Social Policy Commons^™

The Impact Of U.S. Refugee Policy Change & Political Rhetoric On Nonprofit Service Providers’ Emotional Well-Being, Maria V. Wathen, Patrick L.F. Decker, Charity N. Weishar

Social Work: School of Social Work Faculty Publications and Other Works

This study examines how U.S. refugee policy changes from 2014 to 2018 affected the emotional well-being of nonprofit service providers. Elements identified by participants as emotionally significant were funding cuts, the “bans”, the unpredictable nature of policy change, and most impactful, negative political rhetoric. Emotional wellbeing was negatively affected and included an increase in stress, anger, sadness, despair, depression, helplessness, frustration, and caution. Negative impacts were also felt with regard to professional identities and to relationships with family, friends, and strangers. Importantly, impact on emotional wellbeing differed by level of organization at which the participant worked and by organizational characteristics.

“Born Under My Heart”: Adoptive Parents’ Use Of Metaphors To Make Sense Of Their Past, Present, And Future, Lucas Hackenburg, Toni Morgan, Eve Brank

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

Metaphors provide the opportunity to make sense of our experiences and share them with others. The current research qualitatively examined interviews with adoptive parents who had adopted through intercountry or private adoptions. Throughout their interviews, each participant used at least one metaphor in describing their experiences of adopting and raising their child. Overarchingly, the metaphor of “Adoption is a journey” encapsulated parents’ experiences. To demonstrate the journey, parents used metaphors to describe the past, present, and future. Metaphors of the past focused on their child’s trauma and the origin of how the child came to join their family. Metaphors used …

Social Work And Artificial Intelligence: Into The Matrix, Lauri Goldkind

Social Service Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

2021 Adult Foster Home Resident And Community Characteristics Report On Adult Foster Homes, Paula Carder, Jason Z. Kyler-Yano, Ozcan Tunalilar, Sarah Dys, Sheryl Elliott, Ellis Jourdan Hews, Minju Kim

Institute on Aging Publications

This report describes results from an annual study of Oregon adult foster homes (AFH). Data contained in this report include home and owner characteristics; monthly charges and payment sources; and resident characteristics, personal and health-related needs. The study’s purpose was to collect and report data that can inform and advise policymakers, state and county agency staff, aging advocates and AFH owners about the status of AFHs in Oregon. These data were collected between December 2020 and February 2021. This report constitutes the first year during the COVID-19 pandemic that these annual data were collected.

Collaborative Competition In Homeless Services: Three Essays On Federal-Local Partnerships, Andrew Alfred Sullivan

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

The United States’ federal government funds homeless services provided at the local level through the McKinney-Vento Act, encouraging collaboration among providers. This dissertation studies three aspects of homelessness: merging of local planning bodies, identification of homeless students, and the relationship between experiencing homelessness in high school and long-term educational outcomes.

The first chapter studies the effect of merging Continuums of Care (CoCs), local planning bodies for homeless services. While merging brings organizations into the same network and could make use of economies of scale, it brings service provision to a less-local level, taking away responsiveness to the community and inter-jurisdictional …

Neither “Post-War” Nor Post-Pregnancy Paranoia: How America’S War On Drugs Continues To Perpetuate Disparate Incarceration Outcomes For Pregnant, Substance-Involved Offenders, Becca S. Zimmerman

Pitzer Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the unique interactions between pregnancy, substance involvement, and race as they relate to the War on Drugs and the hyper-incarceration of women. Using ordinary least square regression analyses and data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, I examine if (and how) pregnancy status, drug use, race, and their interactions influence two length of incarceration outcomes: sentence length and amount of time spent in jail between arrest and imprisonment. The results collectively indicate that pregnancy decreases length of incarceration outcomes for those offenders who are not substance-involved but not evenhandedly -- benefitting white …

America’S Presidential Crisis Of Legitimacy: How The Electoral College Became Obsolete And How We Can Fix It, Julia Rose Foodman

Scripps Senior Theses

The goal of this thesis is to critique the current American Presidential electoral system, the Electoral College, and to show what an alternative could potentially mean for the American people. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What are the main arguments for the Electoral College, why are they troubling, and how can we mend American Presidential elections for the greater purposes of political equality, democracy, and freedom? To do so, core arguments made by conservative pundits in favor of the Electoral College are outlined in order to bring attention to their logical, political, and moral inconsistencies. The inequalities …

Mitigating The Environmental Impacts Of Explosive Ordnance And Land Release, Mine Action Review

Global CWD Repository

Environmental considerations are rightly gaining increased prominence and awareness. Environmental experts agree that unprecedented changes in climate and biodiversity are taking place, threatening nature and human livelihoods around the world. The humanitarian community increasingly understands the need to identify and assess how their operations affect the natural environment and to mitigate the negative environmental impacts wherever possible.

The mine action sector has begun to recognise that in order to follow the humanitarian principle of “do no harm” it must be aware of and take action to mitigate the potential environmental damage that can occur during land release operations. While an …

Clearing The Mines 2021, Mine Action Review

Global CWD Repository

As at 1 October 2021, 56 States and 3 other areas (territories that are not internationally recognised as States) were contaminated by anti-personnel mines, as listed in Table 1. Asia (including the Middle East) is the most affected continent, with 23 mine-contaminated States. Most are not party to the APMBC. Across Asia (including the Middle East), Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Oman, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, and Yemen are all States Parties. China, India, Iran, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), Lebanon, Myanmar, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Pakistan, the Republic of Korea (South Korea), …

From The Legal Literature: Is Progressive Prosecution Possible?, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

From The Legal Literature: Covid And The Criminal Law, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Preparation And Response To Covid-19: An Exploratory Analysis Of Policy Response Spending And Health Expenditures In 20 Oecd Countries, Anis Ben Brik, Neil Gilbert

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article examines the comparative impact of COVID-19 in terms of the number of cases per capita and the per capita mortality rate and analyzes the relationships between these impact estimates and three policy measures in 20 OECD countries, controlling for the population over age 65. The policy measures involve public and private health expenditures prior to the pandemic onset and per capita fiscal expenditures devoted to policies designed to address the pandemic, which are identified in the International Monetary Fund’s policy tracker. The findings show no relationship between the policy measures and COVID-19 when controlling for the population over …

Narratives In Sex Offender Management Laws: How Stories About A Label Shape Policymaking, Mauricio P. Yabar

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Serious scholarly inquiry regarding the role of social constructions and narratives in sex offender management laws is relatively a new undertaking. In the last two decades, a myriad of studies exploring the negative effects of Sex Offender Registration and Notification (SORN) policies were added to the literature, a trend that appears to be slowing down today. The purpose of this paper is to recommend the integration of the narrative policy framework (NPF) with Schneider and Ingram’s (1993) theory of social construction of target populations in the analysis of SORN policies. The author provides a critical review of SORN policies while …

Fair Innings? The Utilitarian And Prioritarian Value Of Risk Reduction Over A Whole Lifetime, Matthew D. Adler, Maddalena Ferranna, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich

Faculty Scholarship

The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual’s fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This Article investigates SVRR, using a lifetime utility model in which individuals are differentiated by age, lifetime income profile, and lifetime risk profile. We consider both the utilitarian SWF and a “prioritarian” SWF, which applies a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation to individual utility.

We show that the prioritarian SVRR provides a rigorous basis in economic theory for the “fair innings” concept, proposed in the public health literature: as between an older individual …

“It Didn’T Matter What The Bill Said...”: Influences On Abortion Policy Legislative Decision-Making In Georgia, Erica Barton, Subasri Narasimhan, Dabney P. Evans

Journal of the Georgia Public Health Association

Background: In March 2019 the Georgia legislature passed HB 481 described as a “heartbeat bill”, prohibiting abortion at around six weeks gestation. Given the prevalence of anti-abortion legislation and the public health implications of abortion restrictions, we sought to understand how Georgia legislators made decisions on this early abortion ban legislation.

Methods: We conducted in-depth interviews with nine legislators from the Georgia House of Representatives who participated in the 2019 legislative session. In-depth interviews were conducted in-person and over the phone. Interview recordings were transcribed verbatim and inductive codes identified. Codes focused primarily on views of: abortion in general; specific …

Youth As A Leading Power Of Uzbekistan, Mukhtor Nazirov

The Light of Islam

The article examines the features of effective interaction between government agencies, NGOs, and other civil institutions on youth issues. State youth policy in Uzbekistan considers revealing the potential of young people and promoting their effective socialization. The article shows the importance of modern education and upbringing, social support of young people in Uzbekistan. The political activity of youth is an indicator of the processes taking place in modern society. The article considers youth policy, the UN international legal documents regulating the youth sphere. The urgency of the youth issue is growing in connection with the deepening of globalization. The solutions …

Mental Health Stigma: A Wicked Problem (Slides), Katelyn Yoh

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

Mental health stigma began in the 5th century, continued through the 18th century, and began to improve in the 1840s. Mental health has been viewed as negative and those who suffer from a mental illness or disorder also suffer from stigma as well as negative consequences, such as other mental health concerns, physical issues, and psychological issues due to stigma. This paper goes into deep detail about what mental health stigma is, how stigma is used from peers and internalizes and creates self stigma, what the results of stigma are (all negative), and lastly ways to help put an end …

Racism In Education Remix, Kevin M. Donton

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

Racism in Education has been a huge problem in the United States today, and it still is. The presence of racism in the education system is quite controversial and many people have strong opinions on it. Its roots date all the way back to slavery in the United States to the Brown vs. the Board of Education case to the Reagan Revolution to present day in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. This topic has been a problem for a long time now and should be brought up more. Along with this information and as a reinterpretation, or …

Lack Of Resources In Classrooms, Juliana Maffea

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The lack of resources in classrooms are evident around the world, but in this poster, the focus is on the state of Virginia. Teachers are struggling to teach with barely any resources or money, and the students are attempting to learn with little to no supplies. If schools continue to under supply teachers, the students and teachers are going to fall behind. Teachers will not be in the best moods, and the students will suffer. In this poster, it is evident there are some things that can be done to help, but it will take time and effort.

Moving On Up? A Virtual School, Student Mobility, And Achievement, James D. Paul, Patrick Wolf

School Choice Demonstration Project

Virtual charter schools provide full-time, tuition-free K-12 education through internet-based instruction. Although virtual schools offer a personalized learning experience, most research suggests these schools are negatively associated with achievement. Few studies account for differential rates of student mobility, which may produce biased estimates if mobility is jointly associated with virtual school enrollment and subsequent test scores. We evaluate the effects of a single, large, anonymous virtual charter school on student achievement using a hybrid of exact and nearest-neighbor propensity score matching. Relative to their matched peers, we estimate that virtual students produce marginally worse ELA scores and significantly worse math …