Demographic Survey Results from Nine-State IV-D Programs

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Abstract

In FY 2007, the national child support program served 17 million children and collected $25 billion in child support, yet little is known about the underlying demographic and economic characteristics of the individuals served. To remedy this lack of information, Courtland Consulting and the Urban Institute, under contract with the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, surveyed nine state child support programs about their caseloads. We found that state child support programs are able to provide considerable amounts of information about their clients, but key characteristics proved difficult to obtain, such as the poverty status of the families served.

Introduction

Little is known about the underlying demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the individuals served by the child support enforcement program. While the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) regularly collects information from the state child support enforcement programs about the child support characteristics of their cases, they do not ask about the demographic or socioeconomic characteristics of the individuals being served.

Every other year, the U.S. Census Bureau reports the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of families with children who are potentially eligible for child support. For example, in 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, the Census Bureau reported that 16 percent of custodial parents identified as Hispanic and 25 percent of custodial families lived in poverty (Grall 2007). The data for this report are from the Current Population Survey-Child Support Supplement (CPS-CSS), a large nationally representative household survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and funded in part by OCSE.

The CPS-CSS asks custodial parents whether they have contacted the child support enforcement program (also known as the IV-D program), but these questions yield very low participation rates. For example, in 2005, less than one third of custodial parents in the CPS-CSS responded that they had ever contacted a child support enforcement or IV-D office (See Appendix B for the exact wording of the question). Yet, it is generally believed that well over half of all child-support eligible children are in the IV-D program (U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means 2004). Thus, using the CPS-CSS to describe the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of IV-D participants is not accurate. Analysts at the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS/ASPE) have developed an indirect method of identifying IV-D participants in the CPS-CSS, but as we discuss in Appendix B, the accuracy of this indirect method for identifying custodial parent families in the IV-D system is unknown (Mellgren, Burnszynski, Douglas, and Sinclair-James 2004).

Given the limitations of the CPS-CSS for examining the characteristics of families served by the IV-D program, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) decided to examine an alternative method of obtaining these data. OCSE decided to ask the nine states with the largest IV-D caseloads in FY 2006 whether they could provide demographic and socioeconomic data on the families that they serve and if they could, to provide that data for analysis. OCSE contracted with Courtland Consulting and its subcontractor, the Urban Institute, to conduct this survey and to analyze the data that the states provide. All nine states agreed to participate and complete the survey. The participating states are: California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The survey was completed between February 1, 2007 and May 6, 2007.

We should note that for this analysis no data sources were available to fully compare the results of the 2007 Demographic Survey. The best data sources available were the 2004 DHHS/ASPE report as well as data collected by the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE). However, unlike the 2007 Demographic Survey, the 2004 DHHS/ASPE report highlighted characteristics of IV-D clients nationally. Data collected by OCSE provides state-specific results, but it uses case-counts as the unit of analysis rather than custodial and non-custodial parents and children. We report results from the DHHS/ASPE report and OCSE administrative data, but only to provide a frame of reference for data collected through the 2007 Demographic Survey.

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