well-being, and social responsibility. Conducted in Boston, the survey was designed to examine how adults manage tasks in three domains of life -- work, family, and health. Further goals were to describe the subjective experience of goal attainment in midlife and to link it with objective measures of short-term longitudinal changes and cognitive functioning. During the national study, the Boston area was intentionally oversampled in order to create a subset to be used for in-depth study of management processes in midlife.

The Boston study began six months after the national study, and consisted of three interviews: a 30-minute phone interview followed by a 20-minute mail questionnaire (Time 1), a 90-minute in-person combination of cognitive tests, cortisol testing, photograph taking, and interview (Time 2), and a 30-minute phone interview (Time 3), conducted at six-month intervals. The focus was on projects related to family, work, and health that participants were working on during the period of the study. Each successive interview investigated participants' assessments of their progress in the present, recollection of six months in the past, and prediction six months into the future. Two waves of data collection were completed for this study. There were 151 respondents who participated in the first wave, 151 respondents who participated in both waves, and 26 additional respondents who participated in the second wave of data collection.

At Time 1, participants generated a list of two important family, work, and health tasks, then chose one of each as the most important in that domain. For each of the most important tasks, questions were asked about deadlines, whether participants were doing tasks because they had to do them, felt that they should do them, or chose to do them, and whether participants were doing tasks for themselves, others, or both. All six projects were ranked according to importance, and participants divided all their time into percentages spent on family, work, and health. The majority of questions on the mail questionnaire at Time 1 were taken from the Midlife Development Inventory (MIDI), the instrument created for the national study.

Respondents were asked to rate their control over health, to make assessments about present, past, and future health, to list any serious illnesses, and to indicate their physical health status. Study participants also rated their mental health, and discussed stressful life events in the last six months for self, spouse/significant other, parents, and children. Other questions focused on depression, mastery and constraints, community involvement, family, work, and life satisfaction. Scales used included the Ryff Well-Being Scales, the Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Staudinger and Baltes Wisdom Scale (1995), and the Ways of Coping Scale.

Time 2 was done in-person, and included a 50-minute series of cognitive tests followed by a 40-minute interview. The cognitive testing consisted of nine measures of cognitive ability completed in the following order: WAIS Forward Digit Span, WAIS Backward Digit Span, WAIS Vocabulary, counting backwards test, letter comparison test, dual-task test involving the counting backwards and letter comparison tests, WAIS Digit Symbol, Schaie-Thurston Letter Series, and Raven's Advanced Progressive Ma Matrices.

The Time 2 interview began with a series of questions asking about each of the family, work, and health tasks elicited from the participants in Time 1. Many questions were repeated from the MIDI including rating physical health, family life, work situation, and life overall, rating physical and mental health from poor to excellent, and a measure of stressful life events in the last six months for self, spouse/significant other, parents, and children. Participants were asked to rate how old they felt and how old they looked and to indicate their total yearly household income. Lastly, a series of open-ended questions asked about best and worst aspects of family, work, and health, how participants managed their daily life, the most challenging aspect of life and how it was managed, and what participants found most helpful in carrying out their daily life. Photographs were taken of participants at the conclusion of the interview.

Time 3 asked again about each of the most important family, work, and health tasks elicited from the participants in Time 1. Newly developed questions asked participants about ideas related to middle age, including when the participant believed middle age begins and ends, whether the participant was younger than, in, or older than middle age, the biggest changes in middle age, the best and worst aspects of middle age, whether the participant knew anyone who had had a "midlife crisis," and whether he or she would have or had had a midlife crisis. Participants were asked to rate how often they had problems and how often things went well with respect to a list of 26 domains, and how much stress and how much control they had in these domains. Lastly, participants were asked whether they had ever returned to a degree-oriented educational program after being out of school for five or more years, whether they were presently taking classes to further their education, and whether being a participant in the study had influenced the ways they thought about their family, work, and health projects.