By Julie Vandenboom, Program ReEngineering Specialist, Office of Child Support; and Carol Bealor, Director, Cass County Friend of the Court
In 2018, Michigan was invited to become a Behavioral Interventions in Child Support (BICS) Peer Learning Site. BICS was a five-year demonstration grant awarded to eight child support agencies across the country in 2014. Several states – including Michigan – and tribal IV-D programs that did not participate in the grant formed a cohort of Peer Learning Sites to develop, adapt, implement, and evaluate behavioral interventions to improve their own program operations. A behavioral intervention attempts to influence a desired activity or outcome by presenting choices based on how people make decisions. Readers can learn more about the basics of behavioral interventions from this previous Pundit article.
Michigan created a Behavioral Interventions Workgroup (BI Workgroup) in the summer of 2018. Carol Bealor and Julie Vandenboom were named as the group’s co-leads. The workgroup consisted of representatives from the State Court Administrative Office and friend of the court offices in Calhoun, Cass, Kent, Oakland, Muskegon, Washtenaw, and Van Buren counties. It also had representatives from the Office of Child Support (OCS) Operations Division, Policy Section, Training Services Section, and Planning, Evaluation and Analysis Section.
The BI Workgroup was mentored by BICS sites in Ohio and Vermont, as well as receiving assistance from the BICS Project Support Team. The first step in developing the Michigan intervention was to identify a problem statement. The group brainstormed several issues and ultimately decided to work on child support review and modification participation from recipients and payers of child support.
A lack of participation in this process can result in terminated reviews (wasted staff time and effort), additional effort by staff to discover relevant information, support amounts that do not reflect the parties’ actual circumstances and ability to pay, and/or additional time and effort spent on a court hearing when parties object to a recommended order that was developed in the absence of their participation.
After identifying the problem to address, Michigan’s BI Workgroup went through the steps of diagnosing the behavioral bottlenecks in the review and modification process and designed an intervention and evaluation. This process involved examining all review and modification policy, procedures, and forms, from a behavioral change lens. The intervention consisted of several small modifications that offices made to their normal review and modification process:
- Sending a postcard several days before the Notice of Support Review, to prime the recipient’s identity as a parent and because it did not need to be opened – the recipient could immediately see that a review was coming soon.
- The Notice of Support Review was friendlier, with graphics, a frequently asked questions section, and a deadline date to return materials. It was sent in a nonstandard envelope.
- Some offices provided the parties the opportunity for an in-person or telephone interview, rather than requiring them to fill out the Case Questionnaire.
- All offices followed up by phone, e-mail, or text message when they did not hear back from a party, rather than mailing a second Notice of Support Review.
For about four months, each of the participating offices conducted half of their reviews using their normal process (the “control” group), and the other half using the intervention (the “intervention” group).[1]
The results of the intervention were positive, showing a statistically significant improvement in three different measures: payer response, recipient response, and completed reviews.
Parents who are payers of support responded to the Notice of Support Review 52 percent of the time in the intervention reviews, compared to only 43.1 percent in the control group. Parents who are recipients of support responded in 59 percent of the intervention reviews, compared to only 54.2 percent of the control reviews.
There was a recommendation (as opposed to a termination) in 72.9 percent of the intervention group reviews, compared to only 68.4 percent of the control reviews.
In Cass County, 61 cases were processed during the behavioral intervention: 30 control cases (where reviews were done the usual way) and 31 intervention cases. For Cass County, the phone interviews were very productive. However, it was difficult to get parents to provide written confirmation of the information they provided over the telephone. Of the 31 intervention cases, 20 phone interviews were done. Follow-up phone calls were often time-consuming because once parents had FOC staff on the telephone, they tended to ask additional questions about their case. Cass County also offered in-person interviews as an option for the intervention cases; however, no in-person interviews were completed.
The BI Workgroup concluded that the follow-up contact was most responsible for the review results improvements, with some improvement coming from the revised Notice of Support Review. Offices that spent more time and resources on follow-up saw bigger individual office gains.[2]
The exciting news is that all IV-D offices (FOC, PA, OCS, SCAO) are invited to participate in Phase 2 of Michigan’s Behavioral Intervention work. For Phase 2, there will not be a group of several offices participating in a single intervention, but rather each office will have the opportunity to define its own problem statement and create an intervention and evaluation with technical assistance from OCS and members of the BI Workgroup. Offices will be grouped with other offices conducting similar interventions.
Phase 2 was originally scheduled to begin with an introductory webinar in June 2020 and to last approximately one year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, office closures, and resource reassignments, it has been delayed until at least September 2020, as OCS would like to give offices time to ramp their operations back up before soliciting and encouraging any extra projects.
More details about Phase 2 are available in IV-D Memorandum 2020-004. OCS will announce the introductory webinar with an e-mail from the Help Desk. If you would like more information, please reach out to Julie Vandenboom (vandenboomj@michigan.gov) or Carol Bealor (foc@cassco.org).
[1] IV-D Memorandum 2019-002, Behavioral Interventions in Child Support, provides more information on the development of the intervention.
[2]
IV-D Memorandum
2020-004, Behavioral Interventions in Child Support
Phase 2 provides more information on the conclusions and lessons
learned from the intervention.
