Post-Welfare Reform, Low-Income Families and the Dissolution of the Safety Net

There has been a great deal of discussion around the fact that lifting individuals and families out of poverty was not a goal of the 1996 welfare reform legislation. The implementation of welfare reform since 1996 has demonstrated the consequences of caseload reduction as a primary goal. This paper addresses the hardships that can result when lifting people out of poverty is not addressed.     

The Perceptions of Welfare Reform by Michigan Families Whose Children Have Disabilities and Welfare Caseworkers

Abstract

This article examines family and caseworker perceptions of welfare reform and services as they relate to families who have a child with a disability. Interviews were conducted with 39 families and 77 caseworkers. Family questions addressed their perceptions of the welfare system, factors impacting their self-sufficiency, and their perceptions of needed program changes. Caseworker questions addressed their perceptions of welfare practices and policies and their education needs related to serving families who have children with disabilities. Familial perceptions of the welfare system were validated by caseworker reports. Implications for service improvement are discussed.     

Welfare reform's ineligible immigrant parents: Program reach and enrollment barriers

Since the implementation of the 1996 welfare reform act, the child-only Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) caseload has increased dramatically. Perhaps the least understood child-only population is that of ineligible immigrant parents (IIPs), who are ineligible for TANF because of their citizenship or immigration status. Using data collected through in-depth interviews and focus groups in Stanislaus County, California, this study examines how well California's TANF program serves this at-risk group. We analyze the factors that lead IIPs to seek aid for their children, the enrollment obstacles they face, and TANF's ability to meet their needs. Our results demonstrate that immigration-related fears as well as concerns about caseworkers, stigma, and future government sanctions heighten these parents' reluctance to seek aid. They also create multiple and often population-specific barriers to TANF enrollment. We close with research and policy recommendations for serving this vulnerable population.     

Social Adaptation and Welfare Planning in the Post-Nomadic Urban Environment: The Case of the Israeli Negev Bedouin

Abstract

State planning to settle and to provide services for nomadic populations is a complex enterprise. In Israel, the government's efforts to plan, direct, and contain the Negev Bedouins' social development upon settlement has fostered both positive and negative changes in the new communal setting. Women, children, and the elderly have proven to be particularly at risk during the settlement transition period. Proactive efforts on the part of indigenous and Jewish community planners and social workers provide a crucial component encouraging communal adaptation to new environments and lifestyles. Experiences in the Negev may also provide lessons for community practitioners in other previously mobile communities.     

TANF child-only cases in California: Barriers to self-sufficiency and well-being

Since the United States implemented Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), or ‘welfare reform,’ the number of assistance cases without an adult receiving aid has risen dramatically. In states like California, these child-only cases now constitute the majority of all TANF cases. Despite this increase, existing research sheds little light on the composition of child-only caseloads and the status of the adults and children in such cases. Drawing on county administrative data and interviews with 143 parents associated with child-only cases in five California counties, this paper identifies both the demographics of the child-only caseload in these sites and the major barriers to employment that parents in sanctioned and timed-out child-only cases face. These include human capital, health, and family issues, in addition to other obstacles. The data suggest that, despite functioning as one administrative entity, CalWORKs, California's TANF program, has transformed into two separate programs: a welfare-to-work program and a subsistence-level cash assistance program for some members of child-only families. Given this transformation, the paper closes by suggesting a research agenda for future child-only scholarship and argues for policy innovations to meet the needs of the expanding child-only caseload.     

Financial Strain and Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has increased over the past decade. Although poverty and sudden financial shock faced by households via unanticipated adverse events, such as sudden loss of income, are among major contributors, the findings of our study suggest that having an adequate stock of savings and financial assets might reduce the probability of household SNAP participation. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we tested whether a household’s emergency savings, asset poverty, and debt burden could predict SNAP participation separately from the effects of income and program participation. Results demonstrate that a household’s lack of emergency savings and asset inadequacy increased the probability of its SNAP participation. Implications for financial practitioners and policy makers are discussed.     

Building Financial Knowledge Is Not Enough: Financial Self-Efficacy as a Mediator in the Financial Capability of Low-Income Families

ABSTRACT

Policymakers in many countries have taken an interest in population-level financial capability. Limited empirical work has examined how constructs that makeup financial capability relate and how they function for individuals with low incomes. Using a national sample of low-income Canadians, we investigate relationships between financial knowledge, financial self-efficacy, and savings outcomes. Overall, we find that financial self-efficacy fully mediated the relationship between objective financial knowledge and postsecondary-education saving. The association between objective financial knowledge and retirement saving and emergency saving passed through financial self-efficacy. Efforts to promote financial capability need to focus on more than objective financial knowledge.     

Effects of Work Incentive Policies and Determinants of the Socioeconomic Status of Welfare Leavers in an Economically Disadvantaged Area

Abstract

This study explores how work incentive policies influence the socioeconomic status of welfare leavers. Logistic and ordinal regression methods were used to analyze 1999 statewide survey data on West Virginia WORKS leavers. This study found that people who had more months of eligibility remaining for TANF were more likely to have jobs than those with fewer months of eligibility. People who had been sanctioned for noncompliance with work requirementswere less likely to have jobs than those who had not been sanctioned. However, childcare assistance had a significant influence on the employment of welfare leavers. EITC was significantly associated with the expectation of high economic status. Policy implications are discussed.     

Teen Mothers and Welfare Reform: Challenging the Boundaries of Risk

A major component of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) included policies directed to encouraging marriage while discouraging nonmarital births. Teen mothers were of particular concern as policymakers argued that there is a link between teenage childbearing and welfare receipt. This paper seeks to reframe the concept of at-risk teen mothers by looking to the socially construction of boundaries—an imagery that brings to the forefront the complex relations between young mothers and welfare reform policy. From this standpoint, we discuss how welfare reform might address the multiple issues facing teen mothers including housing, education and training, child care, transportation, health, healthy relationships and parenting skills.     

Searching for Local Solutions: Making Welfare Policy on the Ground in Ontario

Over recent decades welfare dependency has played a powerful role in defining the welfare “problem” and in passing appropriate “solutions.” One result has been the proliferation of short-term, low-cost employment programs and training programs that have emerged as critical sites for challenging and reforming the attitudes and behaviors of welfare recipients. By exploring work-readiness programs in four communities in Ontario, Canada, we provide insight into how these programs relate to the lived realities of those compelled to attend them. The research shows how dependency discourse informs program rules and content, raising expectations about both the benefits and the immediacy of work. This focus risks individualizing blame and ignoring the structural realities of labor markets and the systemic forces that create poverty and unemployment. Although the particular empirical focus is on Ontario, the approaches used and their outcomes resonate with strategies that are evident wherever neoliberalism has made its mark.     

Family Cap and Nonmarital Fertility: The Racial Conditioning of Policy Effects

Using an experimental design, this research examines the effect of the nation's first family cap on the births, abortions, and contraception use of over 8,000 women receiving public assistance in New Jersey. The family cap denies additional cash benefits to children conceived while the mother is receiving public assistance. Our research shows that a targeted welfare benefit manipulation does influence fertility behavior; however, the effect is conditioned by race. We find that Black women in the experimental group have a 21% lower birth rate and a 32% higher abortion rate than Black women in the control group. We do not find a birth effect for Hispanic or White women. We discuss the policy implications of the effects of a segmented family cap.     

Perceived Economic Uncertainty and Fertility: Evidence From a Labor Market Reform

Whereas in theory individuals tend to postpone fertility decisions in times of economic uncertainty, empirical evidence on that question is scarce. Using data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (N = 4,548), the authors estimated the effect of economic concerns on the probability of becoming pregnant in the next year. They exploited exogenous variation in economic concerns induced by the announcement of a major German unemployment benefit reform as an instrumental variable and found that strong economic concerns were significantly related to lower fertility of women between ages 26 and 44 years cohabiting with a male partner. Jointly estimating the impact of male and female concerns in a model that allows for endogeneity of perceived economic uncertainty revealed that it was strong economic concerns perceived by the women that reduced fertility. The effect was driven by male main breadwinner couples, by couples with a medium household income, and by couples who already had children.     

Meeting Family Housing Needs: Experiences of Rural Women in the Midst of Welfare Reform

Though sometimes overlooked, the availability, affordability, and quality of housing in rural communities are a potential barrier to transitioning from welfare to work. In this investigation we examine housing issues confronting 17 rural women and their families who were recipients of welfare benefits in 1997. Respondents' housing accounts illustrate the significance of reliance on both government housing subsidies and informal subsidies supplied by friends, family, and more distant relatives. The study focuses on concerns women have in meeting their families shelter needs and the complexities involved in doing so. The findings of the research suggest that additional housing policy initiatives, as well as a targeted research agenda are needed, especially for families whose welfare benefits are nearing termination.     

Federal Welfare and Housing Policy at the Crossroads

Abstract

A time-series design was used to investigate an innovative, rent incentive-based employment initiative in a predominantly African American public housing community. The purpose of the research was to assess the impact of the Welfare-to-Work (W-t-W) program on resident employment levels and on Public Housing Authority (PHA) revenues and costs. Data were collected on a purposive sample of heads of household (N = 313) representing 78.3% of those in the community. Over half of the residents were under 17 years of age, followed by 24.7% who were 18-34, and 15.5% who were 35-54 years of age. Mean annual income for most participants was less than $5,000, and 60% were welfare reliant. Fifty-six percent of the participants in the study (N = 179) received monthly rent credits (discounts) ranging from $23 to $333 (m = $87, s.d. = $38.60). Employment levels in the community increased considerably over the study period and the W-t-W initiative was cost-effective to the PHA. Implications are discussed regarding advantages and limitations of intersected federal welfare and housing policies, the need for formative, evidence-based assessments of W-t-W programs, and the achievement of economic self-sufficiency of public housing residents.     

Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Welfare Reform in the United States on NGOs

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 dramatically transformed the structure and goals of the public welfare system in the United States. The vast body of research and evaluation generated by the 1996 welfare reforms largely overlooked nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) despite their substantial historical and contemporary involvement in the delivery of social services to low-income populations. Therefore, this paper presents a unique assessment of PRWORA's implications based on the perspective of 90 social service NGOs operating in the Detroit metropolitan area. Examination of their services, staffing, budgets, and clients reveals many changes experienced by NGOs between 1996 and 2000 related to the welfare reforms. Overall, the findings suggest an increased role for social service NGOs in the public welfare system as well as concerns regarding their capacity to adequately fulfill this growing responsibility in the future.     

在国家与市场之间寻找中国社会政策改革的逻辑——“社会发展与社会政策:国际经验与中国改革”国际学术研讨会评述

综观东亚新兴经济体和欧美发达国家在社会政策领域的路径变迁,可以得出"两个转型"的基本结论,即东亚新兴经济体从单一追求经济增长逐渐向追求经济与社会平衡发展转型;欧美发达国家从倚重国家福利向倚重社会投资与国家福利平衡发展转型。这两个处于不同社会发展阶段的转型,对中国当前的社会发展和社会政策改革都有着非常重要的启示意义。中国作为具有后发优势的全球最有活力的新兴经济体,当前既需要解决经济增长与社会发展之间的失衡问题,也需要未雨绸缪,避免陷入欧美国家福利陷阱而背上沉重的财政包袱。因此,在国家与市场之间找到一条最具效率性和合理性的社会发展路径,才是符合当前中国社会政策改革的逻辑。     

Work/Family Policy Stratification: The Examples of Family Support and Family Leave

In the past decade the United States Congress has debated and passed legislative policies concerned with women's work, both in the family and in the labor force. The Family Support Act of 1988 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 fall into this category of legislative policy. A comparative study of Congressional testimony in each case reveals that these two pieces of legislation are excellent examples of how federal policies—and the debates which fashion these policies—maintain and promote a system of policy stratification that perpetuates differences based on gender, race, class and marital and occupational status.     

Security Sector Reform and Development Assistance: Explaining the Diffusion of Policy Priorities among Donor Agencies

This paper employs a world society theoretical framework to examine the recent trend among foreign aid donors to focus on security sector reform as an aid priority. Through a comparative qualitative case study based on interview data collected from aid officials and development workers in Canada, Sweden, and the United States (n = 41) in 2006–2007, this paper finds that the extent to which the security sector reform agenda is integrated into donor policy and programs is mediated by catalytic policy processes linked to intergovernmental organizations and the degree of donor agency autonomy from the rest of government. These findings are used to illustrate how common processes of globalization in world society shape similar approaches to foreign aid among donor agencies despite disparate domestic contexts. These processes lead to convergence of donor policy around security issues and at the same time can account for decoupling of practice from world society policy models.     

Family Policy: Becoming a Field of Inquiry and Subfield of Social Policy

This decade review centers on 2 disconnects between rhetoric and reality. First, public investments in families continue to grow, yet family policy is still not a term widely used by policymakers or the public. Second, social science studies increased in number and sophistication, with some family sensitive and others policy relevant. Few focus on both, which is what is most needed if research is to inform family policy. In exploring these disconnects, we summarize recent trends in family policies and the influence of research on family policymaking. We suggest a rationale for family policy and illustrate its value using the examples of early childhood, welfare reform, and parent education policies. We conclude with suggested next steps.