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Jeffrey H.科恩，研究生莱克辛M。特拉斯克将研究如何在福利上的单一少数民族妇女的看法和谈判的制度和社会障碍，因为他们努力实现后福利改革时代的经济自给自足。具体来说，她将调查以前确定的障碍（如，儿童保育、就业、福利机构）是否继续影响城市低收入单身母亲的经济自立以及造成这种情况的日常生活的具体微观过程。研究人员将采用混合方法的社会科学方法。她将进行细致的人种学参与观察，并将对福利妇女进行系统的非结构化和半结构化访谈。她将收集以下方面的数据：家庭预算、儿童保育义务、教育和就业历史、与福利服务提供者的经验、物质困难以及认识到的克服贫困的障碍和解决办法。她还将采访非政府组织和政府机构的工作人员，以获得有关社区服务可用性的更多数据，以及服务提供者本身如何看待低收入单身母亲经济自立的障碍。此外，她还将采用认知技术（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奖学金的很难看到的过程，在边缘化人口的贫困持续存在的基础。 这项研究还将有助于制定更好的公共政策，增加了解低收入少数群体单身母亲如何看待，经历和科普经济自立的障碍，以及他们的看法如何与那些为试图帮助他们的机构工作的人的看法一致或不一致。 这项研究将为重新讨论福利改革政策和方案在使弱势和得不到充分服务的人口摆脱贫困方面的有效性提供一个新的证据基础。 最后，本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.