Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Questioning the Barriers to Economic Self-Reliance: A Micro-ethnographic Investiagtion of African-American Women in Prince George's County

在杰弗里·H·科恩博士的指导下，研究生莱克辛·M·特拉斯克将研究在福利改革后的时代，单身少数族裔女性在努力实现经济自给自足的过程中，如何感知和克服体制和社会障碍。具体地说，她将调查以前确定的障碍(如儿童保育、就业、福利机构)继续或不继续影响低收入城市单身母亲的经济自立的机制，以及日常生活中发生这种情况的具体微观过程。研究人员将采用一种混合方法的社会科学方法。她将进行细粒度的人种学参与者观察，并对福利妇女样本进行系统的非结构化和半结构化的访谈。她将获得以下方面的数据：家庭预算、育儿义务、教育和就业史、与福利服务提供者的经验、物质困难以及克服贫困的公认障碍和解决办法。她还将采访来自非政府组织和政府机构的人员，以获得更多关于社区提供服务的数据，以及服务提供者自己如何看待阻碍低收入单身母亲经济自立的障碍。此外，她还将使用认知技术(自由列表和空间映射)。这项研究很重要，因为它将有助于社会科学研究贫困在被边缘化人群中持续存在的难以看到的过程。这项研究还将有助于制定更好的公共政策，通过增加对低收入少数单身母亲如何看待、经历和应对经济自立障碍的了解，以及她们的看法如何与那些为试图帮助她们的机构工作的人的看法相一致。这项研究将为重新讨论福利改革政策和计划在帮助弱势和未得到充分服务的人口脱贫方面的有效性提供新的证据基础。最后，这项研究将有助于社会科学家的教育。

Under the supervision of Dr. Jeffrey H. Cohen, graduate student Lexine M. Trask will under take research on how single minority women on welfare perceive and negotiate institutional and social barriers as they strive to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the post-welfare reform era. Specifically, she will investigate the mechanisms by which previously identified barriers (such as., childcare, employment, welfare agencies) continue or do not continue to affect the economic self-reliance of low-income urban single-mothers and the specific micro-processes of everyday life by which this happens. The researcher will employ a mix-methods social science approach. She will undertake both fine-grained ethnographic participant observation and will carry out systematic unstructured and semi-structured interviews with a sample of women on welfare. She will elicit data on: household budgets, childcare obligations, educational and employment history, experience with welfare service providers, material hardship, and perceived obstacles and solutions to overcoming poverty. She also will interview personnel from NGOs and government agencies to acquire additional data on the availability of services in the community and how service providers themselves see the barriers that to low-income single-mothers' economic self-reliance. In addition, she will also employ cognitive techniques (free listing and spatial mappings).This research is important because it will contribute to social science scholarship on the hard-to-see processes that underlie the persistance of poverty in marginalzied populations. The research also will contribute to developing better public policy by increasing understanding of how low-income minority single-mothers perceive, experience, and cope with barriers to their economic self-reliance and how their perceptions do or do not correspond to the perceptions of those who work for agencies that are trying to help them. The research will provide a new, evidentiary basis for a renewed discourse on the effectiveness of welfare reform policies and programs in lifting disadvantaged and underserved populations out of poverty. Finally, the research will contribute to the education of a social scientist.