Figure 3.10 How Award Amount was Determined for Cases Where All Children are Either Under or Over the Age of Majority

Figure 3.10 presents the method used to determine the child support award amounts separately for these two groups. Cases in which all children were above the age of majority were less likely to report that the Guidelines had been used than were cases in which all children were under the age of majority (42.4 percent compared to 54.2 percent, respectively). In order to determine whether the proportion of cases reporting that the Federal Child Support Guidelines were followed (according to information in the file) has changed since the implementation of Phase 2 of this study, cases were rank-ordered according to the year of judgement from 1998 through 2001. Results indicated an increase in the proportion of cases reporting that the Guidelines were used from 1998 (53.4 percent) to 1999 (56.6 percent), followed by decreases in 2000 (51.4 percent) and 2001 (51.1 percent). As noted above, however, these percentages are likely to be lower than the actual proportions, due to the number of cases in which the method of calculating the child support award amount was unknown.