Social Work Commons^™

The Impact Of Guaranteed Income On Political Participation, Daniel Horn

Doctoral Dissertations

This three-paper dissertation examines the impact of guaranteed income (GI) and cash transfer (CT) programs on political participation, aiming to contribute to understanding how social policies can shape civic engagement. The first paper provides a comprehensive literature review on GI and CT programs, focusing on their potential effects on political participation. By analyzing existing studies, this paper identifies key findings and gaps in the literature, setting the stage for further empirical investigation. The second paper develops and tests a new instrument called the Brief Political Participation Scale (BPPS), designed to measure political participation concisely and reliably. The third paper presents …

On Income Inequality And Poverty In Egypt: Is Prosperity Immoral?, Mohamed Karim Lotfy Abdelkhalek

Theses and Dissertations

There are varying perspectives on, and divergent solutions to, the phenomena of income inequality and poverty. There seems to be polarizing views on both of these sensitive topics. One side of the argument believes income inequality should in itself be mitigated through redistribution measures, while the other argues that this should not be the focus of policy makers, as it deters them from facing the more pressing issue facing society – which is absolute poverty. The relationship between income inequality, poverty, and citizen well-being in Egypt is one that warrants further research, and this paper aims to fill this lacuna. …

A Qualitative Study On The Financial Education Of Young Black Men, Sue M. May

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Financial literacy awareness is low among young adults, and financial literacy among Black college students is significantly lower than in other groups (Singh, 2018). However, there is little to no research on why financial literacy is so low among young Black men between 18 and 25. Few studies specifically show how financial literacy and decision-making may be related to their family economics and socialization for young Black men. Using Critical Race Theory and Family Financial Socialization theoretical frameworks, this dissertation project examined a sample of seven young self-identified Black men ages 24 to 25 years old in Northern California Bay …

Are Hispanics Less Likely To Receive Vocational Rehabilitation Services?, Alberto Migliore, John Shepard

All Institute for Community Inclusion Publications

In the US, 16% of people with cognitive disabilities self-report to be of Hispanic ethnicity (US Census Bureau, FY 2020). However, among people with intellectual disabilities who received vocational rehabilitation services, only 11% (-5%) are Hispanic (N = 32,823, RSA911, FY2020).

Homelessness Estimates In The Mountain West, 2020, Saha Salahi, Vanessa Booth, William E. Brown Jr.

Demography

This fact sheet summarizes a recent report titled, “The 2020 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress,” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By synthesizing homelessness vulnerability categories to the Mountain West states, this report offers data for Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

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 …

The Economics Of Love, Débora Silva Viana

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I argue that the obligation to love based on the Christian tradition requires Christians to disperse their resources in a way that significantly evens out wealth distribution and increases social justice. Christians disagree on the terminology and some tenets of the goal of the Christian life (e.g., deification, beatific vision, communion with God, salvation). However, the requirement to practice love is common to all of these concepts, thus making love normative for Christians. I argue that when love takes such a prominent role in one’s life, then it naturally influences how one manages one’s resources. If love …

Measurement Of Childhood Poverty In The United States And Its Enduring Influences, Zi Yang

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper measures childhood poverty in the United States and classifies it into three degrees based on different durations – persistent poverty, chronic transient poverty, and non-chronic transient poverty – using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data and actual poverty thresholds in the United States. Then I examine the enduring influences of different types of childhood poverty on future performance, including academic achievement, income, and criminal behavior, utilizing OLS and logistic models as well as Mincer wage functions. The regression results show that childhood poverty has a negative impact on schooling years and earnings. Living in poverty increases …

Social Justice And Worker Cooperatives, Gurveer Shaan Dhillon

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Social Justice (SJ) is an organizing principle of contemporary community psychology (CP); however, the concept and understanding of social justice in community psychology is undertheorized and narrow. Specifically, the concept of distributive justice, which has been a popular notion of social justice in community psychology discourse, does not translate well into transformative action. In order to address this issue, the research uses a qualitative approach to explore the understanding of social justice from the perspectives of worker-members of 5 worker cooperatives in Ontario, with the aim to contribute to an understanding of SJ that has transformative implications. A worker cooperative …

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 …

A Review On Literatures Of Zakat Between 2003-2013, Fuadah Johari, Muhammad Ridhwan Ab. Aziz, Ahmad Fahme Mohd Ali

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The objective of this article is to analysis the related literatures on zakat between 2003 until 2013. The methodology of this article is through descriptive research based on document-analysis on previous articles and literatures on zakat between 2003 until 2013. Data from each articles related in this field were collected and statistically analyzed using the Statistical Product & Service Solution (SPSS) software. This study looked at several variables which include authorship patterns, number of articles published, research approach, subject and gender of the author. The general finding of this article shows that the zakat issues are among the most discussed …

Conditional Cash Transfers, Community, And Empowerment Of Women In Colombia, Harlan Downs-Tepper

21st Century Social Justice

In 2001, the Colombian government initiated an experiment in poverty alleviation called Familias en Acción. This conditional cash transfer (CCT) program takes a novel approach to poverty reduction by addressing short- and long-term factors contributing to poverty. Though Colombia’s CCT program is just one of a wave of similar initiatives, its unique context and unexpected social effects, beyond the primary intentions of program designers, differentiate it from other such programs. Drawing on 200 interviews and focus group discussions which he conducted with academic experts, program beneficiaries and program administrators in three Colombian cities, the author finds that an unexpected …

A Mixed-Methods Study Of Resident Readiness, Engagement, And Relocation During Mixed-Income Redevelopment, Laurie A. Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since 1990, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has supported mixed-income redevelopment (MIR) strategies to address the problems of concentrated urban poverty neighborhoods with traditional public housing structures. This study focused on two neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado, with more than 38% of the residents living in poverty, which are facing transit-oriented MIR in the coming years. Residents in both neighborhoods have engaged in formal planning processes and community organizing as a way to be prepared for the change.

The study posed three research questions: (1) what predicts a community's readiness for MIR, (2) what predicts resident involvement as …

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

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

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 …

Skew Selection Theory Applied To The Wealth And Welfare Of Nations, Susan F. Allen, Deby L. Cassill

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

According to skew selection theory, working citizens who build wealth and, at the same time, share portions of their wealth with those in need are more likely to survive economic downturns than citizens who hoard wealth. In this article, skew selection is employed as a theoreticalframework to support governmental efforts to develop social policies that protect the income of working citizens and, at the same time, provide for vulnerable, non-working children and elders. To illustrate its applicability, the social policies of Japan, Sweden and the United States-all of which are challenged by decaying ratios of working to non-working citizens-are compared …

Potential Impact Of Eitc Adjustments On Financial Self-Sufficiency Among Low-Income Families: A Simulation Model, Younghee Lim, Catherine Lemieux

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Policies that help low-income mothers find and keep employment as a means of obtaining self-sufficiency have been a focal point of the welfare reform debate in the past decade. In the midst of this dialogue, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has gained popularity as one of the core work support programs for America's low- and moderately low-income families with children. This study compares the estimated effects of EITC when its value deteriorated in the late 1990s with that of a simulated EITC for which the real value kept pace with the actual cost of living on welfare caseload reductions. …

Searching For Social Capital In U.S. Microenterprise Development Programs, Nancy C. Jurik, Gray Cavender, Julie Cozogill

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper focuses on the claims and efforts of U.S. microenterprise development programs (MDPs) to build social capital among poor and low income entrepreneurs. MDPs offer business training and lending services to individuals operating very small businesses (with five or fewer employees and less than $20,000 in start-up capital). Advocates suggest that MDPs help promote economic development by building social capital defined as networks among small entrepreneurs and between entrepreneurs and their larger community. We begin our paper with a short review of the varied definitions and claims about the role of social capital in promoting civic and economic empowerment. …

Review Of One Third Of A Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports On The Great Depression. Richard Lowitt And Maurine Beasley (Eds.). Review By John M. Herrick, John M. Herrick

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Book review of Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley (Eds.), One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000. $21.95 papercover.

The Poverty Of Hard Work: Multiple Jobs And Low Wages In Family Economies Of Rural Utah Households, Christina E. Gringeri

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The combination of paid work and poverty, or near poverty, is a growing problem in the United States, one of which is often accentuated by residence in rural, low-wage communities where underemployment is more prevalent than in metropolitan areas. This paper examines the experiences of sixty rural families with inadequate employment using data from ethnographic interviews with a particular focus on the strategies they use to meet their family's needs in spite of low-wage work.

The Role Of Social Capital In Reclaiming Human Capital: A Longitudinal Study Of Occupational Mobility Among Displaced Steelworkers, Allison Zippay

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper examines the employment and income effects of job training, education, and social network contacts over a l0-year period among a random sample of steelworkers who lost jobs to plant closings in the early 1980s in a manufacturing community in Western Pennsylvania. First interviewed in 1987, a majority of the 102 respondents were unemployed or underemployed. A second round of interviews was conducted in 1997 with 87 of the original respondents to examine changes in income and employment status, the types of training and education that had been pursued over the course of 10 years, and their use of …

An Exploration Into Individual Development Accounts As An Anti-Poverty Strategy, Timothy G. Reutebuch

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

A non-random, cross-sectional sampling procedure was utilized in this study to determine what factors are related to households choosing to utilize Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) as a means to escape poverty. Surveys from 111 households were collected from September 1997, to April 1999, in seven Ohio counties to elucidate the relationship between the level of assets in working poor households and selected household demographic variables, and the decision on whether or not to actually participate in an IDA program. Findings revealed that households 1) with more than one wage earner and 2) with higher levels of education are more likely …

Residential Mobility And Youth Well-Being: Research, Policy, And Practice Issues, Edward Scanlon, Kevin Devine

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Despite an extensive body of sociological work suggesting that residential mobility reduces child well-being, the subject of relocation has been largely overlooked in social work and social welfare literature. Recent social policies threaten to increase the incidence of moving among low-income families in the United States. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical literature in this area and finds evidence that residential mobility reduces children's academic functioning, and may negatively affect other aspects of child well-being. These effects are especially strong for poor children from single parent families, making this issue of particular relevance for social work. The authors suggest implications …

Job Stability And Wage Progression Patterns Among Early Tanf Leavers, Steven G. Anderson, Anthony P. Halter, George Julnes, Richard Schuldt

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article reports on first-year employment experiences of a randomly selected sample of 213 Illinois TANF leavers. Aggregate employment levels were 70 percent at exit, and leavers typically generated earnings from a single full-time job. However, employment often was unstable, so that only about one-fourth of leavers had the same job both at exit and when interviewed 10-11 months later. Employment instability resulted from the marginal or temporary nature of many jobs, as well as employment barriers such as health problems and lack of day care. Average wage levels easily exceeded the minimum wage and grew during the first year …

Exploitation-The Invisible Hand Guided By A Blind Eye: Confronting A Flaw In Economic Theory, Phillip Dybicz

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Economics is alone among the social science disciplines in failing to have a sound theory to explain behaviors when people do not act according to their self-interest, that is, with compassion. This has resulted in a fundamental flaw in economic thought. As economies have grown in scale and complexity, there has been a corresponding distancing between consumers and producers. This flaw has revealed itself through a lack of economic structures which bridge this distance, restore a level of intimacy within the economic interaction, and hence facilitate the expression of compassion.

Equality And Family Policy In International Perspective: Toward A Feminist Theory Of The State, Patricia Spakes

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This three country comparison uses case studies of family policy in Britain, Canada and the US to explain how governments utilize family policies to maintain patriarchal systems and to promote labor force and economic goals. The paper examines how equality/difference theories are applied in family policy. Propositions are developed in order to provide a basis for developing new approaches to family policy based on gender equality.

Refugee Resettlement In The United States: Implications For International Social Welfare, Miriam Potocky

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

An analysis of U.S. refugee resettlement policy reveals approaches that do not address several root causes of resettlement difficulties: cultural differences, post-traumatic stress disorder, and discrimination by the host culture. Several recommendations are made for policy improvements, and suggestions for the future of international social welfare are presented.

Restraint Economics And The New Right: A Structural Analysis Of The Political Economy Of Social Services Cutbacks, John Butcher

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Restraint by government in the area of social service spending in the 1980's has become an issue of grave concern for social service practitioners, planners, and administrators. The emergence in North America of neo-conservative economic policies has engendered a body of critical and provocative literature which examines the effects of "restraint economics".

Recent work in geography has sought to locate the supply-side trend within a framework of macro-level processes. These suggest that a declining public commitment to maintaining the social safety net is linked to broader structural changes in the workplace and spatial shifts of capital and industry (Dear & …

The Immobility Of Low-Paid Workers, Marshall I. Pomer

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This paper extends the labor segmentation perspective on unequal job access. Analyzed here are Census data on the occupational mobility of low-paid workers during the period 1965 to 1970. Upward mobility, defined as movement from a low-paid to a mainstream stratum, is far more common for white men than for women and blacks-even after controlling for differences in age, education, and type of low-paid job. A worker's particular low-paid occupation also strongly affects chances of entering the mainstream stratum. The dominant paradigm for quantitative research on social stratification is questioned, and social policies are suggested.

The Social Work Service Commodity In The Inflationary 80'S, Harold Lewis

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The decade ahead is going to be dominated by economic issues. All signs point to continued Inflation, continued high levels of unemployment, cyclical troughs and declining peaks in the overall economy, energy shortages and Increasing financial pressures, particularly on those families living on minimal or below-poverty level budgets. Stresses In management of basic requirements for maintenance of health, housing, education and transportation %III burden middle income, blue collar and the working poor family. In this context, funding of social services will be tight, relative to need. It seems useful, for these reasons, to place our discussion within an economic framework, …

The Price Of Unemployment And Inflation And Who Pays, Michael Borrero

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Since the early 1960's many economists and policy makers have contended that full employment and price stability are unattainable goals. Stimulated by the works of A. W. Phillips, a British economist, they have argued that there is an inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; that is, as unemployment decreases, inflation increases. Phillips in his original article, "The Relationship between Unemployment and the Rate of Change in Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom,"1 cautiously reasoned that when demand for commodities, services or labor was high relative to supply, prices increase. Increasing prices for labor draw out unemployed people into the …