This study explores the relationships between program practices and program impacts on
earnings and welfare payments in California's welfare-to-work program, known as GAIN.
Practices and impacts (based on a random assignment experiment) are compared across six
counties and (on some measures) 20 local offices. The findings challenge some popular theories
of "what works best" in welfare-to-work programs and illustrate how comparisons of a small
number of sites within multisite studies can help researchers "get inside the black box, " a
common problem in evaluation research.
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