Appendix A. Methodology

This report is the product of a qualitative research study that began in 2022 and ran through 2024. The study sought to understand how families living in poverty or on low incomes experienced the impact and aftermath of pandemic-era aid and what lessons could be learned for policymakers and the public about what families need to thrive.

To this end, Better Life Lab researchers and reporters received training in ethical human subjects research and adopted a grounded theory approach, which entailed collecting data from individuals with direct experience of pandemic aid and relying on their interpretations and accounts of their experiences to form conclusions about this time period and its potential lessons for lawmakers and the public moving forward. The Better Life Lab team spent extensive time interviewing 11 families with children across the country living in poverty, as defined by the Supplemental Poverty Rate, or on wages low enough to qualify for public benefits. We also extensively profiled one child care provider and the financially insecure community she serves. Those who agreed to participate in our study included people who identified as white, Black, Latin, and Native American. About half were partnered, and half were raising children on their own. About half were U.S.-born and half had immigrated to the United States.

To preserve the integrity and authenticity of our narrators’ voices, we made a conscious and deliberate decision to limit edits to their vernacular speech and instead recognize that they are experts in their own lived experiences. Part of that work must include refusing to fit how narrators tell their stories into the confines of privileged language. Our narrators were courageous enough to speak freely about their experiences, and out of respect, we chose not to mold their dialects to fit within the confines of Standard American English. We also researched, reported, and wrote one case study in Spanish, recognizing the presence of an estimated 17.5 million Spanish speakers living in the United States who speak English less than “very well” and are overrepresented among families living in poverty.¹

The researchers employed four qualitative research methods to gather the data they analyzed: focus groups, case studies, facilitated stories, and journalism. The researchers met regularly to discuss their data and their participants’ narrations of their experiences and conducted multiple synthesis sessions to map and analyze major themes emerging from the stories. They also noted particularities and exceptions among the participants to avoid overgeneralizations and maintain nuance in the eventual findings.

New America’s New Practice Lab (NPL) is conducting a longitudinal, multi-site, and mixed-format qualitative research study with families experiencing financial insecurity while raising kids under age six. This began with five in-person co-design workshops, in English and Spanish, in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, recruiting more than 30 families from rural and urban communities. For the next 18 months, the families engaged with the Lab through a remote digital diary study, offering insights into the joys and challenges of raising young children through a series of prompting questions. Together, the researchers and families explored what it would mean for their families to thrive and the resources needed to get there. Findings in this report are informed by insights pulled from some of the New Practice Lab team’s analysis of their qualitative data and deeper dive interviews conducted with select participants by the Better Life Lab team.

Better Life Lab researchers also worked through community groups and recruited four participants from across the United States for in-depth ethnographic case studies. The participants included a college-educated Black mother of four raising her children on her own in Georgia, a Spanish-speaking mixed-status immigrant family of four, two parents and two children, in Los Angeles, a single mother of Navajo descent raising two children in Utah, and one child care provider and the financially struggling community she serves in West Virginia. Individual researchers met with these participants at least once in-person in their homes and hometowns, observed their daily lives, and interviewed them extensively. These in-person meetings were supplemented with interviews on the phone and over Zoom over the years about their experiences during and after the pandemic. In particular, the researchers sought to establish timelines that showed changes to the participants’ and their families’ emotional and financial status before, during, and through the end of pandemic aid; to inquire as to which types of pandemic aid participants were able to access and how; and to ascertain how this aid and its expiration impacted participants’ attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs. These participants were compensated with $250 cash cards for their time. Participants were also afforded the opportunity to fact-check and to approve or disapprove the final text of the case studies.

From the outset of the project, Better Life Lab researchers and reporters investigated, developed, and sought to use ethical storytelling guidelines to recruit, engage with, learn from, and share the stories of people living in poverty or on low wages and their experiences with the unprecedented federal investments in families during the pandemic. We chose to use facilitated storytelling to gather qualitative data, serving as facilitators to help narrators tell their own stories in their own way. The Better Life Lab recruited some narrators through our New America partners, the New Practice Lab’s focus groups, as well as through various community-based groups and partners across the country, including the Economic Security Project, Global Women’s Strike, the Aspen Institute’s Women in the Economy project, and others. We spent time with eight narrators, recording and transcribing multiple interviews, and worked alongside them to edit their stories into an “As Told To” format. Narrators, who were not compensated for their time, were engaged throughout the story development process and had final approval on their respective drafts.

The Better Life Lab, for nearly a decade, has been a pioneer in using journalistic techniques to advance its narrative change mission: We seek to advance work-family justice and intersectional gender equity and elevate the value of care through the power of solutions-focused reporting, rigorous research, and compelling storytelling. Better Life Lab team members reported widely on pandemic-era government investments, interviewing and gathering information from academic experts, researchers, policymakers, advocates, community leaders, workers, and many others to capture trends and look for specific stories to tell in reported pieces of journalism or in opinion pieces. These have been published in a variety of media outlets, including CNN, EdSurge, Early Learning Nation, The Persistent, and others, with the aim of reaching broad audiences, opening eyes and minds, and helping shape the national conversation. In addition to stand-alone pieces, the journalism informed the framing of the project, the team’s synthesis work, and this report.

The participants in these four methodologies of research do not form a representative sample of U.S. individuals nor of low-income individuals in the United States. Our researchers recruited participants through their existing networks, organizations that support low-income families, and word of mouth. Participants were selected if they were willing to participate and met the criteria of having children under 18 during the pandemic, as well as reporting having used one or more pandemic-era programs between March 2020 when the the federal government declared the pandemic a public health emergency, and May 2023, when the emergency declaration expired. Because women are more likely to be solo heads of families with low incomes than men, and families of color disproportionately have low incomes,² participants in the various phases of this study are disproportionately women and people of color.