In October 1994, CSR, Incorporated, and its subcontractor, the American Bar Association's Center on Children and the Law, conducted an evaluation of the implementation of child support guidelines under a contract with the Office of Child Support Enforcement. The evaluation was conducted from October 1994 to March 1996. The major components of the evaluation included the following: collection and analysis of child support cases from 21 counties in 11 States; interviews with key participants in the child support system in the study counties; collection and analysis of State guideline reviews; and analysis of data from the Current Population Survey.
As part of this project, ASPE funded the development of a public use database which is offered here. This User's Guide to the Public Use Database is Volume III of the final report on this evaluation. Volume I and Volume II are available at http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cse/rpt/gdl_m.htm. Volume I presents the main study findings, integrating findings from all components. A comprehensive description of the research questions, methodology, and history of child support guidelines implementation are in Volume I, Chapter 1 of this report, which also describes study methodology and limitations on the data. Additional details on the methodology are contained in Appendix A of Volume I, and Appendix B of Volume I contains typical cases received from each of the study States. Volume II of the report analyses the State guideline reviews, deviations in those reviews, and interviews conducted with stakeholders in the study counties.
USER'S GUIDE TO THE PUBLIC USE DATABASE
APPENDIX A: Supplemental Data Codebook
APPENDIX B: Specialized State Data Entry Screens (not available in html)
APPENDIX C: Detailed Instructions for Installing and Using the Public Use Database
The database itself is available as a self-extracting compressed file (CSR-DBAS.EXE 675kb) and as an ordinary compressed file (CSR-DBAS.ZIP 659kb). The resulting database after being unpacked consists of 66 files requiring at least 15 mb of hard disk space.