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Drawing on in-depth interviews with sixty poor mothers in a high-poverty neighborhood in Houston, TX, I ask how mothers experience the potential loss of privacy endemic to the process of seeking public assistance, and examine how privacy concerns affect when, how, and whether they engage with the social safety net. I find that in the welfare context, it is both the extent of information clients are asked, how caseworkers ask those personal questions, and the power of the state to uncover clients' personal information whether or not they voluntarily disclose it that produce privacy problems for mothers. In contrast, in the non-profit and church settings, very little personal information is required from mothers and organizations do not have the power to get information if clients do not disclose it. Yet, mothers worry about a different dimension of privacy, as they fear being seen by other community members utilizing these resources because of the stigma attached to being "needy" enough to use what is seen as a last resort, and the judgment around those labeled "greedy" because they take charity for which others might have a greater need. Mothers face multidimensional tradeoffs navigating the social safety net as they weigh the desire to preserve privacy, dignity, and autonomy while also getting the material assistance they need to support their families. Theoretical and policy relevant implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Dorothy Smith's "institutional ethnography" framework to explore how welfare recipients attending university both resist and engage dominant discourses regarding paid work, unpaid work and welfare receipt. In-depth interviews of twenty-four welfare recipients reveal that these parents resist the "work plan" of welfare reform by attending university in the hope of attaining good jobs, not just any job. In some ways these student recipients draw from an intensive mothering ideology, but in other ways they challenge it. Most students envisioned structural changes in order to reconcile parenting, paid work, and schoolwork, but also avoided structural explanations when discussing the predicament of other welfare recipients. The conclusion explores why these student recipients are more likely than other welfare recipients to invoke structural viewpoints and suggests several possibilities for changing the university and welfare state to better meet student recipients' needs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to low-income targeting and various programs explicitly designed to alleviate poverty in industrialized democracies. Three questions relevant for current social reform debate are addressed. First, the extent to which minimum income protection has suffered from the stagnation and decline of welfare states in recent decades? Second, whether the social agenda in the Europeanization of welfare states marks a distinct European path in the development of low-income targeting? Third, if it is possible to observe certain gendered dimensions in the structure of minimum income protection, whereby women are treated differently than men? The empirical analyses are based on new and unique institutional data from the Social Assistance and Minimum Income Protection Interim Data-set. It is shown that last-resort arrangements for the poor and the needy have suffered from retrenchment during the last one and a half decade, although extensive cross-national differences do exist. There is some evidence of convergence in benefit levels among the European countries, but there is no clear evidence of gender inequalities embodied in benefit standards. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of welfare reform, many poor people have used up their benefits and now have to live with less government support. While all of these former welfare recipients are struggling, some of them are experiencing housing problems that are quite severe. We use survey data on former welfare recipients who have used up the maximum time limits for receiving welfare to better understand three core explanations for rural housing problems among the poor: community factors, individual, and family factors. We weigh the relative effects of these factors on the likelihood of experiencing several housing outcomes and find that rural location is the most consistent predictor of housing outcomes, predicting home ownership, living in a trailer, and having low quality housing. We also find that individual and family factors affect the type of housing one has and the stability of one's housing. We conclude that housing policies may need to be tailored to specific housing outcomes that we seek to improve. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 represented the largest-scale reformation of cash assistance policies for the poor since Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). How did this radical change in American welfare laws come about? In their article "From Poverty to Perversity," Margaret Somers and Fred Block attribute the onset of the "welfare revolution" to the rebirth of the perversity thesis (first forwarded by Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century, and later articulated by Albert Hirschman in the 1990s). A closer look at the mechanisms of social naturalism, theoretical realism, and conversion narrative explains the rebirth of the perversity thesis in the case of the American welfare "revolutions." In addition to these mechanisms, I propose that a prior partial change of the ideational regime caused by progressive movements such as the feminist project caused inconsistencies in the regime followed by an ideational realignment, without which, the perversity thesis may never have taken hold. Parallel to the increase in the "dependency" rhetoric, advances in the feminist movement were also taking place. The two ideas culminated in a "devil's bargain," a reconciliation between the anti-dependency idea and the idea of female self-sufficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1970s, demographers, sociologists, economists, and political scientists researched this migration for welfare. Peterson and Rom provide evidence for the idea that welfare recipients will migrate for benefits had crystallized in the minds of policymakers and the public with the publication of Welfare Magnets in 1990. In making the case for a national welfare standard and the federal financing of welfare benefits, Peterson and Rom provide minimal anecdotal evidence that some recipients move to increase benefits. They also provide empirical evidence to support their claim that in an attempt to discourage welfare migration states compete in a race to the bottom to provide benefits so low as to discourage migration from neighboring states. This paper reviews the literature on welfare migration and argues that previous research fails to adequately account for non-welfare explanations for migration. I argue that poor people make the same calculations as the non-poor when deciding to migrate. Specifically, poor people move to increase their employment options?not to increase their welfare benefits. Additionally, single-parents (largely mothers) have the added constraint of needing to remain close to kin networks that affect their decisions to migrate (or not migrate). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post welfare reform, attention has focused on the potential of pay equity and living wage strategies to move women out of the ranks of the working poor. In this paper we use data from a large municipality in the Northeast to simulate implementation of the two policies and compare their relative and combined effectiveness in raising the earnings of female- and minority race/ethnic-dominated jobs, narrowing gender- and race/ethnic-based earnings differentials, and lifting workers out of poverty. Results show that pay equity is effective in redressing pay discrimination among low-skilled and minority-dominated jobs and in closing the wage gap. Both pay equity and living wage dramatically reduce the incidence of poverty; living wage, however, leaves discrimination virtually untouched. The implications of these results in addressing the needs of women transitioning off public assistance are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a comparative case study of the social welfare systems of an urban and a rural county, I consider various theoretical approaches to understanding variation in local welfare implementation by examining organizational strategies. Regulation theory is found to be relevant, but inadequate. Structuration theory provides useful principles for detailing how organizations and actors function in their environment and exercise agency. Cultural studies are also useful for examining the ways in which different understandings of poverty and community mediate larger external pressures. Different organizations, in effect, develop different capacities for agency. More specifically, the enforcement of low-wage work that is supported by national policy is highly constraining, but can be challenged through a welfare organization when the right conditions are present. Such conditions involve financial and cultural resources that were present in the urban county, but not the rural county. Service provision in the rural county was less diverse and less effective than in the urban county due to such place-based factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-income women are often treated as a homogenous category. For example, research shows that low-income women as a group are at greater risk of having no or inadequate insurance. Yet welfare reform illustrates the diversity of low-income women's experiences; while some low-income women have gained new access to private insurance since 1996, others have lost access to both public and private insurance. Prior research suggests that continuity of coverage shapes women's health, but how might unstable work, family, welfare and health insurance factors differentially affect categories of low-income women? Results from a logistic regression analysis of 1,662 women from 1999-2005 provide evidence of a hierarchy of risk among low-income women. Compared to those with stable welfare, work, and family attachments, low-income women who experience welfare, work, and family changes over time are at greater risk of being uninsured or having unmet health needs. Results suggest that poor women's reliance on public insurance creates different risks for them than their near-poor peers who rely on private insurance. I argue that recent health care reforms have the potential to significantly improve low-income women's access to insurance, thereby altering the hierarchy of risks low-income women face under the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the attitudes toward poverty and welfare reform of a sample of social workers and inner city school teachers. More specifically, I focus on the impact of poverty attributions on attitudes toward welfare reform among members of this sample. There is a mystery about these attitudes toward welfare reform that this paper attempts to explain. These social workers and teachers reject most of the 1996 changes to welfare, but they are surprisingly positive about the impact these reforms have on the families with which they work. This contradictory set of beliefs is explained as a function of the family oriented view of poverty peculiar to this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides descriptive information about an important and under-studied food subsidy program: the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). We address three basic questions: (1) Does CACFP reach targeted low-income children? (2) How do eligible families and child care providers who participate differ from those who do not participate? (3) What is the association between attending CACFP-participating child care and children's food intake, weight, and food security? Findings include that a provider's incentives to participate (costs and benefits) strongly associate with the probability that a child will attend CACFP-participating child care. As a result, provider decisions, in combination with program eligibility rules, leave many poor children outside the CACFP program. Furthermore, among poor children, participation in the program is correlated with positive outcomes such as increased consumption of milk, fruits and vegetables, and healthier weight (BMI). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]