Pay-As-You-Go Youth Work
Evaluations differ on the value of giving kids cash and other rewards to participate in youth development programs.
By Martha Shirk

On the last day of a month-long summer program in life skills, 14-year-old Shedrick Milton left the cozy office of the San Francisco Independent Living Skills Program with a couple of gift cards, some cookbooks and what amounts to money in the bank.
Shedrick, who is in foster care, can take more skill-building classes during his leisure hours throughout the school year, earning more gift cards and credits toward a stipend that could reach $2,500 by the time he graduates from the program in four years.

He is among thousands of youth around the country who receive financial or material rewards for taking part in youth development activities. Agencies use such incentives to motivate youth to avoid pregnancy, do their homework, stay in school, master life skills, train for jobs, save money, and serve on boards and advisory councils.
Until last year, a retired Nashville couple was paying $10 to every child who memorized the Ten Commandments. Twenty thousand children claimed the reward before the money ran out.

While the concept seems to be gaining popularity, only a handful of incentive-using youth programs have been evaluated. And because researchers have rarely separated the impact of the incentives from other program components, both proponents and opponents of the practice can cite findings to support their views.
In a paper that was widely distributed last year, respected researchers Robert J. Ivry and Fred Doolittle of MDRC, a nonprofit social research organization, argued that three decades of research prove that financial incentives solve the biggest problem most youth programs face - "namely, maintaining high levels of engagement, participation, and retention."

Ivry and Doolittle urged youth-serving agencies to make greater use of "participation bargains" that reward at-risk youth for acquiring specific competencies or achieving self-improvement benchmarks, such as abstaining from alcohol or drugs, earning academic credentials or completing training.

But some studies of specific programs suggest proceeding with caution. A study of a Canadian job training program for school dropouts found that incentives drew many youth who just wanted the money. A study of a short-lived pregnancy prevention program in Denver called Dollar-a-Day, based at a hospital, found that incentives got girls to show up, but did not reduce repeat pregnancies. And one evaluation of Quantum Opportunities Program (QOP) for youth at risk of dropping out of school found that incentives lost their effectiveness over the long term.

While cash incentives are commonplace at independent living programs for foster youth, some program administrators think the practice has gone too far and have switched to providing goods, such as movie passes or household items.

Researchers at the Harvard Family Research Project recently reviewed studies on incentives in youth programs and concluded that they "deserve greater attention as a strategy for improving youth's out-of-school-time program participation." The researchers stopped short of endorsing incentives.

"It does appear that it may make a difference in getting teens to participate in programs if you offer them incentives, but there is no research evidence to support this - only common sense," says Priscilla Little, the Harvard project's associate director.

Before integrating incentives into their programs, youth-serving agencies might want to consider the following questions:

Do incentives get youth to come? Arlene Hylton sees incentives working every day in the independent living program she runs for youth in San Francisco's foster care system. Incentives attract youth who would otherwise be reluctant to spend their leisure time in activities that adults think are good for them. "And once we get them here, they're hooked," she says.

The research validates Hylton's observations. The most recent evaluation of QOP - by Mathematica Policy Research - concluded that the hourly stipends "induced newly enrolled youth to attend program activities."

Incentives were also found to lure participants to Integrated Training Centres for Youth, a Canadian job-training program, as well as to the hospital-based pregnancy prevention program, Dollar-a-Day.

Do incentives keep youth coming?

Whether youth keep coming for the incentives or because they've gotten hooked is hard to determine.

For 10 years, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains has been attracting girls to its pregnancy prevention program in Denver with a $1-a-day payment for avoiding pregnancy. (This is different from the Dollar-a-Day effort that was run by a hospital.) After a dozen or so sessions, "The kids seem to forget about the money," observes Krista Anderson, the agency's vice president of education and training. "Sometimes they even leave without asking for it. What becomes the primary focus is really the knowledge and skills and the relationships they're getting from the program."

Two studies of QOP sites provide somewhat contradictory answers to the question of whether incentives keep youth coming. A study of the QOP pilot project, by researchers at Brandeis University, concluded that "financial incentives can be effective in maintaining student interest in and attendance at program events."
But a later study of the QOP demonstration project, by Mathematica, concluded that the incentives became less of a lure over time. Responding to that finding, plus observations from staff and participants, the Eisenhower Foundation last year increased the incentives to $1.25 or $1.40 an hour (from $1) at the six sites where it is replicating QOP. The foundation expects the higher payment to make the program more attractive to older youth, those whom the Mathematica researchers found most likely to stop participating.

Incentives were found by researchers to be important to maintaining participation in the Canadian job-training program, Integrated Training Centres. At one site, 37 percent of participants told evaluators they would have quit without the incentives.
Even with the incentives, however, the drop-out rate was high - between 22 percent and 37 percent, depending on the site. The evaluators attributed that primarily to an inadequate screening program. They concluded that attracting youth who are "there 'just for the money ...' is to some extent unavoidable, but it further demonstrates the difficulty the agencies face in having incentives work in the way they were intended."
At the San Francisco Independent Living Skills Program, Hylton changed her incentives several years ago, partly to keep youth coming back. The program used to pay youth $50 quarterly to attend life skills classes. Now, it combines immediate rewards, such as gift cards to stores like Old Navy, Target and T.J. Maxx, with the prospect of a longer-term payoff: the graduation stipend, which rises with the amount of effort a youth puts into preparing for independence from foster care.

"We keep telling them, 'the more you participate, the bigger your check will be,'" Hylton says.

One of Hylton's students, Cassandra Mitchell, 18, admits that it was the promise of a reward at the end that got her to keep coming to financial literacy workshops last summer, even though she didn't always find them interesting.

When she completed the six classes, she received a check for $100, plus an Individual Development Account that will match her savings for education or housing by a ratio of 3 to 1. Mitchell promptly deposited $500 from her summer earnings. When she saves $500 more, she'll be able to withdraw $3,000 to pay for her education or housing expenses at the University of the Pacific, where she is a freshman.

Do they help change youth behavior?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Usually, it's hard to tell. The key to behavior change seems to be the soundness of the program.

The Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program, operated by the Children's Aid Society of New York, reports a host of statistically significant positive outcomes among its participants, including lower pregnancy and birth rates. The program includes stipends for employment-preparation activities.

Dr. Michael A. Carrera, the program's director, believes that it's the overall quality of the program that's important, not the incentives. He prefers to think of the stipends as compensation for "substantive participation," rather than as incentives.

"The 'incentive' word is tied in my mind to someone saying, 'If you take the SAT tutoring, I'll buy you that pair of shoes you want,' " he says. "What I want to tie it to is something that is active and substantial and starts to teach them the equation that we've all learned, which is that when you get something done, you meet a deadline, you honor your obligations, you get your compensation."

Planned Parenthood claims positive behavior results from its Dollar-a-Day Program, which serves mostly Latina girls between 14 and 18. In each of the past 12 years, fewer than 10 percent of participants have gotten pregnant, Anderson says. (In comparison, the Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that about 15 percent of 15- to 19- year-old Hispanic girls in Colorado became pregnant in 2000.)

Finally, both QOP evaluations demonstrated that participation in the incentive-using program increased the likelihood of graduating from high school and enrolling in post-secondary school or training. Was it because of the incentives or the programming? The evaluators concluded that incentives "do not appear to operate effectively in the absence of a strong program featuring much personal contact with staff."

For whom do incentives work best?

Ivry and Doolittle of the MRDC suggest that incentives may be most effective with youth who do not care about conventional rewards. "Young people who are outside the mainstream may not be motivated solely by pragmatic goals like attaining an education credential, learning new skills related to employment, or even getting a job," their report notes.

Especially for older youth, they argue, offering financial incentives for participation in self-betterment activities is important because of competition from other pursuits. "Given the economic realities faced by at-risk youth, it is difficult for human capital development programs to compete with the secondary labor market and the underground economy," they say.

Larkin Street Youth Services works with the youth Ivry and Doolittle are talking about: homeless kids and runaways in San Francisco. "These are the hardest-to-serve young people, those who have been through multiple programs," says Sam Cobbs, director of program services. "They're sleeping on the street and wondering where their next meal is coming from."

Incentives are crucial for getting these youth "to do what they need to to get off the street," Cobbs says.

While younger youth respond well to incentives like blank CDs, phone cards or clothing vouchers, older youth and young adults prefer cash, Cobbs says. "Providing cash incentives is our attempt to set up our own economic system in-house, versus them going out on the streets and doing things to get money some other way," Cobbs says. "They're willing to sit in on a focus group or take a survey for $20 to put in their pocket."

The Eisenhower Foundation also regards incentives as an important part of the success of the QOP model, which targets highly disadvantaged youth. "It would surprise you to see how those kids treat those stipend checks," says Johnnie Gage, the foundation's chief operating officer. "It's huge to them. They know what they had to do to earn it, and the check demonstrates to them the connection between effort and reward. Most of the world is like that. And for the first time, they get it."
Incentives have also been shown to be effective with another historically hard-to-motivate group: the pregnant and parenting welfare-dependent teenagers targeted by Ohio's Learning, Earning and Parenting (LEAP) program. An evaluation found that participation in LEAP increased school completion by almost 20 percent and employment by 40 percent for teens who enrolled while still in school. At the suggestion of the MDRC evaluators, the state increased the incentives, adding a grade completion bonus of $62 and a graduation bonus of $200.

Where's the money?

Probably the greatest barrier to increasing the use of incentives is finding the money. Except for independent living programs, which are financed largely with highly flexible federal funds, many youth-serving programs are hampered by restrictions on spending.
"Some of our programs aren't in the position to give out as much," Gage says of the Eisenhower Foundation's QOP sites. "They've had to develop community resources to be able to give out bonuses. "

Ivry and Doolittle of MRDC argue that the public is likely to support incentives in youth programs as long as it believes it's getting something in return. As the nation's experience with welfare reform has shown, they argue, "The public generally approves of helping low-income people who are working hard to improve their lives. The public is therefore likely to respond favorably to policies that help young people who help themselves and who avoid risk-taking behaviors."

But the Harvard researchers caution that, given the cost, "it may be worthwhile to evaluate this strategy as an enhancement to an existing program prior to implementing it on a larger scale."

In addition to finding more money, providing such incentives also requires overcoming the skepticism of critics. "Incentives are likely to be not just ineffective but positively counterproductive in youth development programs, just as they've been shown to be in schools, families and work places," says motivational expert Alfie Kohn, author of

Punished by Rewards.

"The trouble is that there are actually two very different forms of motivation: intrinsic, which means doing something for its own sake, and extrinsic, which means doing something to get a reward," Kohn argues. "As extrinsic motivation goes up, intrinsic motivation - the kind we care about - tends to go down. This is one of the most frequently replicated findings in all of social psychology: The more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward."

Maybe so, maybe not. After all, many people are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated at the same time.

Besides, some program directors say they use incentives not just because they work, but because it's the right thing to do. Hylton views incentives primarily as a way of "honoring participation."

Cobbs, of Larkin Street, seconds that notion. "In our everyday lives, we have incentives," he notes. "Why shouldn't these young people, at least until they get to the point where there are natural incentives?"

Anderson, of Planned Parenthood, says the real value of paying girls a dollar a day not to get pregnant may be in its symbolism. "A lot of these kids are not your star athletes or your star students," she says. "They really don't get a lot of positive rewards for positive behavior.

"The weekly stipend says to them, 'Here's $7 because you're doing a really great job to improve yourself. Each day you're working really hard to do the right things [you] need to do to remain healthy.' "

Even if youth do participate in a program for extrinsic reasons, as Kohn suggests happens with incentives, they do get exposed to information that can aid their development.

Consider Cassandra Mitchell, the San Francisco girl who put her summer earnings into an Individual development Account. Mitchell says she probably would have saved her earnings even without the 3-to-1 match that she got through the IDA. "Since I grew up in a homeless family, it's important to me to have money," she says. "I'm always saving for a rainy day."

But to get the promised match, she had to sit through hours of financial literacy training. Ultimately, that's likely to help her manage her finances better.

Shedrick Milton is also both extrinsically and intrinsically motivated. "The gifts are good," Shedrick says of the rewards he got for taking life skills classes. "I'd be lying if I didn't say so. But they're not why I come. I come because I know I'm going to be on my own when I turn 18, and these are things I need to know.