The Supporting Families Index analyzes two types of family support programs that are critical to the health and well-being of families: nutrition and income. The Nutrition Index is composed of program-level indices for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, and the Child and Adult Care Food Program. The Income index is composed of program-level indices for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, state Earned Income Tax Credit, state Child Tax Credit, and state Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. The Overall Index combines the Nutrition and Income Indices.
Collecting and standardizing the data
For each program, we collected measures of four dimensions of accessibility: how inclusive the program’s eligibility requirements are, how easy or burdensome it is to access program benefits, the breadth of the program, and efforts made to increase awareness of and participation in the program. The following table shows the structure of the Supporting Families Index:
Data Elements | ||
|---|---|---|
Dimension | Nutrition | Income |
Eligibility, inclusivity | Eligibility requirements, cultural relevance, and participation levels—or coverage—of a nutrition program within the population it is designed to serve | Income eligibility requirements, inclusivity of different family structures, and age and citizenship status qualifications for income support programs |
Burden, barriers | Ease of accessing relevant program information; ease of learning how to enroll | Ease of accessing and enrolling in an income support program or claiming a tax credit |
Accessibility | Ease of accessing resources such as SNAP-authorized retailers and WIC clinics; whether information about approved benefit use is readily available | Efforts made to increase awareness of and participation in an income support program |
Expansiveness | Received benefits and time frames for benefit use | Breadth of an income support program, including information on received benefits and the refundability of tax credits |
Within each dimension, we selected program components based on their relevance, data availability, variation across states, and potential importance to families with children. While we collected data for multiple years, the current Supporting Families Index is based primarily on data for 2022.
To aggregate data components into an index for a program, we first standardized each component to have a common scale and meaning. This allowed us to combine different data components while retaining the variation across states in each component.
Constructing the indices
We constructed each program’s index by taking a weighted sum over the selected components. We applied weights to account for the varying importance of components for capturing program accessibility. Similarly, the overall index applied program-specific weights to account for program’s varying importance in the landscape of family support.
To develop the component and program weights in a way that minimized potential bias from the research team, we surveyed a group of experts on each program to determine the average relative weight an expert would place on each component and program. First, we asked experts to complete an exercise allocating 100 points among the different components of a program according to their relative importance. They were asked to only complete the exercise for programs they believed they had enough expertise in. Second, we asked them to allocate 100 points across the different programs according to their relative importance in the landscape of family support. They had the option to skip a program in the exercise if they did not think they had enough information about it. We sent the survey to 15 experts internal to Mathematica and 100 experts in the broader academic and research community. We received 44 survey responses, for a response rate of 38 percent.
After taking the weighted sum of components and programs to generate the overall Supporting Families Index, we converted the resulting values onto a scale from 1 to 4 for ease of interpretation.
The data for the Supporting Family Index are available here: Public Use Data File (CSV, 21KB).
A codebook explaining the variables is also available here: Download SFI codebook (XLSX, 15KB)