Project Overview
Adolescence is a critical period for political development. Different political attitudes, political behaviors, and political interests tend to develop during adolescence and persist into adulthood. Welfare participation is associated with lower political participation and pessimistic views of politics among adults, yet we have not uncovered the extent to which welfare participation in adolescence affects political outcomes in adulthood. This project aims to address the disconnect in the literature between what we know about the effects of welfare program experiences and what we know about individual political development.
Data and Data Collection Overview
The broader project relied on both qualitative and quantitative data, including secondary data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) cohort, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which are not included here. The original data collected by the depositing researcher are included, as described below.
The qualitative data included a focus group with seven participants and individual interviews with 30 other individuals recruited by the researcher. Interviews were chosen so that participants could be more comfortable sharing personal experiences in a private setting. This data collection technique also allowed the researcher to keep conversations on topic and to ask probing and follow-up questions more easily. The focus group technique was chosen to provide for interactions among the participants involved, thus allowing participants to react to each other’s experiences and comments, and going beyond top-of-mind themes for any one participant.
Participants in Round 1 (including those in the focus group and individual interviews) and Round 2 were recruited from the undergraduate student body at a large midwestern public university (N=7), as well as from a local community college (N=13). They were recruited through IRB-approved mass emails to the undergraduate student bodies. Participants in the Round 3 data collection (N=10) were recruited from the sample of Qualtrics panel respondents who completed the Adolescent Hardship and Politics Attitudes Survey (AHPAS; more detail below). Among the ten individuals interviewed in Round 3, five were on welfare during their adolescence, and the other five were not on welfare but grew up in poverty.
The Round 1 and Round 2 questionnaire data include the pseudonyms that were selected by participants from a list. The participants in Round 3 chose any name they wanted as a pseudonym. A list of Round 3 names chosen is included as documentation, so that they can be paired with the unique ID code that was used as part of the AHPAS survey.
There were two key original quantitative data sources. First, the quantitative data included national-level survey data called the Adolescent Hardship and Political Attitudes Survey (AHPAS), fielded by the researcher via Qualtrics Research Services ( https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/distributions-module/online-panels/ ). The AHPAS sample consisted of 1,137 respondents recruited by Qualtrics, who were surveyed in January 2025. About half of the sample had experienced means-tested welfare programs during adolescence, while the other half had not been on welfare, but was in poverty during the period. Second, quantitative data were separately derived from a questionnaire about political attitudes and demographic factors that interview participants from the Round 1 and Round 2 qualitative data collection also completed.
After receiving IRB approval, a recruitment email was distributed with a screener survey to identify individuals with adolescent welfare program experience. Participants were selected based on the extent of their program experience (indexed in terms of number of programs used), as well as their availability to participate in the focus group or an interview. Participants were offered a $25 gift card incentive for their participation. To protect confidentiality and privacy, participants selected a pseudonym to use in the subsequent focus group
The focus group and interview transcripts were analyzed using Atlas.ti. The transcripts were coded by combining deductive and inductive coding approaches.
Selection and Organization of Shared Data
Data files shared in this deposit include:
- The de-identified transcripts from the focus group discussion and the three rounds of individual interviews, all labeled with participants’ chosen pseudonyms, along with the researcher-collected questionnaire data from the same participants.
- The original national-level quantitative data from the AHPAS used for analysis are also shared, in a raw and clean version, in .dta and .csv formats. The Original version has the uncoded variables in it, while in the Clean version, the variables are coded/labeled, although there is no separate codebook. Secondary users who want to make different coding decisions can use the Original version.
- A qdpx version (interoperable with other qualitative software analysis programs) of the Atlas.ti project.
The qualitative (focus group and interview transcripts) and quantitative data (AHPAS files and questionnaire completed by Rounds 1-3 respondents) are presented in separate dedicated folders.
The documentation files provided consist of the original informed consent forms, interview instruments, screening questionnaire, list of Round 3 interviewees, this Data Narrative, and an administrative README file. |
