Social Work Commons^™

Reaping What We Sow: The Implications And Outcomes Of Mississippi House Bill 1125, The “Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures (Reap)” Act, Kerigan Brewer

Honors Theses

Mississippi House Bill 1125 (MS HB1125), also known as the “Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures (REAP) Act,” was signed into law by Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves in early 2023 (REAP Act, 2023). It is one of multiple policies passed into law that limit the rights of transgender people. This thesis aims to clarify the history of the trans community, dispel myths around gender-affirming health care and the trans identity, and discuss the current state of anti-trans laws and transgender rights. Using a policy analysis framework by DiNitto (2011), MS HB1125 is analyzed on points like its social and economic costs, the …

The Impact Of The Deinstitutionalization Policies On Homelessness, Henrique Krigner

Helm's School of Government Conference - American Revival: Citizenship & Virtue

Homelessness is a growing issue in America. In 2019 there were 567,715 homeless individuals in the United States, distributed in emergency shelters (63%) or residing unsheltered on streets (27%). In 2021, even though specialists argue that the Covid-19 restrictions greatly harmed an accurate counting, the total number of unsheltered homeless in America increased in 20%. Such increase became a central discussion not only to regular citizens and neighborhood associations, but it also became a great concern within the federal government which has been appropriating billions of dollars each year to “end homeless”.

Specialists point out that the growth of the …

The Effects Of “No Pro Homo” Policies On Lgbtq+ Perceptions In The American South, Isabella L. Brocato

Honors Theses

Five states in the American South currently have “no pro homo” policies in place, while an increasing number of bills targeting discussions about sexuality and gender identity in public schools are being introduced to House floors around the country. Although there is extensive research on the ways in which these policies put the physical and mental well-being of LGBTQ+ students at risk, there is little to no research about how they shape public perceptions of the LGBTQ+ community collectively. With inspiration from Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s social science study cited in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), this study works …

Legislative Language For Success, Sanjana Gundala

Master's Theses

Legislative committee meetings are an integral part of the lawmaking process for local and state bills. The testimony presented during these meetings is a large factor in the outcome of the proposed bill. This research uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to analyze testimonies from California Legislative committee meetings from 2015-2016 in order to identify what aspects of a testimony makes it successful. A testimony is considered successful if the alignment of the testimony matches the bill outcome (alignment is "For" and the bill passes or alignment is "Against" and the bill fails). The process of finding what …

Reproductive Freedom For All: A Policy Brief, Noa J. Cook

The Downtown Review

Reproductive freedom in the United States has been a source of controversy throughout history and current legislation places these rights under attack. Divided into three parts, this policy brief seeks to address the lack of accessible reproductive healthcare for women, with special attention to economic, racial, and ethnic disparities. Part 1 includes a historical overview of abortion access and significant legislation in the U.S., describes the present status of the problem, and the populations affected. In Part 2, the pros and cons of current policies such as the federal contraceptive guarantee of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Hyde Amendment, and …

Barriers To Post-Secondary Success, Douglas Swanson, Najeana Henderson, Maritza Sloan

Dissertations

This study reviews factors that prior studies have identified or failed to consider as barriers to post-secondary success. The three main areas include academic success for Latinx students after high school, organizational systems and their impact on African-American students’ postsecondary readiness, and what workers think of their high school education with regards to career preparedness.

Five factors are identified as major barriers for Latinx students to continue in a higher education system. A survey of former students from Saint Louis, Missouri, and Dallas, Texas, metroplex area identified 56 Latinx students that participated in an initial survey. This led to a …

Dinámica Familiar En La Persona Mayor En Confinamiento Por Covid 19 En El Municipio De Chía Cundinamarca, Laura Katalilna Alfaro Ramos

Trabajo Social

El presente documento expone la realización de la investigación denominada: “Dinámica familiar en el adulto mayor en confinamiento por COVID 19 en el municipio de Chía, Cundinamarca” la cual tiene como propósito abordar a grupos familiares afectados por la pandemia que se desató desde el año 2019 a lo largo del mundo. Este es un asunto que se considera relevante estudiar desde el Trabajo Social, debido a la fundamentación en familia y por la especial importancia de tener en consideración el testimonio de personas en edad mayor.

La metodología empleada para la realización de esta investigación fue de tipo cualitativo, …

Let's Get Free: Family Policing, Prison Industrial Complex Abolition, And Transcendent Love, Emma Li

Scripps Senior Theses

My objective is to illuminate the painful, discriminatory, and avoidable effects of family separation underneath the American child welfare system and tradition of family policing. In this bureaucratically sprawling and interconnected system comprising of prisons, courts, social workers, and doctors, individual blame is assigned to parents, families, and communities facing long-running systemic problems. Family policing and the child welfare system have long been excluded from conventional discussions surrounding the harms of police and prisons. The everyday violence Black, Latinx, and low-income families face at the threat of/implementation of family separation - an immensely traumatic and agonizing process - must be …

“[Don’T] Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor...” A Study On The Trump Administration’S Unprecedented Reforms To The U.S. Refugee Admissions Program And Their Implications, Savannah Day

Honors Theses

From 2017 to 2020, the Trump administration cut United States refugee admissions tenfold. These reforms come unprecedented to the 40-year-old resettlement program (USRAP). By critically reviewing literature on this topic as well as conducting eight original interviews with five national nonprofits contracted by the Department of State to do refugee resettlement casework, this study sought to identify the implications of the Trump administration’s reforms to the program. Once implications were identified, I used the applied frameworks of program model as well as Michael Worth’s sociological and political science theories of American nonprofit-government relations to better inform and guide the study. …

We Need A Loud And Fractious Poor, Jeff Maskovsky, Frances Fox Piven

Publications and Research

This article explores the political consequences of four decades of consistent humiliation of the poor by the most authoritative voices in the land, and offers insights into ways that new movements are creating spaces for poor people’s political voices to surface and become relevant again. Our specific concern is the challenge that the current humiliation regime poses to those who seek to revive radical, disruptive and fractious anti-poverty activism and politics. By humiliation regime, we mean a form of political violence that maltreats those classified popularly and politically as “the poor” by treating them as undeserving of citizenship, rights, public …

Torn Apart: A Closer Look At Our Cover Image, Sandra Rios

Culture, Society, and Praxis

No abstract provided.

Review Of Broke And Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country, Peter A. Kindle

Contemporary Rural Social Work Journal

Review of Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country

The Predictors Of Juvenile Recidivism: Testimonies Of Adult Students 18 Years And Older Exiting From Alternative Education, La Toshia Palmer

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this descriptive, qualitative study was to identify and describe the importance of the predictors of juvenile recidivism and the effectiveness of efforts to prevent/avoid juvenile recidivism as perceived by previously detained, arrested, convicted, and/or incarcerated adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education in Northern California. A second purpose was to explore the types of support provided by alternative schools and the perceived importance of the support to avoid recidivism according to adult students 18 years of age and older exiting from alternative education.

Methodology: This qualitative, descriptive research design identified …

Fax: August 8, 1996, The White House, Office Of The Press Secretary

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

A fax sent to Dr. Edna L. Saffy, a press release regarding President Clinton signing a bill on July 31, 1996 and the welfare system.

Shared Experiences Of Women In Politics, Esther Pew

Thinking Matters Symposium Archive

What are the lived experiences of female politicians in the state of Maine who have made the active decision to run for elected office?

• What is the experience like for a woman running for political office?

• What motivates and hinders women in their aspirations to run for political office?

The Fear Factor: Exploring The Impact Of The Vulnerability To Deportation On Immigrants' Lives, Shirley P. Leyro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative study explores the impact that the fear of deportation has on the lives of noncitizen immigrants. More broadly, it explores the role that immigration enforcement, specifically deportation, plays in disrupting the process of integration, and the possible implications of this interruption for immigrants and their communities. The study aims to answer: (1) how vulnerability to deportation specifically impacts an immigrant’s life, and (2) how the vulnerability to deportation, and the fear associated with it, impacts an immigrant’s degree of integration. Data were gathered through a combination of six open-ended focus group interviews of 10 persons each, and 33 …

Community Land Trusts: A Help Or Hindrance To Community Development In The United States, Andrew Kuka

Stevenson Center for Community and Economic Development—Student Research

The availability of affordable housing in the United States continues to be an issue for Americans who are on the brink of homelessness, rely on housing subsidies, or struggle to pay their mortgages or rents. These issues, as well as the gentrification threat that community development poses to low-income residents can have deleterious effects on democratic participation and community development efforts. One proposed solution to these problems is the implementation of more community land trust programs nationally. This paper will assess the practicality of CLTs, and what such an implementation would mean for individuals, government entities, community members, and community …

Economic Wealth And Social Welfare: A Longitudinal Analysis Of Transnational Well-Being, Kelly Brooke Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

Macro changes in the financial arena have prompted ongoing research focused on global economic trends. As America emerges from an era of stagnant wages, rising unemployment, and growing class stratification it is necessary to explore differences in cross-national socioeconomic behavior to address the changing needs of our country. Many studies attempt to describe statistical correlations between economic wealth and social well-being domestically and abroad by utilizing methodological perspectives that do not account for longitudinal change. To address the gap in existing research, this study seeks to measure variations in econometric indicators between the U.S. and Nordic countries to further explicate …

The Hear.Us Project - Reducing Anti-Immigrant Sentiment And Myth Through An Online Awareness Intervention, Douglas J. Epps

MSW Capstones

The following is an online awareness intervention designed to reduce anti-immigrant sentiment and myth throughout the greater community by means of an educational toolkit. The foundation of this toolkit was designed using macro level theoretical intervention frameworks. The content is grounded in empirically based interpersonal communication strategies specialized in addressing anti-immigrant sentiment. The goal of this toolkit is to provide a source for humanizing and factual education especially for those who are unfamiliar with immigrant community members. The intervention achieves this goal by means of three specific elements: 1) Humanizing and inspiring personal stories from immigrants in the local community …

Why You Should Care About The Threatened Middle Class, Jill Littrell, Fred Brooks, Jan Ivery, Mary Ohmer

jill l littrell Dr.

In the last two decades, the income and security of the individual middle class worker has declined and the gap between the middle class and the wealthy has widened. We explain how this is bad for democracy, the economy, and the aggregate health of the nation. We examine the governmental policies and interventions that increased the middle class following the depression and maintained its vigor through the post-World War II period. The impetus for these changes in governmental policies in the 1930s was to end the Great Depression. We pose the question of whether a nation can recover from a …

Specialists, Generalists, And Policy Advocacy By Charitable Nonprofit Organizations, Heather Macindoe, Ryan Whalen

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Previous research finds modest levels of engagement in policy advocacy by charitable nonprofits, despite legal regulations permitting nonprofit advocacy and the significance of public policy to nonprofit constituencies. This paper examines nonprofit involvement in policy advocacy using survey data from Boston, Massachusetts. Nonprofit participation in policy advocacy is associated with professionalization, resource dependence, features of the institutional environment, and organizational characteristics such as size and mission. Drawing from population ecology theory, we examine an additional aspect of organizational mission: whether a nonprofit serves a specialized or general population. We find that nonprofits serving specialized populations are more likely to participate …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

Fear Vs. Facts: Examining The Economic Impact Of Undocumented Immigrants In The U.S., David Becerra, David K. Androff, Cecilia Ayón, Jason T. Castillo

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Undocumented immigration has become a contentious issue in the U.S. over the past decade. Opponents of undocumented immigration have argued that undocumented immigrants are a social and financial burden to the U.S. which has led to the passage of drastic and costly policies. This paper examined existing state and national data and found that undocumented immigrants do contribute to the economies of federal, state, and local governments through taxes and can stimulate job growth, but the cost of providing law enforcement, health care, and education impacts federal, state, and local governments differently. At the federal level, undocumented immigrants tend to …

Unanswered Questions Of A Minority People In International Law: A Comparative Study Between Southern Cameroons & South Sudan, Bernard Sama Mr

Bernard Sama

The month July of 2011 marked the birth of another nation in the World. The distressful journey of a minority people under the watchful eyes of the international community finally paid off with a new nation called the South Sudan . As I watched the South Sudanese celebrate independence on 9 July 2011, I was filled with joy as though they have finally landed. On a promising note, I read the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon saying “[t]ogether, we welcome the Republic of South Sudan to the community of nations. Together, we affirm our commitment to helping it meet its …

Beyond Tolerance: Consciously Using Universal Energy Laws, Discernment, And Harmonious Relationship Principles, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

Every day we, as human beings, maneuver through a myriad of circumstances in our individual and collective life spaces. Central to our experiences is the nature, kind, and quality of our relationships. When we encounter differences (racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, economic, sexual orientation, the mentally and physically challenged), a common issue that often emerges in our experiences is the extent to which we use tolerance in relating to other people and circumstances. For this reason, I want to discuss the nature of tolerance and its limitations, and how to move beyond tolerance by consciously using Universal Energy Laws, discernment, and …

Why You Should Care About The Threatened Middle Class, Jill Littrell, Fred Brooks, Jan Ivery, Mary Ohmer

SW Publications

In the last two decades, the income and security of the individual middle class worker has declined and the gap between the middle class and the wealthy has widened. We explain how this is bad for democracy, the economy, and the aggregate health of the nation. We examine the governmental policies and interventions that increased the middle class following the depression and maintained its vigor through the post-World War II period. The impetus for these changes in governmental policies in the 1930s was to end the Great Depression. We pose the question of whether a nation can recover from a …

The Citizens Were Heard, Donna M. Hughes Dr.

Donna M. Hughes

Archetypal Energies, The Emergence Of Obama As A Practical Idealist, And Global Transformation, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

During this time of change, AHP and kindred spirits on the edge have important roles to play. We are the keepers and nurturers of a transformative and evolutionary Vision for Consciousness and a more humane world. At issue is what I will call the “psychic politics” for global transformation, nurtured by practical idealism and the Archetypal Energies. In other writings, I have described Archetypal Energies as Higher Vibrational Energies, operating deep within our individual and collective psyches, which have their own transcendent value, purpose, quality, and “voice”, unique to the individual. We experience them as “creative urges” to move us …

Presidents, Profits, Productivity, & Poverty: A Great Divide Between The Pre- & Post-Reagan U.S. Economy?, Richard K. Caputo

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper examined profits, productivity, and poverty in the United States from 1961 through 2002. Results indicated that the "great divide" thesis regarding the U.S. economy before and after the Reagan administration depends on which measure of the economy is the focus of attention. In addition, on some measures where before and after differences were detected, the nature of those differences was paradoxical. Corporate profits as a share of national income, for example, were highest in Democratic rather than Republican administrations and despite the increased income inequality of the post-Reagan years, individual and family poverty rates remained relatively constant after …

The National Domestic Workers Union And The War On Poverty, Elizabeth Beck

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article explores values, strategies, and tensions found within the War on Poverty and examines a War on Poverty-supported initiative, the National Domestic Workers Union (NDWU). The article makes the argument that the NDWU is illustrative of the War on Poverty in that each held structurally based descriptions of poverty and individually based prescriptions. The article explores the relationship of domestic service to the institutions of racism, classism, and sexism and how the ND WU strategies of training, service, and, advocacy-like those of the War on Poverty-sought to address the needs of individual domestic workers while circumventing larger and more …