The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project seeks to increase parents’ compliance with child support orders by using procedural justice principles to increase trust and confidence in their processes and to reduce the use of contempt for noncompliant parents. The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement funded six local child support agencies to implement a demonstration of these strategies. The evaluation of PJAC uses a random assignment design and include implementation and benefit cost studies. As a subcontractor to MDRC, MEF is leading evaluation operations and implementation research in two sites, authoring project briefs, and leading the cost- benefit cost analysis. MEF is also leading a follow-up qualitative study of how child support programs responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and implications of these changes for longer term changes to the operations and policies of the child support program.
