Glossary

People who are ages 25 to 49.

AFDC, the predecessor to TANF, was a federal assistance program in effect from 1935 to 1996 that provided financial assistance to families with children and no or low incomes. States set their own benefit levels, established (within federal limitations) standards for eligibility based on income and resources, and administered the program with federal and state funding. During the 1990s, many states received waivers of the federal requirements from the federal government to experiment with changes to the eligibility requirements and benefits.

Structured on-the-job training consisting of three primary elements: (1) mentorship from a professional in the field; (2) participation in pre-determined hours of classroom instruction in addition to on-the-job training; and (3) culmination in an industry-recognized credential. Apprenticeships may be federally registered or non-registered. Apprenticeships may be an intervention's primary service.

People who graduated from high school or passed a high school equivalency exam such as the General Educational Development test (GED) or high school equivalency test (HiSET). 

After individuals in a study are randomly assigned to the group receiving the intervention (the intervention group) or the group not receiving the intervention (the comparison group), they might drop out of an intervention or the study team might lose contact with them. This means information about how they fare over time is no longer available for use in the in the study. This dropping out is called attrition. The proportion of people who drop out of a study is called the attrition rate. There are two different types of attrition that matter when deciding whether a study’s findings can be considered reliable. The first is overall attrition, which captures the total number of individuals missing from the original sample. The second is differential attrition which captures the difference between the percentage of individuals missing from the intervention group and the percentage missing from the comparison group. When either the overall attrition or the differential attrition is too high, the study results might not accurately capture the effects of the intervention. We use scientific standards to determine when either of these types of attrition is too high for a study’s findings to be considered reliable.