Volume 10 – Issue 3 – 2006
Heather Boushey and Jeffrey B. Wenger
Rebecca Y. Kim, Younghee Lim, and Wonik Lee
“Unemployment Insurance Eligibility before and after Welfare Reform”
Heather Boushey
Center for Economic and Policy Research
and
Jeffrey B. Wenger
University of Georgia
Abstract: Welfare and unemployment insurance (UI) were designed to serve distinct populations, mothers and workers. As more women moved into the paid labor force, these previously separate groups have melded into a single group – working mothers. In this research, we analyze the likelihood of former welfare recipients being eligible for UI using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participants. Our analysis compares UI eligibility in the early 1990s, before welfare reform, to the late 1990s, after welfare reform. In general, we find that despite a strong labor market in the late 1990s relative to the early 1990s, former welfare recipients were less likely to meet the earnings requirements for UI eligibility, owing largely to an increase in the share of welfare leavers with little or no earnings.
“Local Struggles for Environmental Justice: Activating Knowledge for Change”
Sara E. Grineski
Arizona State University
Abstract: Environmental knowledge and how it is acquired and deployed are important features of local enviornmental politics in the US. This paper is an ethnography of a community-based participatory research effort for environmental justice in Phoenix, Arizona. Residents, professional community activists and university-based researchers worked together to conduct a health and environmental concerns survey and monitor air quality in a low-income Latino neighborhood. Analysis of this case explores how neighborhood struggles for environmental justice can result in socioenvironmental change through the activation of knowledge in certain political-legal frames. The interpenetration of lay knowledge and expert knowledge during community-based participatory research is theorized to spur environmental justice action when enabled by political-legal structures, and subvert the supposed binary between science and advocacy. The role of the university in community-based participatory research is also examined. Catalysis through involvement, more so than research results, emerges as an important role for the university in influencing environmental justice action.
“A Guide to the Earned Income Tax Credit: What Everyone Should Know about the EITC”
Amy N. Mendenhall
Ohio State University
Abstract: The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) was created in 1975 as an anti-poverty, non-welfare program to reduce poverty among the working poor. This article seeks to increase knowledge about the EITC by providing a comprehensive understanding of what the EITC is and how it impacts poverty in the United States. The goals, history, and structure of the EITC are described, and the efficacy of the credit is analyzed in terms of its goals. Weaknesses of the EITC are discussed along with possible solutions.
“‘It Still Don’t Make you Feel Like You’re Doin’ It’: Welfare Reform and Perceived Economic Self-Efficacy”
Lorie J. Schabo Grabowski
University of Minnesota
Abstract: The massive federal welfare reform effort of 1996 contained an inherent assumption that welfare use negatively affected recipients’ sense of self-efficacy. Little research attention has been given to examining this assumption. Using in-depth interviews, I explore economic self-efficacy perceptions of 31 young mothers who have experience receiving welfare. Financial choice, they said, was central to their perceptions of themselves as economic agents and therefore to their sense of self-efficacy. Findings presented here detail women’s perceptions of their own economic abilities, as well as how welfare receipt, the character of work, and experiences related to parenting in poverty all affected women’s opportunities for exercising agency.
“A Study of Health Care Coverage among Children in Immigrant Families in the Post Welfare-Reform Era”
Rebecca Y. Kim
Ohio State University
Younghee Lim
Louisiana State University
and
Wonik Lee
Ohio State University
Abstract: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) has targeted lawful immigrants by imposing a broad range of restrictions on access to federally-funded benefit programs. Within the federal restrictions, however, states have been granted considerable latitude concerning immigrants. In Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid, the major benefit programs for low-income children, states are authorized to determine whether these programs are to be provided to immigrant families. First, this study examines variations in immigrant provisions across states in Medicaid, TANF, and state health care programs. Second, the study estimates the impact of state immigrant provisions in those programs on the uninsured among children of immigrants. Using the 1999 Current Population Survey (CPS), the study finds that state-funded Medicaid and state health care programs made available to ineligible immigrants (under PRWORA) significantly decrease the risk of being uninsured for children of immigrants, while controlling for all other socio-economic-geographical variables. A child’s citizenship is also found to be a significant and strong predictor for being uninsured among children of immigrants.