Changing the culture of the welfare office: the role of intermediaries in linking TANF recipients with jobs - commentary

Welfare ; Employment (Economic theory) ; Poverty

Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys

neighborhood effects; social experiment; mixed methods; youth risk behavior

Parenting as a Package Deal: Relationships, Fertility, and Nonresident Father Involvement among Unmarried Parents

Fatherhood has traditionally been viewed as part of a package deal, where a father’s relationship with his child is contingent upon his relationship with the mother. We evaluate the accuracy of this hypothesis in light of the high rates of multiple-partnered fertility among unmarried parents using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a recent longitudinal survey of nonmarital births in large cities. We examine whether unmarried mothers’ and fathers’ subsequent relationship and parenting transitions are associated with declines in fathers’ contact with their nonresident biological children. We find that father involvement drops sharply after relationships between unmarried parents end. Mothers’ transitions into new romantic partnerships and new parenting roles are associated with larger declines in involvement than fathers’ transitions. Declines in fathers’ involvement following a relationship or parenting transition are largest when children are young. We discuss the implications of our results given the high levels of relationship instability and multiple-partnered fertility among unmarried parents.Fragile families, childbearing, nonmarital childbearing, fartherhood, fathers

How Much In-Kind Support Do Low-Income Nonresident Fathers Provide? A Mixed-Method Analysis

Past child support research has largely focused on cash payments made through the courts (formal support) or given directly to the mother (informal support), almost to the exclusion of a third type: non-cash goods (in-kind support). Drawing on repeated, semistructured interviews with nearly 400 low-income noncustodial fathers, the authors found that in-kind support constitutes about one quarter of total support. Children in receipt of some in-kind support receive, on average, $60 per month worth of goods. Multilevel regression analyses demonstrated that children who are younger and have more hours of visitation, as well as those whose father has a high school education and no current substance abuse problem, receive in-kind support of greater value. Yet children whose fathers lack stable employment, or are Black, receive a greater proportion of their total support in kind. A subsequent qualitative analysis revealed that fathers' logic for providing in-kind support is primarily relational, and not financial

Listening to the Voices of America

We make the case for building a permanent public-use platform for conducting and analyzing immersive interviews on the everyday lives of Americans. The American Voices Project (AVP)—a widely watched experiment with this new platform—provides important early evidence on its promise. The articles in this issue reveal that, although public-use interview datasets obviously cannot meet all research needs, they do provide new opportunities to study small or hidden populations, new or emerging social problems, reactions to ongoing social crises, submerged values and attitudes, and many other aspects of American life. We conclude that a permanent AVP platform would help build an “open science” form of qualitative research that complements— rather than replaces—the existing very important body of immersive-interviewing research

The origins of unpredictability in life trajectory prediction tasks

Why are life trajectories difficult to predict? We investigated this question through in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 families sampled from a multi-decade longitudinal study. Our sampling and interviewing process were informed by the earlier efforts of hundreds of researchers to predict life outcomes for participants in this study. The qualitative evidence we uncovered in these interviews combined with a well-known mathematical decomposition of prediction error helps us identify some origins of unpredictability and create a new conceptual framework. Our specific evidence and our more general framework suggest that unpredictability should be expected in many life trajectory prediction tasks, even in the presence of complex algorithms and large datasets. Our work also provides a foundation for future empirical and theoretical work on unpredictability in human lives.Comment: 54 pages, 8 figure

Hispanic Familism Reconsidered

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93710/1/tsq1252.pd

Normalizing Deviants: Notes on the De-Stigma Trend

This article explores destigmatization discourses in the United States in the early 21st century, as social and political strategies and as narrative social movements unto themselves. We argue that the first decades of the new century see a trend of marginalized actors across many categories, including queer marriage, drugs, (discreditable) mental illness and (discredited) other areas of identity and disability, make narrative attempts to neutralize their “deviant” identities. We argue that de-stigmatization has occurred through the successful use of medicalization and assimilation framing of de-stigma discourses. Assimilationist frames increase “liberal” emphasis on actionable outcomes of de-stigma, like cultural access (i.e. inclusion, visibility, representation), and legal justice for marginalized people. Some assimilationist discourse endeavors to situate stigmatized identities inside of conformist frames, while (fewer and less visible) others resist dominant frames of acceptability. Contested assimilation and radical leftist de-stigmatization, as well as re-stigma discourses are also discussed

Inactivated Influenza Vaccine That Provides Rapid, Innate-Immune- System-Mediated Protection and Subsequent Long-Term Adaptive Immunity

The continual threat to global health posed by influenza has led to increased efforts to improve the effectiveness of influenza vaccines for use in epidemics and pandemics. We show in this study that formulation of a low dose of inactivated detergent-split influenza vaccine with a Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) agonist-based lipopeptide adjuvant (R4Pam2Cys) provides (i) immediate, antigen-independent immunity mediated by the innate immune system and (ii) significant enhancement of antigendependent immunity which exhibits an increased breadth of effector function. Intranasal administration of mice with vaccine formulated with R4Pam2Cys but not vaccine alone provides protection against both homologous and serologically distinct (heterologous) viral strains within a day of administration. Vaccination in the presence of R4Pam2Cys subsequently also induces high levels of systemic IgM, IgG1, and IgG2b antibodies and pulmonary IgA antibodies that inhibit hemagglutination (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) activities of homologous but not heterologous virus. Improved primary virus nucleoprotein (NP)-specific CD8! T cell responses are also induced by the use of R4Pam2Cys and are associated with robust recall responses to provide heterologous protection. These protective effects are demonstrated in wild-type and antibody-deficient animals but not in those depleted of CD8! T cells. Using a contact-dependent virus transmission model, we also found that heterologous virus transmission from vaccinated mice to naive mice is significantly reduced. These results demonstrate the potential of adding a TLR2 agonist to an existing seasonal influenza vaccine to improve its utility by inducing immediate short-term nonspecific antiviral protection and also antigen-specific responses to provide homologous and heterologous immunity

The Economic Resource Receipt of New Mothers

U.S. federal policies do not provide a universal social safety net of economic support for women during pregnancy or the immediate postpartum period but assume that employment and/or marriage will protect families from poverty. Yet even mothers with considerable human and marital capital may experience disruptions in employment, earnings, and family socioeconomic status postbirth. We use the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the economic resources that mothers with children ages 2 and younger receive postbirth, including employment, spouses, extended family and social network support, and public assistance. Results show that many new mothers receive resources postbirth. Marriage or postbirth employment does not protect new mothers and their families from poverty, but education, race, and the receipt of economic supports from social networks do