Frequently asked questions

The Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse is an investment of the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It was established under a Congressional mandate in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017 (PL 115-31). Launched in 2020, the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse identifies programs that aim to improve employment outcomes and support self-sufficiency for populations with low incomes, especially recipients of public programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). It is a comprehensive resource designed to help direct employment service providers, TANF administrators, policymakers, and researchers easily access and understand the effectiveness of programs that aim to improve employment outcomes for job seekers with low incomes. Information about a program’s effectiveness is presented alongside information for better understanding the context in which it has been shown to work and how it was implemented.

The Chief Evaluation Office within the U.S. Department of Labor established the Clearinghouse for Labor Evaluation and Research (CLEAR) in 2012 to increase the accessibility of research on a wide range of labor and employment topics. CLEAR is a central source for labor-related research and evaluation evidence on a variety of programs spanning employment, training, health and safety, worker benefits, employer compliance, and other topics. CLEAR aims to help practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and the public find and use research to inform their decisions about labor policies and programs, future research, and improve outcomes for a variety of populations. Find more information about CLEAR by visiting: Clearinghouse for Labor Evaluation and Research: https://clear.dol.gov/.

The Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse and CLEAR are coordinated federal efforts that have complimentary areas of focus and use similar standards to assess the quality of causal evidence in studies. Both Clearinghouses primarily focus on reviewing and rating causal impact studies. The Clearinghouses have collaborated to share studies and to combine dissemination efforts. There are also important differences between the Clearinghouses, including distinct goals, approaches to aggregating data across studies, and the types of study designs reviewed.

Goals and scope

• CLEAR is designed to be responsive to the entirety of the work and programs overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor, including, for example, compliance with occupational safety guidelines and child labor.
• Pathways to Work is more narrowly focused on programs that aim to improve self-sufficiency for individuals with low incomes.

Data aggregation

• In addition to reviewing individual studies, Pathways to Work aggregates information across studies to determine a program’s effectiveness. It rates a program’s effectiveness within each of four outcome domains: earnings, employment, public benefit receipt, and education and training.
• CLEAR primarily focuses on assessing individual studies and rates programs for effectiveness in only one of its topic areas, Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA), to help states meet program requirements.

Types of studies reviewed

• In addition to reviews of causal studies, CLEAR reviews descriptive and implementation studies in some topic area evidence reviews.
• Pathways to Work does not systematically review noncausal studies but does provide implementation details for studies with a moderate or high quality study rating.
• Pathways to Work also has established cost standards and rates the quality of cost estimates from cost analyses, cost-benefit analyses, and cost-effectiveness analyses.

The Pathways to Work team uses prespecified keywords to systematically search databases of journal publications, evaluation reports, and unpublished literature (such as working papers). We also incorporate studies cited in literature reviews and those submitted in response to a public call for relevant studies. We screen studies for their eligibility to be included in the review against a set of predefined criteria. Then, we prioritize the eligible studies based on publication date (examining the most recent first and turning to older research as resources allow). For more information, please see the Protocol for the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse.

Studies underway have a rigorous impact evaluation in progress, but no available findings at the time that Pathways to Work identifies them. Nominations for studies underway can come from federal staff, evaluators, and the public. If the evaluations meet the eligibility criteria established in the Protocol for the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse, they are added to the Studies Underway page. These evaluations need to be randomized controlled trials or comparison- group quasi-experimental designs of an employment or training program in the U.S. or Canada that focuses on populations with low incomes.

Please note that Pathways to Work is not a registry for impact evaluations and submitting evaluations does not count as registering research. If you have a study underway to share with Pathways to Work, please email the name of the program, a brief description, and links to any additional publicly available materials (such as websites or reports) to PathwaysClearinghouse@abtglobal.com.

The Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse reports implementation details for programs with at least one outcome domain that has a well-supported or supported rating across the 10 outcome domains (increasing earnings, increasing employment, or decreasing benefit receipt in the short, long, or very long term, or increasing education and training). We focus on programs with supported outcomes because program providers and policymakers might be interested in learning more about how to implement these programs.