The net effects of the Project NetWork return-to-work case management experiment on participant earnings, benefit receipt, and other outcomes

The Social Security Administration (SSA) initiated Project NetWork in 1991 to test case management as a means of promoting employment among persons with disabilities. The demonstration, which targeted Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) applicants and recipients, offered intensive outreach, work-incentive waivers, and case management/referral services. Participation in Project NetWork was voluntary. Volunteers were randomly assigned to the "treatment" group or the "control" group. Those assigned to the treatment group met individually with a case or referral manager who arranged for rehabilitation and employment services, helped clients develop an individual employment plan, and provided direct employment counseling services. Volunteers assigned to the control group could not receive services from Project NetWork but remained eligible for any employment assistance already available in their communities. For both treatment and control groups, the demonstration waived specific DI and SSI program rules considered to be work disincentives. The experimental impact study thus measures the incremental effects of case and referral management services. The eight demonstration sites were successful in implementing the experimental design roughly as planned. Project NetWork staff were able to recruit large numbers of participants and to provide rehabilitation and employment services on a substantial scale. Most of the sites easily reached their enrollment targets and were able to attract volunteers with demographic characteristics similar to those of the entire SSI and DI caseload and a broad range of moderate and severe disabilities. However, by many measures, volunteers were generally more "work-ready" than project eligible in the demonstration areas who did not volunteer to receive NetWork services. Project NetWork case management increased average annual earnings by $220 per year over the first 2 years following random assignment. This statistically significant impact, an approximate 11-percent increase in earnings, is based on administrative data on earnings. For about 70 percent of sample members, a third year of followup data was available. For this limited sample, the estimated effect of Project NetWork on annual earnings declined to roughly zero in the third followup year. The findings suggest that the increase in earnings may have been short-lived and may have disappeared by the time Project NetWork services ended. Project NetWork did not reduce reliance on SSI or DI benefits by statistically significant amounts over the 30-42 month followup period. The services provided by Project NetWork thus did not reduce overall SSI and DI caseloads or benefits by substantial amounts, especially given that only about 5 percent of the eligible caseload volunteered to participate in Project NetWork. Project NetWork produced modest net benefits to persons with disabilities and net costs to taxpayers. Persons with disabilities gained mainly because the increases in their earnings easily outweighed the small (if any) reduction in average SSI and DI benefits. For SSA and the federal government as a whole, the costs of Project NetWork were not sufficiently offset by increases in tax receipts resulting from increased earnings or reductions in average SSI and DI benefits. The modest net benefits of Project NetWork to persons with disabilities are encouraging. How such benefits of an experimental intervention should be weighed against costs of taxpayers depends on value judgments of policymakers. Because different case management projects involve different kinds of services, these results cannot be directly generalized to other case management interventions. They are nevertheless instructive for planning new initiatives. Combining case and referral management services with various other interventions, such as longer term financial support for work or altered provider incentives, could produc     

Attrition in the new beneficiary survey and followup, and its correlates

Panel surveys interview the same individuals more than once over a period of time. Attrition from the survey occurs when those individuals die, refuse to be interviewed again, or, for some other reason, cannot be contacted. If the original sample was representative of a specific population, then survey analysis may provide misleading conclusions about changes in population characteristics over time if these individuals leave the sample in a nonrandom way. Therefore, it is important to identify the characteristics of individuals who leave the survey for various reasons. This article explores the extent of and reasons for attrition in the New Beneficiary Survey (NBS) between the first interview in 1982 and the followup interview in 1991. Presented is a comparison of the characteristics of survivors (the reinterviewed sample) with attriters (those in the sample not reinterviewed) from the retired-worker and disabled-worker samples. The article explores a variety of potential determinants of attrition to the probability of attrition. These determinants are examined alone and in a multivariate framework. The NBS sample population is drawn from and linked to Social Security Administrative records, which have exact matched data on mortality as a cause of attrition. These data do not depend on survey-reported reasons for attrition; hence, it allows the examination of the differences in the patterns and predictors of attrition due to death and due to other reasons, primarily, the refusal to be interviewed. Attrition due to death must be identified precisely because misidentification of death as refusal to be interviewed may lead researchers to infer more selective attrition than might be the case. Different patterns of attrition are evident in the comparison of attrition levels and the determinants of attrition for the retired and disabled samples, both composed of persons with relatively high mortality risk. In particular, individuals' health, health insurance coverage, and level of education have different impacts on their likelihood of attrition. In general, it appears that refusal to be interviewed is more evenly spread across populations and characteristics than is death. The analysis shows that attrition due to death and attrition due to refusal are quite different processes, even though health conditions play a role in both processes. The results suggest that because attrition patterns (including death) may be quite different across population samples, sample-specific attrition patterns must be analyzed over the lifetime of any panel study. Long-term studies of panel attrition are necessary to provide researchers analyzing the data with information on potential biases due to nonrandom attrition.     

A new individualization marker of semen: deoxyribonuclease I (DNase I) polymorphism.

We describe a method for obtaining specific and reproducible deoxyribonuclease I (DNase I) typing from liquid semen. Isoelectric focusing of the enzymes on polyacrylamide gel (IEF-PAGE, pH 3.5-5) was accomplished using a 0.5-mm thick gel. The separated isozymes were visualized by a new activity staining method, dried agarose film-overlay (DAFO). Pretreatment of semen samples with neuraminidase markedly enhanced the isozyme-band resolution and sensitivity. The method was simple and reliable, with high resolution and sensitivity. The DNase I types in semen samples were correlated with the types found in corresponding blood and urine samples. DNase I typing could therefore provide an additional discriminant characteristic in the forensic examination of semen.     

Drinking and driving in Singapore, 1987 to 1989.

Between 1987 and 1989 there were approximately 5,000 cases of fatal and injury-sustained road traffic accidents, of which 2.3-3.0% were alcohol related (blood alcohol levels greater than the legal limit of 80 mg% ethanol). The offenders of alcohol-related accidents are mostly Chinese (> 79%), male (> 98%), and more often 30-40 years old. The majority of the alcohol-related accidents (> 74%) took place between 8 P.M. and 4 A.M. in fine weather and light traffic. Rear-end, head-on, and side-on collisions comprised > 60% of all the alcohol-related accidents, and losing control of vehicles approximately 30%. Drunken driving cases for the same period that were not accidents showed a number of characteristics similar to those for accidents. In Singapore, motorcycle riders and pedestrians are more prone to road fatality than other road-user groups. International comparisons of road fatalities per 100,000 population gave Singapore one of the lowest accident rates (8.1-8.4) as compared with countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan.     

The diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis in the forensic medical study of cadavers]

Presents analysis of cases when pulmonary tuberculosis was diagnosed during autopsy by forensic medical experts. Before death the patients were not registered at tuberculosis control centres and were administered no treatment for tuberculosis.     

The “dark figure” and composite indexes of crime: Some empirical explorations of alternative data sources

This paper compares composite crime indexes across two alternative data sources—the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the National Crime Survey (NCS). A variety of indexes are constructed based on weights derived from Sellin and Wolfgang's “seriousness” scale. The results reveal that indexes weighted by offense seriousness are not very highly correlated across data sources for a sample of twenty-six American cities. The substantive importance of the discrepancies between UCR and NCS estimates is illustrated by examining the ecological correlates of weighted crime rates for the twenty-six city sample and by assessing changes in weighted crime rates at the national level for the 1973-81 period. The results also reveal that if estimates of homecide are included in the composite indexes by supplementing the NCS data with data from the Center for Health Statistics, then under certain weighting conditions the correlations across data sources are nearly perfect. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this latter finding for the measurement of overall levels of criminal activity and for the scaling of the relative gravity of different offenses.     

Perceptions of repressed memories: A reappraisal

College students read a trial summary of a sexual abuse case. The victim in the case either claimed that (a) her memory for the abuse had been repressed for 20 years and only recently recovered during therapy, or (b) she consciously remembered the abuse for 20 years but never discussed it until recently in therapy. Participants were significantly more likely to convict the defendant when the testimony was described as nonrepressed (67%) versus repressed (58%). This effect was not modified by the age of the victim at the time the alleged abuse occurred (either 3, 8, or 13 years of age), although the younger and older victims were significantly less believable than the 8-year-old victim. Compared to female participants, male participants were significantly less likely to convict the defendant and rated the victim as significantly less believable. These findings are discussed in the context of recent research on juror reactions to repressed memory testimony.     

Fact-finding in Inter-state Adjudication

All analogies are imperfect in this respect, and yet the whole of our reasoning from experience … is reasoning from extremely imperfect analogies between past and present occurrences. The question is not, are the conditions of the two problems the same? — for that may always be answered in the negative — but do they resemble each other closely enough for the old solution to be so modified as to apply to the new problem, or to suggest an analogous solution which may be applied to it?¹