Cash payments help address food insecurity in families, RAPID study finds — but timing and amount matter
A new study using data from the RAPID Survey Project has given insight into what types of cash assistance may best help families with young children who are facing food insecurity.
RAPID, based at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, collects data monthly from parents and child care providers in all 50 states. Through surveys, RAPID gathers information about the needs, health and well-being of young children and the adults in their lives.
Samantha Steimle, who led the study published in Children and Youth Services Review, is a National Poverty Fellow through the University of Wisconsin-Madison who works in residence at the Department of Health and Human Services. Steimle used RAPID data that tracked parents’ experiences before and after receiving pandemic-related forms of cash assistance – specifically the economic stimulus payments and the monthly expanded Child Tax Credit payments that were in use in 2021.
The study asked whether a lump sum payment or regular smaller payments of cash were better at alleviating food insecurity among families with young children. Steimle explains in the following Q&A why the answer is: it depends.
Why was RAPID Survey Project data a good place to study this?
For one, food insecurity tends to be higher among families with young children, which is the precise sample of this project. But, perhaps more importantly, RAPID surveys families on a frequent basis, and we know that experiences with food scarcity and food insufficiency, which make up the umbrella term of food insecurity, can vary on really small timescales, even day-to-day. I was specifically interested in the pandemic-related forms of cash assistance – the economic stimulus payments and the monthly expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments – and wanted to see how they related to families’ food insecurity. And it turns out much of the story regarding the differences between these payment forms could only be told with frequent food insecurity data like that of the RAPID Survey Project.
The outcome of the study suggests that lump sum payments may be better suited for addressing food insecurity during times of crisis, while regular payments may be more appropriate for long-term stability, as long as they are large enough. Can you talk more about each payment type and how it helped families?
Yes, so we found that lump sum payments, the economic stimulus payments, predicted lower levels of food insecurity for low-income families in the months following receipt. But something interesting happens when you look at the items that make up food insecurity. These [stimulus] checks predicted lower levels of severe food insecurity, like experiencing hunger, the month of and two months following receipt, but predicted lower levels of less severe food insecurity, like food purchased not lasting and not having money to buy more, in the later months after receipt. To us, this suggests that the stimulus payments were really useful at addressing high levels of food insecurity initially, but as the money was spent down over time, they were only able to address less severe forms of food insecurity.
In contrast, the associations between the monthly CTC payments and food insecurity really varied across CTC months. In some months, food insecurity was lower, in others, it was not. The CTC months where there were no changes in levels of food insecurity pre- to post-payment tended to correspond to months where there were lots of other expenses for parents, like back-to-school time and the holiday season. Our interpretation of these findings is that the CTC payments, by nature of being a smaller amount of money at a time, may not be able to stretch as far across family expenses every month, but have the advantage of being distributed over a longer total period of time so can provide smaller, more long-term benefits.
In short: both payment forms were helpful to families and were associated with lower food insecurity, but they did so in pretty different ways.
Were there any findings that were surprising to you?
Something that stood out to me was just how difficult of tradeoffs low-income families with young children need to make, even with something as seemingly positive as an influx of cash. Thinking about the fact that there were months where parents were able to wholly address food insecurity but not others signals to me that when expenses are high and they receive cash assistance, parents still have to make really difficult choices about how to spend those finite funds. And sometimes that means sacrificing their own food security so that their children can eat and have their basic needs met, which is a finding supported in other literature.
So maybe not a surprising finding per se but it’s certainly something I’ve been thinking a lot about after conducting this study and I think prompts future research to understand how variations in the need for more income at some times more than others may require more precise tailoring or flexibility of payment amounts.
Universal Basic Income is a hot topic right now. Can the results of this study be used to inform these types of programs, and if so, how?
I would say, yes and no. I think overall the results indicate that different forms of payment, lump sums and regular monthly payments, tend to be used in different ways by families, and those differences can translate to differences in outcomes in the short-term. As such, I think it would benefit these types of programs to think through the delivery style of cash when providing households with a UBI. However, these results examine one outcome among families with young children during a time when economic hardship was very high, so it is unclear how these forms of payment may operate with different families in different contexts. But at the very least, as these programs are being deployed and studied, delivery style is one variation in cash assistance that should be considered.
What can policymakers and other leaders take away from this? What kinds of programs or initiatives might they want to focus on?
I think the takeaways for policymakers and other leaders is that cash, in either form, delivered during a time of economic turmoil like that of the COVID-19 pandemic, can measurably help families address food insecurity. The findings also suggest that when economic hardship is high, a lump sum like a stimulus check can allow families to address their food insecurity readily and intensely, whereas a regular payment like the monthly CTC has the potential to provide longer-term, smaller food security benefits and thus is better suited for times of greater economic stability.
Stanford co-authors on this study include Sihong Liu, social science research scholar and methodologist at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, and Philip Fisher, the Diana Chen Professor of Early Childhood Learning in the Graduate School of Education, and Director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood.
See all authors and read the full study published in Children and Youth Services Review.
