The Experiences of Workers Hired Under Consumer Direction in ...

In the final sample, 391 workers for treatment group members and 281 workers for controlgroup members responded to the survey. We refer to the primary paid workers for the treatmentgroup as “directly hired workers” and to those for the control group as “agency workers.”However, 1 percent of the workers for the control group reported that they were paid directly bythe consumer (presumably through a private source), and another 1 percent were hired by theconsumer through a Medicaid waiver program, Alternatives, which allowed a beneficiary’srelatives and friends to become certified providers and receive payment for providing care. Also,agencies were allowed to hire the relatives of their clients, but they rarely did.2. Descriptive MeasuresThe survey data allow us to construct measures that describe the workers’ characteristics aswell as their experiences, as shown in Appendix Table A.1. In general, the measures describeonly the experiences of workers caring for the IndependentChoices sample member. (Forexample, they describe the hours the worker spent caring for the sample member, but not thehours spent taking care of any other individuals.) In summary, our measures describe:• Worker and consumer characteristics, including the worker-consumer relationship• Working conditions, including (1) factual measures, such as the workers’ wages andfringe benefits, and (2) the workers’ perceptions about the working conditions• The training and preparation that workers received for job• The pattern of care provided, including the type, amount, and the timing of careprovided during the “past two weeks” 3 (that is, the two weeks preceding the primarypaid worker interview)3 Directly hired workers reported the number of hours of care they were paid for and thenumber of hours of total care they provided. However, they did not differentiate tasks they werepaid for from tasks that they provided informally. Likewise, they did not report (and likely didnot keep track of) whether the hours the time they worked during non-business hours were paidor unpaid.8