Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons^™

Crime Victims And Public Social Policy, Joe Hudson, Burt Galaway

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The administration of criminal law has traditionally Ignored the role of the victim and focused on the criminal offender. Increasingly, however, social policy and programs are beginning to take Into consideration the situation of the crime victim. Programs designed to focus on offender restitution to crime victims are being developed and Implemented at various stages of the criminal Justice system. At the same time, programs of state compensation to crime victims are being Implemented in an Increasing number of jurisdictions.

The Welfare Poor: Patterns Of Association And Interaction In Discretionary Time, Francis P. Noe, Kirk Elifson

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The welfare poor in America are classified into a "subterranean' strata not solely because of economic inequality but entrenched by racial ethnicity, age disadvantages, physical and psychological impairment, and broken family structures. While the misery and plight of the poor are often recognized in basic terms in which the survival necessity of food, clothing, health care, and shelter are real concerns, seemingly other less important cultural considerations are glossed over as trivia. Leisure participation continues to be neglected by researchers and because of this low priority, little or nothing is known of the leisure life style of the poor. Less …

Evaluation Research: Some Possible Contexts Of Theory Failure, Pranab Chatterjee, Lenore Olsen, Thomas P. Holland

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

What can evaluation research tell us about social science theory? It is the purpose of this paper to examine that question. There has been much written in the current literature about the relationship between theory and practice. Because it is evaluation research (Breedlove, 1972: 71-89; Newbrough, 1966: 39-52; Suchman, 1971: 43-48; Suchman, 1967; Weiss, 1973: 37-45; Fitz- Gibbons and Morris, 1975: 1-4) that attempts to analyze the results of practice, it is the authors' belief that an examination of evaluation research studies for possible contexts of theory failure will contribute to a linkage between theory and practice.

Philosophy, Sociology And The Theory Of Social Welfare: A Conceptual Starting Point, Robert D. Herman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In this paper I want to explore and 2begin to elucidate a fundamental problem in social welfare theory. The problem centers on the conception of the relation between individuals and social structure. Before proceeding with this task, it is important to note the senses in which the term "social welfare" will be used. The term has two basic senses, deriving from two more or less distinct intellectual traditions. In one sense the term refers to the provision of goods and services to needy individuals, either through government "transfers" or private philanthropy. In this comparatively narrow sense social welfare is a …

Public Welfare: Utilization, Change, Appropriations, Service, John E. Tropman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

During the decade of the 1960's there was continually increasing interest in the programs of public welfare. This interest sprang from several sources. Citizens, always worried about welfare expenditures, developed resurgent concern. Recipients, long a quiet group, became more active, forming the National Welfare Rights Organization. And then there was the rediscovery of poverty as a social problem, and a realization that very many Americans were poor, many more than anyone had somehow realized.

The general interest in poverty and the measures used to relieve it had an effect on the academic community, generating some sustained and critical attention to …

Social Policies And Social Development - A Humanistic-Egalitarian Perspective, David G. Gil

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This essay explores the relationship of social policies and of policy-relevant societal values to social development. Its thesis is that the scope, direction, and quality of the social development process are largely shaped by the social policies and the dominant value positions of societies.

Social Equality And The Housing Allowance Approach To Assisting The Poor, Elizabeth Huttman, John Huttman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This report discusses the role housing assistance has played in the United States in decreasing social inequality of America's poor, and then, in more detail, discusses the degree to which a housing allowance program, now being experimented with, might do a better job of diminishing social inequality. The report is based on the author's ten years of research on subsidized housing programs, especially public housing, new towns, housing for the elderly, and most recently, the HUD experymental housing allowance program and European housing allowance programs.

The Impact Of Urban Removal From A Child's Point Of View, L. K. Northwood

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

It is the premise of this paper that forced urban resettlement has more devastating consequences for children and their families than the usual voluntary moving process. The moving process, whether forced or voluntary, involves the following phases: a decision to change the place of residence, an exploration of housing opportunities in various areas, the final selection of one of these, activities associated with making the move, and activities associated with getting settled in the new house and neighborhood.

Relocation Of Vancouver's Chinatown Residents Under Urban Renewal, Richard Nann

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Introduction. This is a study of the relocation patterns of Chinese-Canadian residents in an area undergoing urban renewal in Vancouver in the late 1960's. The study shows the inadequacies of simplistic social planning. The study indicates the need to understand the variety of responses to forced relocation, based on social class, the stage in the family life cycle and ethnicity. The study points out the different ways various families view the old neighborhood and the Chinese community as a whole, and, as part of this, how they view urban renewal. The study shows how housing and residential preferences relate to …

Condominium Housing: Some Social And Economic Implications, Frank G. Mittelbach, Joe Ebin

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The functioning of condominium communities and projects has received increased attention from housing analysts in many professions. As of 1973, there were an estimated 15,000 condominium and townhouse communities in the United States, a figure expanding approximately by 4,000 annually.

In this context, the proliferation of home owners associations in the communities or projects is of special interest due to their emerging role as a new form of residential government. This role manifests itself as both supplementary and in part complementary to the existing government framework. The collective provision and maintenance of selected services, including roads, utilities, lighting, refuse collection, …

Social Research On Housing In The United States: Directions And Themes, Shirley S. Angrist

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

I shall present a selective overview of recent themes and directions in social research on housing in the U.S. I narrowed the topic by focusing on research centering on the family and on neighborhood. These topics offer ways to concentrate on "social" research and to narrow a rather broad topic.

My meaning of "social" research encompasses work not only by sociologists. It also includes the separate or collaborative work of other disciplines, especially psychology, anthropology, social psychology, architecture and urban planning. Research on housing has from its Post-World War II flowering been an interdisciplinary enterprise. And it continues to be …

New Towns And Social Welfare Prospects: 1975 - 2000 A.D., Arthur B. Shostak

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

America's 15 HUD-aided new towns are mired in such serious financial problems as to make likely the emphatic close of the 1968-1974 Golden Age of modern new town development. Contrary, however, to present-day indications there is reason to expect a revival of new town prospects in the late 1970's, and social welfare components may be center stage in the matter.

There is no gainsaying the seriousness of the 1975 collapse of the American new towns movement: HUD, for example, from a prior commitment to approving at least ten projects a year between 1968 and 2000 A.D. is now refusing to …

Operational Problems Of New Communities, Chester C. Mcguire

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The development of Reston, Virginia and Columbia, Maryland in the early 1960's produced much speculation concerning the role of new towns in future urban growth. Supporters of new towns have offered them as prescriptions for many of the ills found in urban America today: as opposed to the sprawling, often poorly designed and frequently single class typical suburban community. However, in the decade that has passed since the inception of Reston and Columbia large numbers of planned new towns have not been built, due in large part to the myriad problems of new town development which are now general knowledge.

Gemeinschaft Vs. Gesellschaft In A Finnish New Town, Stanley F. Wiseman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Excerpt from the full-text article:

This article has a dual purpose: (1) to describe report on the creation and progress of one of the most famous New Towns, Tapiola, in Finland, and (2) to "operationalize" in this scene the dual concepts of Ferdinand Tbnnies' Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or al they have come to be identified modernly, cimunity and contract bureaucracy. (T~nnies, 1963:12-25) This approach is used because the major attempt in the world today to restore the peopleoriented element of Geeinschaft to local government is being taken in the New Town setting, and one of the most successful (according to …

Alternative Methods Of Providing Services For The Elderly In Independent And Semi-Independent Living Arrangements, Elizabeth Huttman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The purpose of this report is to relate some advantages and disadvantages of using the community based services versus the development based services; a number of examples from our case studies will be given and data from our surveys of the elderly residents and of managers will be examined.

Residential Alienation, Home Ownership And The Limits Of Shelter Policy, Peter Marcuse

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

There is greater public confusion over housing policy today than there has been in any comparable period in the last thirty years. The Nixon-Ford administration's wholesale program terminations and budget slashes only cloak the problem temporarily. Everyone agrees that the ostrich ought to get his head out of the sand, but few agree where he should go once he doel so. Housing allowances, at this point, seem to many the best answei; at least they haven't been proven wanting yet. But others disagree, and certainly there is reason to be wary.

Social Service And Urban-Renewal: A Case Illustration, Brian J. Langdon, Norman N. Goroff

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The city of Stamford, Connecticut has an Urban Renewal project as have most Urban centers. The Family Relocation Divison of Stamford's Urban Redevelopment Commission (URC) entered into a contract with the Family and Children's Services (FCS) to provide one day a week consultation to the Relocation staff and client services to the families in the renewal area. This consultation involved in-service training programs geared toward helping the relocation staff increase their skills in identifying problems within families and in assisting families to obtain help. As a result of this consultation, the relocation workers frequently would discuss the problems of the …

The Politics Of Funding: Human Needs And Social Welfare, Robert F. Kronick

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Sociological theory has provided two models that attempt to explain social power and decision making in America, the elite model (Mills) and the pluralist model. Mills saw power in America like particles dispersed in a triangle--with more and more power at the top, but more people at the base of the triangle. For Mills there was a powerful elite that ruled almost like a monarchy and decision making on all fronts was vested in them. Rebellion as utilized in Merton's paradigm would turn this triangle upside down in setting up new goals and new means, as well as distributing power …

The Welfare Calculus Allocations And Utilization Within The American States, John E. Tropman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Within the history of the American states, the attitude toward "welfare" had been fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand there is a great thrust in this country toward charity, and toward helping the poor. Much is given each year to United Funds across the country (860 million in 1972-73), and the Christmas listing by the New York Times of the 100 "neediest cases" results in much spontaneous offering of aid. On the other hand, Americans are singularly suspicious of institutionalizing this impulse. These suspicions leave the United States behind other comparable countries in providing social welfare benefits. Indeed, so suspicious …

Evaluation Research And Evaluation: Scientific Social Reform Movement And Ideology, Michael Baizerman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The idea that human services programs should be evaluated is accepted by most practitioners and researchers. Discussion is about the technical aspects of this research and about how practitioners can be encouraged to utilize evaluative findings in their everyday practice. Emphasis is placed also on the organizational barriers to this utilization. These ideas and issues are found in a growing literature in the social sciences and, increasingly, in the even faster growing literatures in the professions and in the human services, including the social services, medical and health services, criminal justice and the like.

Here, evaluation research is discussed from …

Anti-Poverty Policies And Evaluation: A Critique Of The Pluralist Conception Of Politics And Evaluation, Robert D. Herman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Excerpt from the full-text article:

The beginnings of U.S. federal evaluation research can, in descriptive historical terms, be located in McNamara's Department of Defense and the later requirement that all federal government agencies adopt a Planning, Programming, Budgeting System. While the formal PPB system was discontinued in 1971, the analytical or policy evaluation activities it required, still live on, especially in agencies dealing with human resource development and/or social welfare programs (Schick, 1973, Wholey, et al, 1970). Given the recent advocacy of increasing and improving federal evaluation efforts, I think it important to examine some of the assumptions and consequences …

The Myth Of A Population Explosion In America: Implications For The Social Welfare Profession, Lillian T. Cochran, James M. O'Kane

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In the past decade, the concern over a hypothetical "population explosion" has become an increasing preoccupation in growing segments of the American public. Terms such as "standing-room-only-world," "demographic catastrophe,' "future doomsday," etc. have become common, and the work of organizations such as Planned Parenthood, Zero Population Growth, and countless other agencies has centered around this supposed threat to continued human existence. Paul and Anne Ehrlich have set forth the general position on "overpopulation" stating: "The explosive growth of the human population is the most significant event in the past million millenia. . . . Mankind itself may stand on the …

The Three Evaluations Of Social Welfare Programs, Dean Harper, Haroutun M. Babigian

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

As new and innovative social welfare programs are being attempted, there has been an increased concern with evaluating the effectiveness of such programs. To what degree is a new program effective? For which kinds of clients is each type of program effective? What elements are crucial in a program which has been judged to be effective? These are just a few of the questions that evaluators would like to answer.

There is a large literature on evaluation research--some of it reporting or reviewing the results of specific evaluations (6, 8, 9, 10, 11) and some of it presenting general discussions, …

Conflict And Compromise In Evaluation Research: A Case Study, Joe Hudson, Peter Chommie

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

As has been pointed out by a host of writers, a crucial issue in conducting evaluative or action type research is the problem of gearing an appropriate research design into the cogs of organizations, ensuring that once initiated the evaluation is in fact conducted according to the original design, and that the results of the study are utilized in policy formulations and ultimately in program development. The focus of this case study is on the major political and administrative problems and processes involved in planning, conducting, and utilizing the findings from a field experiment dealing with the relative effects of …

An Evaluation Of The Case Against National Income Insurance, John B. Williamson

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In an earlier paper I outlined a proposal for a national income insurance plan and discussed the strengths of the approach (Williamson,1974c). Income insurance is a special case of the negative income tax or more generally of the guaranteed income. Negative income tax proposals of any kind are open to a variety of criticisms from both the left and the right. The national income insurance plan is no exception. In the present paper an attempt is made to anticipate and deal with the major arguments against the plan. Many of these arguments are equally applicable to other guaranteed income proposals. …

Opinions And Expectations Of Nursing Home Administrators, Jordan I. Kosberg

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

From a comparative analysis of 214 nursing homes in the Chicago area, it was found that the nursing home field is composed of institutions with great variations in treatment resources available to the residents (Kosberg and Tobin, 1972). While the determination of organizational correlates to the extent of treatment resources was the major objective of the study, an exploration of the attitudes of a sample of nursing home administrators was undertaken in an effort to learn of possible relationships between attitudes and the characteristics of facilities.

There is a commonly-held assumption that not only the academic background of an administrator …

Self-Interest, Social Welfare Policy And Social Problems, John P. Flynn

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This writer assumes that there is a reciprocal interdependence between the providers and the receivers of social welfare programs and explores one particular aspect of that exchange. A proposition explored here is that self-interest is a dynamic in social welfare policy formulation and that such a dynamic is founded on the basic assumption of reciprocal interdependence. The perception of newlyfound self-interests obtainable in alternative social welfare policy options is examined here as a factor in inducing purposive policy change.

It Is proposed here that the common characterization of the welfare relationship as a unilateral transfer has obscured the connection between …

Social Welfare As Coercive Social Control, Norman N. Goroff

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The key concepts which require some basic definitions in the title are "social welfare, social control and coercion". For the purposes of this paper, social welfare is defined as those public programs designed to provide an individual who is in financial need with the resources (financial and/or in kind) to exist in our society. Social control refers to the entire range of actions and pressures which are designed to lead the individual to function within society without threatening to disrupt the social order. These actions and pressures are embodied in sanctions for enforcing group norms as well as in formal …

National Income Insurance: Some Implications For Political And Economic Inequality, John B. Williamson

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Several co-workers and I have recently completed an evaluation of sixty-three anti-poverty programs and proposals (Williamson, et. al., 1973, 1974). This paper briefly describes the study and some of our findings by way of introduction to the presentation and defense of a national income insurance proposal, This proposal is a synthesis of three highly rated anti-poverty strategies. It would within a few years have a substantial impact on the extent of the economic inequality in the United States.

The Interorganizational Relationships Of A Public Welfare Agency, Burton Gummer

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The American social welfare field is best characterized as a highly decentralized sphere of activity in which autonomous organizations define and pursue their goals in a fairly independent fashion. The complex nature of modern social problems, however, requires concerted action by a variety of organizations if effective solutions are to be developed. This conflict between the structural nature of the welfare field and the demands of the problems to be addressed has meant that social welfare planners have had to be concerned with the conditions affecting the willingness of independent organizations to engage in cooperative activities with each other. The …