Food Stamp Participation and Reasons for Nonparticipation: 1986

The decision of eligible households to participate in the food stamp program is analyzed utilizing the 1986 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Less than one-half of the sample of eligible households receive food stamps in 1986. The results of a multinomial logit model suggest that participation is related negatively to the age and educational level of the household head and positively to the benefit level. Participation is lower for single men and households residing in the West and higher for people with disabilities and households receiving some form of public transfer income. Problems regarding information about food stamps and personal attitudes toward food stamp use have the greatest impact on the decision to participate.     

Attitudes of elderly persons towards receiving financial support from adult children

Although many studies of attitudes regarding filial obligations have found consensual agreement that adult children should provide the necessary help to their elderly parents, in most studies, filial obligations have been examined through the eyes of the younger generation, while attitudes and beliefs from the perspective of the elderly themselves have rarely been examined. The purpose of this study is to determine the attitudes of Israeli Jewish elderly persons towards financial assistance received from adult children, in general, and to investigate the variables that may impact these attitudes. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 153 respondents aged 60 and over, residing in the southern region of the country. The results revealed that the majority believed that adult children should provide financial support for their elderly parents, in particular when their parents have insufficient income for their needs and whenever their children can afford it. Regression analyses showed that attitudes supporting the provision of financial support to adult children, gender, ethnic decent, and number of daughters have been found significant predictors of attitudes toward filial obligations to provide financial support for elderly parents. The policy implications of these findings are discussed and further avenues of research are suggested.     

Risk and Recovery: Understanding Flood Risk Perceptions in a Postdisaster City—The Case of New Orleans

Flood hazards are a serious and growing threat to the health and welfare of residents in cities and rural areas around the world. This cross-sectional study uses a sample of 383 residents living in seven New Orleans, Louisiana, neighborhoods to examine the effect of experiential, sociodemographic, and socioeconomic factors on flood risk perceptions. Findings suggest that respondents judge the level of flood risk to be lower than other types of risk. Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses show that flood risk perception is influenced by flood experience, income, race, gender, homeownership status, and years residing in New Orleans. Our findings support extant scholarship showing that African Americans tend to have higher perceptions of risk than whites and that low-income people and women have higher risk perceptions than higher income residents and men. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for risk management planning in coastal cities like New Orleans that face omnipresent flood threats associated with climate-change-driven sea level rise and increased frequency and destructiveness of storms.     

How beliefs about substance use differ by socio-demographic characteristics,individual experiences,and neighborhood environments among urban adolescents

In this article, we tested a series of Item Response Theory (IRT) models to examine the individual and neighborhood variation in perceived risk along dimensions of substance use (alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs) and usage patterns (light/experimental use, moderate use, heavy/regular use). Data were gathered from 2266 adolescents aged 9, 12, and 15 residing in 79 Chicago neighborhoods. Developmental patterns for age and amount of use were observed whereby older respondents rated alcohol and marijuana as less harmful compared to the younger respondents, but rated hard drugs as more harmful. Risk perceptions were found to be more closely tied to one's direct experience with drugs rather than a general constellation of beliefs. Neighborhood variation in risk perceptions was also observed for hard drugs and three patterns of use, controlling for characteristics of individual residents. Neighborhoods did not vary in risk perceptions toward alcohol use. Individual-level factors rather than characteristics of the neighborhoods explained the observed neighborhood variation in perceptions toward marijuana use. These findings illustrate the complex links between individual and contextual factors in the development of beliefs about the health risks associated with substance use.     

Wealth: Determinants of Savings Net Worth and Housing Net Worth of Pre-Retired Households

The objectives of this study are to determine effects of household members' characteristics, financial resources, and attitude toward intergenerational support on change in savings net worth and change in housing net worth. Subsamples of White respondents, Black respondents, and Hispanic respondents were analyzed to identify the effects of race or ethnicity on the dependent variables. Attitude toward intergenerational support was the intervening variable. Change in labor income had a positive impact on change in savings net worth for all three racial or ethnic groups. An additional child in a household and an older age of the household head were likely to decrease the change in savings net worth. Effects of the remaining variables differed by subsample. The effects of labor and nonlabor income were different for the change in savings net worth but not for the change in housing net worth. Some different effects for variables across the three racial or ethnic groups were noted.     

Commitment to mothering and preference for employment: The voices of women on public assistance with young children

This study uses qualitative data to examine how welfare-dependent women with young children feel about the employment mandate in the 1996 welfare reform legislation, Personal Work Responsibility Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PWRORA). The voices of poor women have been overlooked in the policy debate about welfare reform, as well as in the social science literature. The data were drawn from individual and group interviews done with 14 women on public assistance during the initial phase of their participation in a voluntary welfare-to-work program. The women in this sample report that they have strong positive feelings about working outside of the home, as well as strong reservations. The paper presents new data on low-income women's role preference and perceived conflict regarding employment when their children are young. All the women in the sample had children under 2 years of age. The data demonstrate that there are aspects of role preference and conflict with employment that are unique to women on public assistance, as well as aspects that are universal across income groups.     

Welfare Reform and Elderly Immigrants' Naturalization: Access to Public Benefits as an Incentive for Naturalization in the United States

Welfare reform in the United States restricted non‐citizens' eligibility for public assistance programs and strengthened economic benefits from naturalization. We examine the impact of these policy changes on elderly immigrants' naturalization, considering their level of need for public benefits. Using individual data from the Current Population Survey as well as state‐level data, we employ a differences‐in‐differences approach to consider variations in time, state policy, and probability of Medicaid participation. Results show that naturalization significantly increased among elderly immigrants who were likely to participate in Medicaid, suggesting that elderly immigrants in need of Medicaid became naturalized to maintain their eligibility for public benefits after welfare reform.     

Die Gesellschaftliche Akzeptanz der Sozialhilfe

This article examines on which grounds the German population is willing to support a social policy program targeted towards minorities such as social assistance. Using our own survey data and applying linear regression analysis, we test several hypotheses concerning the influence of self-interest, justice- orientations, and victim-blaming attitudes towards welfare recipients on two indicators of support for social assistance. A central finding is that the effects can be interpreted in line with the concept of a “moral economy”, in that the justice orientations of the respondents as well as their attitudes towards welfare recipients correspond with the norms incorporated in the institutional architecture of social assistance.     

Seven years later: effects of a neighborhood mobility program on poor Black and Latino adults' well-being

This study explored program effects on adults' well-being seven years following the implementation of a court-ordered neighborhood mobility program. Low-income black and Latino adults residing in poor, segregated neighborhoods in Yonkers, New York were randomly selected to relocate to publicly funded townhouses in middle-class neighborhoods within the city. Adults who moved (n = 141) and demographically similar adults who were not selected to move (n = 106) were interviewed. Data indicate that 85 percent of adults who moved to the new housing remained there at follow-up. Results revealed that adults who moved resided in neighborhoods with higher collective efficacy and less disorder and danger but had fewer neighborhood social ties than adults who stayed in poor neighborhoods. Movers were also more likely to work and less likely to receive welfare than nonmovers. Adults who remained in low-poverty neighborhoods at the time of the follow-up reported better physical health than adults residing in poor neighborhoods, but mental health did not vary by neighborhood.     

Welfare analysis and redistributive policies

Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful tax-benefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably, most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function – typically inequality or poverty indices – of household equivalized income. In parallel, economic research has made considerable progress in the measurement of welfare along several dimensions. Distinct but related branches of the literature have attempted (i) to model different behavior (in a way that matter for incidence and redistribution of tax-benefit policies), (ii) to go beyond income, (iii) to better define and estimate equivalence scales, (iv) to open the household black box and measure welfare at the individual level. I suggest a general framework to critically review these streams of literatures and to discuss whether recent advances in each of these fields have been or could be readily operationalized in welfare analyses and policy simulations.     

Attitudes toward Immigrants,Immigration, and Multiculturalism in New Zealand: A Social Psychological Analysis1

The research examines attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy based on a random sample of 2,020 New Zealand households. The analyses revealed that New Zealanders have positive attitudes toward immigrants and endorse multiculturalism to a greater extent than Australians and EU citizens. In addition, structural equation modeling produced an excellent fit of the data to a social psychological model commencing with multicultural ideology and intercultural contact as exogenous variables, leading, in turn, to diminished perceptions of threat, more positive attitudes toward immigrants, and, finally, support for New Zealand's policies on the number and sources of migrants.     

Family Adaptations to Income and Job Loss in the U.S.

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines the extent to which families experience major economic setbacks and how they respond. Families that experience a substantial loss of income or work hours are more likely to cut back on expenditures, receive public assistance, experience divorce or separation, and move. No evidence that partners are able to compensate for a major income loss by increasing their work hours was found. Initial conditions, such as income and assets, the unemployment rate of the area, and race, affect how a family adapts. Families with fewer resources and those who live in areas of high unemployment are more likely to rely on public assistance, and they are less likely to move, increase the work hours of the female head of household, or cut food expenditures.     

Retirement financial preparation:implications for policy

Financial preparation for retirement is key to positive outcomes for future cohorts. Studies suggest that insufficient preparation is occurring among Baby Boomers. Data from community-dwelling adults (N = 1508, ages 40-70) show that most respondents (22-75%) had taken four specific preparation steps, and few reported negative attitudes toward planning. Five correlates (gathering information, locus of control, self-definition as household planner, financial worries, and negative attitudes) and demographic variables tested in bivariate analyses showed most having associations with preparation. In multivariate analyses, however, only two correlates (gathering information and negative planning attitudes) and demographics (race/ethnicity, education, income, health, age, and education) explained planning behavior.     

Some indications of limits to framing the policy preferences of the civically engaged: Interplay of social capital,race attitudes,and social justice frames

Our experiment, which tested support for a hypothetical social welfare program, found that the civically engaged as a whole were resistant to social justice framing employing universalistic versus particularistic standards. We suggest the lack of a framing effect was due to the use of a preexisting, shared “symbolic racism” frame. Social justice framing did succeed for those whose attitudes toward symbolic racism were ambivalent or neutral. Other factors including sex, income level, political participation, and ideology significantly influenced choice. These results provide some indications of limits to experimental framing of policy preferences of the civically engaged in their institutional settings.     

Does SNAP serve as a safety net for mothers facing an economic shock? An analysis of Black and White unwed mothers' responses to paternal imprisonment

In an era of increasing economic insecurity and declining welfare assistance, scholars and policy makers have increasingly recognized the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) as an important safety net for disadvantaged families facing a loss of income. Research on welfare and race has found that SNAP use is more frequent among Black families than White families. However, scholars have overlooked another potential source of race-based variation in the use of SNAP: differences in how Black and White mothers use SNAP as a safety net when facing an economic shock such as fathers' imprisonment. Analyses using difference-in-difference-in-difference methods suggest that while Black mothers generally receive a higher level of SNAP benefits than White mothers, SNAP benefit increases following fathers' imprisonment are less effective in compensating for the loss of income among Black mothers than among White mothers. Additional analyses, including a propensity score matching model, produce consistent results. The racial difference in income shock to families caused by paternal imprisonment does not account for this racial disparity. These findings highlight an important mechanism through which an income shock such as paternal imprisonment can produce particularly negative consequences for Black children.     

Real household income and attitude toward immigrants: an empirical analysis

Previous studies have analyzed the (aggregate) effects of unemployment on attitudes towards immigrants and on right-wing crimes. In this paper, we investigate the effects of economic prosperity on attitudes towards immigrants, focusing not only on unemployment status but also on real household income. Using panel data from the German Socioeconomic Panel on around 33,000 individuals over the period 1992–2004 we find a robust negative relationship between real personal household income and self-declared concern about immigrants, both in levels and first differences. Both job loss and income reduction concerns about immigration. Our findings document an interesting interaction between economic variables and social attitudes which does not depend on economic growth per se but on its capacity to generate higher economic wellbeing at individual level, not only for unemployed people but also for those in employment, who may face a fall in real income during economic downturns.     

The independent effects of socio-demographic and programmatic factors on economic strain among parents in a Child Savings Accounts program

This study examines the independent effects of socio-demographic variables and program social services on the degree of economic strain among lower income parents who had an opportunity to open child savings in a subsidized savings accounts program known as Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment (SEED). SEED is a policy, practice and research initiative designed to test the efficacy of and inform policy for a national system of asset-building accounts for children and youth. Findings suggest that overall, the degree of economic strain was not significantly different at baseline and at the second wave between parents who opened accounts and those who did not open accounts for their children. However, household income, having a household savings account, and receipt of means-tested welfare programs affected the degrees of economic strain. Implications are directed toward helping lower income families effectively participate in child savings programs.     

Self-Rated Health and Attitudes About U.S. Health Care Policy

How does one’s own health influence attitudes about national health care policy? Previous research has documented a reliable (though bounded) role of personal interest in shaping policy preferences, but little is known about the role that personal health plays in shaping these attitudes. Using recent General Social Survey data, we find that those with poorer self-rated health were more likely to endorse a strong role for government in providing health care, and more likely to endorse increased spending on health care. Further analysis suggested that this relationship was moderated by political ideology. Implications for better understanding the source of health policy support are discussed.