Continuing the Important Debate on Government-Supported Healthy Marriages and Relationships Initiatives: A Brief Response to Johnson's (2014) Comment

I appreciate the opportunity to continue the important debate on the merits and wisdom of public policy efforts to support educational ser- vices designed to help lower income couples form healthy relationships and enduring mar- riages. Johnson (2014) has critiqued the recent article in Family Relations (Hawkins, Amato, & Kinghorn, 2013), which attempted to document at the demographic level whether public funding of Healthy Marriages and Relationships Initia- tives (HMRIs) was having any effect. Despite the brief time frame that this policy initiative has been active (since 2005), the limited funding for the initiatives (First, I want to clarify that the funding that has supported the federal HMRI has not been "carved out" (Johnson, 2014, p. 300) of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. That is, there is a general misunderstanding that the investment of federal dollars in HMRIs has detracted from other purposes of TANF. This is not the case. Funding for TANF has remained stable since passage of welfare reform in 1996 at $16.5 billion a year (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2012). Federal funding for HMRIs is a separate part of the Social Security Act, formalized in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Pragmatically, the original TANF legislation provided funding to reward states that were reducing their unwed childbearingrates.Butpolicymakersdiscovered that these rewards were going to states that benefited from natural demographic change rather than active policy successes. So these fundswereretaskedtosupportHMRIs.Acouple of states have set aside a small proportion (about 1%) of their TANF block grant funds to support preventative couple-education efforts, but these efforts subtract a miniscule amount from the overall TANF program. And such efforts clearly fall within the overarching legislative purposes of TANF. Of course, some might argue that regardless of where the funding comes from, it would be better used in the service of traditional antipoverty programs, given how great those needs are (and that inflation has reduced the value of the annual TANF allocation). However, if HMRI funds were added to the annual TANF appropriation, it would add (considerably) less than 1% to TANF-supported activities. Hence, HMRIs have not detracted financially from other antipoverty efforts. HMRIs are a new, experimental policy initiative, supplementing other antipoverty programs, exploring whether relationship education services can address directly a known cause of poverty-family instability.In addition, I want to clarify some points raised by Johnson about the research evaluating HMRI efforts. Space limitations to our recent article restricted how much detail we could offer readers about the emerging body of evaluation research on this topic and more research has come out since our article went to press. I appreciate that the editor of Family Relations has provided additional precious journal space toprovidemoredetailsoftheevaluationresearch to inform the debate over the merits of public support of HMRIs.Johnson highlighted three rigorous, large- scale, federally funded evaluation studies of HMRI services across the United States (Bir et al., 2012; Hsueh et al. 2012; Wood, Moore, Clarkwest, Killewald, & Monahan, 2012). One of these studies (Bir et al., 2012) was a quasi- experimental assessment of HMRIs in a handful of U.S. communities. But as the researchers themselves note, there were serious problems in the design and execution of the study that call into question the findings (which found no significant differences between treatment and comparison groups). …