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

Aid to Dependent Children, the precursor of AFDC, was established in 1935 as a way of providing financial assistance to widows so that they would be free to parent their children. The focus at the time was on strengthening and maintaining mother-child relationships in these stressed families. Modern welfare-to-work programs have generally been designed to change the lives of families through maternal education and job training. Evaluation, consequently, has often focused on maternal educational attainment and employment status. The New Chance Demonstration, the program that we will be addressing in this paper, was designed by Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) with additional goals in mind: New Chance was a comprehensive two-generation demonstration program, seeking to address the needs of both young mothers on welfare and their children (Quint, Fink & Rowser, 1991; Quint, Polit, Bos, & Cave, 1994). Because of this renewed focus on children and mother-child relationships, MDRC designed the evaluation component of New Chance to include an embedded observational study. The Observational Study allowed a more in-depth look at mother-child relationships and child outcomes in a subset of the participants from the full New Chance sample. As a part of the Observational Study, we at the University of Minnesota coded videotaped interactions of the mothers and their children working together on a series of Teaching Tasks in order to examine the effects of New Chance on behavioral and affective qualities of the mother-child relationships. Because the full evaluation included instruments that relied on the report of the mothers, survey interviewers, and in some cases the children's teachers, we also have a unique opportunity to examine methodological contributions of observational techniques to our understanding of the effects of the New Chance program.