Overview

The project goal is to study if uncertainty is associated with perceptions of burdens by analyzing survey responses of GetCalFresh’s post-enrollment survey and combine it with administrative outcomes, including application determinations. The survey included items of experienced administrative burdens (learning, compliance and psychological costs) and measures of perceived determination uncertainty that were both linked with applicants’ determination outcomes. This allows us to compare reported burdens between applicants who knew their determination outcomes and those who did not.

Findings

  FINDING 1

Applicants who are uncertain about their determination outcome experience administrative burdens at similar levels to those who were denied.

Importantly, this relationship between uncertainty and burden levels persists regardless of the applicant's final determination status.

When controlling for a host of key administrative and application characteristics like the number of documents submitted or whether the application was submitted by a community-based organization on behalf of the applicant, results stay unchanged. Disaggregating burdens into its different costs, uncertainty emerges as the strongest predictor of learning costs, followed by psychological costs, and compliance cost.

FINDING 2

Applicants experiencing uncertainty were significantly less likely to provide positive feedback, while reporting higher rates of anxiety and frustration in their open-ended responses to the enrollment survey.

This suggests that uncertainty not only leads to higher levels of reported burdens, but also comes with psychological distress.

Approach

We combined administrative outcomes and post-enrollment responses from a survey of 19,000 SNAP applicants on Code for America’s GetCalFresh application portal.

Funders: Code for America, Walmart Foundation, Gates Foundation