Intervention(s)
Parents were assigned to one of four treatment groups: baseline, text-message, don't tell, or non-classroom. In the baseline treatment, the parent was asked to choose between his or her current CCT (base value) and an unconditional Cash Transfer (CT) of increasing size, until he or she made the switch. The parent was then asked the same questions with the UCT held at base value and the CCT increasing. Parents were informed that 5 percent of participants would have one of their decisions implemented, and that the decision would be randomly chosen from the 25 questions. In the baseline treatment, the child would be informed of any change in conditionality. All subsequent treatments are indentical to the baseline except for the factors described below. In the text message treatment, before eliciting a parent's choice between CCT and CT, the parent is offered free cell phone text messages every time their child misses school (a monitoring technology), regardless of the parent's choice. In the don't tell treatment, children would not be informed about any program change, and thus would not know whether the conditionality had been removed. In the non-classroom treatment, the conditionality would now be on whether the child was present on school grounds during the day, with no obligation to attend classes. This was implemented to potentially observe how parents value the non-classroom content of school, such as keeping the child off the streets.