Increasing the Access to EITC As a Strategy to Enhance Family Protective Factors and Reduce Child Maltreatment

Background and Purpose: While the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) positively impacts parents and caregivers – and, notably, is associated with decreased child maltreatment – one in five families eligible for the EITC does not receive it. The EITC Access Project is an ongoing project that aims to increase economic security, increase protective factors, and decrease Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). EITC is acknowledged as the most effective anti-poverty strategy in the U.S. and research has demonstrated that tax credit was successful in reducing poverty and increasing employment among families with economic disadvantages. We hypothesized that through increasing access to EITC, families will have improved outcomes including reduced economic hardship, intimate partner violence, mental health challenges, and child maltreatment and increased protective factors.

Methods: The project involves a community-education strategy and one-on-one concentrated benefits advocacy and involves motivational interviewing techniques, EITC information, and financial empowerment activities. We employed a pretest-posttest nonequivalent groups design; to further assess the more time-intensive concentrated benefits advocacy strategy, all families complete a pre-test survey and post-test surveys every 6-months over two years.

A series of t-tests were run to examine pre-post test differences among treatment group families. Due to the low number of control group findings at the time of submission, we reviewed those data descriptively only.

Results: To date, we collected 132 surveys, 71 pre-test and 61 post-test surveys. 46 families (40 treatment, 6 control) had pre-post test data to assess program impacts. The access to EITC – hearing about EITC, applying for EITC, and receiving EITC – from pre-test to post-test remained the same in the control group, while it increased in the treatment group. In the treatment group, a statistically significant increase was observed in hearing about EITC and applying for EITC and a marginally significant increase was found in receiving EITC. Overall ACEs scores decreased from pre-test to post-test in the treatment group and increased in the control group. Changes in the protective factors from pre-test to post-test were mixed – i.e., the scores of some factors increased and others decreased – in both groups. Neither the changes in ACEs nor protective factors was statistically significant. Home visitors reported the benefits of tools and resource programs for families and tangible shifts in thinking and planning in the families.

Conclusions and Implications: Although the sample size is too small to infer causal impacts, the findings are suggestive that the intervention is related to increases in knowledge of and receipt of EITC. Thus, increasing the utilization of EITC will likely have positive impacts on families including reducing economic hardship and ACEs and improving protective factors in families.