A View From the Inside Out: Recipients\u27 Perceptions of Welfare

Welfare use is a highly stigmatized behavior in American society. The word itself conjures up various images of disdain in the minds of most Americans. Yet how do the recipients of welfare discern and react to being on public assistance? The focus of this paper is on understanding the manner in which recipients view their own situation, how they perceive the general public\u27s attitudes toward themselves, and their views on fellow welfare recipients. Also examined are how such attitudes influence recipients\u27 behavior towards welfare. These perceptions and behaviors are explored in detail through the use of in-depth, open-ended qualitative interviews with a random sample of welfare recipients. The concept of managing and coping with stigma is utilized to provide insights into the results

Discussant Comments

Discussant Comment

Asset Building Over the Life Course

Asset Building Over the Life Cours

Toward a New Understanding of American Poverty

This Essay argues that one of the fundamental reasons the United States currently has the highest poverty rates in the industrialized world is that we have consistently misunderstood the nature and causes of American poverty. Old strategies of addressing poverty have rested upon imagining a world that reflects a preferred set of myths, agendas, and policies; a new approach to poverty reduction must put in place a set of policies that reflects the realities of the world. These policies should be grounded in a new understanding of the nature and meaning of American poverty. This Essay provides the rudimentary details of such a paradigm

The Racial Injustice of Poverty

Professor Roberts’ conclusion is that we should be attacking poverty to improve the well-being of children. In order to shed more light on this, I would like to briefly discuss some of the research on which I am currently working that looks at the issues of poverty and race in a different fashion. My recent work attempts to paint a much broader view of poverty by looking at childhood and adulthood as a whole. Rather than asking what the rate of poverty is at a single point in time in a child’s or adult’s life, the question I am analyzing is: What is the likelihood of poverty across the entire span of the childhood and adulthood years

AFDC, Food Stamp, and Medicaid Utilization: A Research Note

During the past 20 years, social welfare programs have been expanding both in terms of federal and state expenditures, and in terms of numbers of recipients. Among the programs involved in this expansion were Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Food Stamps, and Medicaid. However, knowledge of the sheer numbers of people and dollars involved provides at best an incomplete picture of these social welfare programs. The researcher, policy planner, and government administrator must also have an understanding of who is at risk of utilizing welfare in the general population. Such knowledge may provide insight into the present and future implications of policy changes. Therefore, the purpose of this research note is to provide a detailed analysis of the percentage of the population, broken down by demographic characteristics, involved in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Food Stamp, and/or Medicaid programs

Estimating the Life Course Dynamics of Asset Poverty

Poverty can be conceptualized and measured in several different ways. The most common approach has been to rely on a scarcity of income as the basis for poverty. This paper analyzes poverty using a relatively new and alternative measuring stick—that of asset poverty. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we examine the extent to which individuals have enough assets to allow them to live for three months above the official poverty line. Households that fail to have the necessary amount of assets are considered asset poor. Three different measures of counting assets are used in this paper—net worth; financial wealth; and liquid wealth. We construct a series of life tables that allow us to examine the period, cohort, and age patterns of asset poverty from 1984 to 2004. Our results indicate that asset poverty is widespread across the life course. The vast majority of those in early adulthood will experience asset poverty in terms of their net worth, financial wealth, and liquid wealth. For those in the middle and later stages of the life course, there remains a substantial risk of encountering financial wealth and liquid wealth asset poverty. In addition, individuals who have less education, are not married, are black, and who do not own a home, are all significantly more likely to experience asset poverty. The policy implications of these findings are discussed

Homeownership Across the American Life Course: Estimating the Racial Divide

Homeownership has historically been viewed as a fundamental piece of the American Dream, with up to 70 percent of households owning their home as of 2006. Yet it has also been demonstrated that nonwhites are less likely to own a home and that the value of their homes is much less than that for whites, even when social class is taken into account. This paper explores the overall life course patterns of homeownership and the importance of racial differences in understanding those dynamics. Based upon a life table methodology, we examine the homeownership patterns for individuals between the ages of 25 to 55 using 36 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our findings indicate that although the vast majority of nonwhites will eventually become homeowners, there is nevertheless a significant racial divide in the patterns of homeownership. Nonwhites are less likely than whites to become homeowners, are more likely to purchase their first home at a later age, are less likely to have acquired as much equity in their home, and are less likely to own their home outright. The implications of these findings are discussed within the overall context of racial stratification in America

American Poverty as a Structural Failing: Evidence and Arguments

Empirical research on American poverty has largely focused on individual characteristicst o explain the occurrence and patternso f poverty. The argument in this article is that such an emphasis is misplaced. By focusing upon individual attributes as the cause of poverty, social scientists have largely missed the underlying dynamic of American impoverishment. Poverty researchers have in effect focused on who loses out at the economic game, rather than addressing the fact that the game produces losers in the first place. We provide three lines of evidence to suggest that U.S. poverty is ultimately the result of structural failings at the economic, political, and social levels. These include an analysis into the lack of sufficient jobs in the economy to raise families out of poverty or near poverty; a comparative examination into the high rates of U.S. poverty as a result of the ineffectiveness of the social safety net; and the systemic nature of poverty as indicated by the life course risk of impoverishment experienced by a majority of Americans. We then briefly outline a framework for reinterpreting American poverty. This perspective incorporates the prior research findings that have focused on individual characteristics as important factors in who loses out at the economic game, with the structural nature of American poverty that ensures the existence of economic losers in the first place

Energetic proton spectra in the 11 June 1991 solar flare

The June 11, 1991 gamma-ray flare seen by the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory (CGRO) displays several features that make it a dynamic and rich event. It is a member of a class of long duration gamma-ray events with both 2.223 MeV and greater than 8 MeV emission for hours after the impulsive phase. It also contains an inter-phase between the impulsive and extended phases that presents a challenge to the standard gamma-ray line (GRL) flare picture. This phase has strong 2.223 MeV emission and relatively weak 4.44 MeV emission indicative of a very hard parent proton spectrum. However, this would indicate emission greater than 8 MeV, which is absent from this period. We present the application of new spectroscopy techniques to this phase of the flare in order to present a reasonable explanation for this seemly inconsistent picture