International Journal of Social Welfare最新文献

Individuals encounter and experience different costs, conceptualized as administrative burdens, when seeking access to social welfare programs. Scholars and practitioners suggest that digitalizing and redesigning application processes could alleviate and shift some of these negative experiences. However, empirical research testing whether real interventions achieve this remains scarce. In a laboratory experiment, we randomly assigned participants (n = 120) to one of two application processes for a student financial aid program: the standard paper-based or a digitalized and redesigned application procedure. Students encountering the latter experienced significantly less administrative burdens, were more satisfied, and completed a higher proportion of process steps. Furthermore, functional literacy improved the experience of the bureaucratic encounter. These findings reveal the potential of redesigning and digitalizing application processes to alleviate administrative burdens.

A large body of research has demonstrated that evictions affect already vulnerable groups and are linked to a number of adverse outcomes. However, prior findings largely rely on enforced evictions processed through the legal system and it has been suggested that such an approach might underestimate the number of evictions. Using comprehensive Swedish individual-level register data from 2009 to 2012, this study extends prior literature by focusing on self-initiated moves that occur during a formal eviction process but before an enforced removal. Results from explorative statistical analyses indicate that self-initiated moves during the formal eviction process are four times more common compared with enforced evictions. Although self-initiated moves typically affect the same disadvantaged groups as those facing enforced removals, those who self-initiated their move were younger. Households with children were also found to be more common in that group compared with those faced with enforced removals. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed.

Historically, researchers and policymakers alike recognized the risk of poverty among large families, but family size is often neglected in the contemporary literature. This article revives an examination of the connections between family size and poverty risk for children with a focus on Germany. We take a child-centered perspective by analyzing a sample of 13–14 year-old children from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). First, we provide a detailed overview of the welfare and tax policies aimed at large families in Germany. Next, we estimate the poverty risk and prevalence for children in large families (looking at families with 3+ and 4+ children). Finally, we discuss how the policy and socio-economic context interacts with the risk of poverty. We identify that the means-tested social assistance scheme penalizes large families, while the child benefit would only acknowledge higher need of middle-income families with three or more children.

Temporary employment has been the core dimension of employment precariousness in Spain for decades. In December 2021, a labour market reform aimed at reducing the use of fixed-term contracts, which especially affected young people, was passed. This article compares the situation of young workers before and after this labour market reform, with the objective of identifying internal differences among this age group. The results show a substantial reduction in the prevalence of temporary employment after the reform, although they also show that temporary employment, as well as incipient forms of precariousness such as involuntary part-time employment, are more concentrated than before among the most disadvantaged in this age group, following traditional patterns of segmentation in the labour market. This article, therefore, provides insights into which profiles of young workers were better off after the reform and which were not, offering valuable lessons for other countries with similar labour market challenges.

The United Kingdom two-child policy was announced in 2015 and began to operate from April 2017. A mother claiming a range of means-tested benefits who had a third or subsequent child born after 6 April 2017 could not receive a child addition for them, while a new claimant with three or more children would now receive no more than a claimant with two children. Using data from nationally representative annual living conditions surveys for the period up to 2019/20, we find that larger families experienced substantial real income losses since the introduction of the two-child limit, with proportionally greater losses among those on lower incomes. Income losses among larger families were driven primarily by changes in income penalties to family characteristics, such as the presence of children under three, rather than changes in the distribution of these characteristics. Although this is not a causal analysis, these findings are consistent with a negative impact of the policy change on larger families' incomes.

Norwegian youth in out-of-home care move three times as frequently as their peers. Such placement instability is linked to negative outcomes in terms of social attachment, well-being, educational achievements, health, and future opportunities. Norway implemented a new child welfare service reform in 2022 that increased the municipalities responsibilities for out-of-home care. The “incentive package” and “Barneløftet” were measures implemented to prepare the municipalities for these changes. This study evaluates how the implemented measures affect the number of moves within out-of-home care in Trøndelag county. An event-study design with difference-in-difference estimates was used to study the effect of the measures. The data are Norwegian registers that include most children in out-of-home care from 2013 to 2021. The findings of this study indicate that increased support for foster care homes significantly reduces the number of moves. Increased placement stability is associated with an increased sense of belonging, thus facilitating positive development.

Policy feedback scholars argue that experiences with government shape political participation. Administrative burden scholars posit that burdensome bureaucratic encounters deter political participation. Related quantitative studies take a top-down, deductive approach and test effects of single policies, yet people engage multiple programs, and all policies may not be equally salient in how they view the state. Using qualitative interviews, our inductive, “bottom-up” approach examines the most prominent policy domains in views of government shared across mothers with low incomes in the United States (n = 80). Mothers experienced a wide range of policies, and they detailed related administrative burdens, but this was not the focus in most of their views of the government. Many raised issue areas that hit close to home, such as affordable child care or children's recreation programs. They often drew on a sense of collective motherhood in their view of government, including how it could facilitate efforts to raise children.

An ecosocial approach implies integrating social and ecological sustainability on all levels of social work practice (Boetto, British Journal of Social Work, 2017:47(1), 48–67). This survey study explored the frequency of ecosocial work practices in Finnish social work and the factors that enable or hinder adopting ecosocial work in social work practice. The study found that ecosocial work practices are quite rarely applied in Finnish social work. It indicates that personal interest in and knowledge of the ecosocial approach, organizational practices, and client attitudes play an important role. Social welfare professionals as well as the organizations where they work should be informed of environmental issues affecting human wellbeing and of the ecosocial approach in social work. This study examines the present state of the ecosocial approach in Finnish social work and provides opportunities to reflect on the relationship between social work and the natural environment.

The Sample of Integrated Welfare Benefit Biographies (SIG) provides comprehensive administrative data on the labour market participation, household composition and financial situation of welfare benefit recipients and their household members in Germany between 2007 and 2020. The SIG data enables research on the dynamics of welfare receipt and labour market participation of welfare recipients. The aim of the article is to introduce the SIG and to showcase its analytical potential by empirically examining benefit loans that can be granted by welfare agencies when unexpected expenses cannot be covered by welfare recipients themselves. Loans and detailed further financial information available can be used to assess the severity of financial restrictions during welfare receipt. We found that 2% of welfare recipients received loans at least once during their benefit episode and that loans were most likely to be granted right at the beginning of a benefit episode. Moreover, the likelihood of loans increased with higher benefit needs and when a parallel employment episode started.

To err is human, and as such, administrative errors are an inevitable component of current and future welfare state bureaucracy. Hitherto, while studies on administrative burden have shown us that routine interactions with welfare bureaucracy are often burdensome, very little is known about the nature of these interactions when something goes wrong. Most social policy and public administration scholarship focus on ex-ante analysis of administrative errors, with only scant research devoted to ex-post analysis of how claimants experience such errors once they occur, and the types of costs they may incur. This article contributes to the growing field of administrative burden research by examining welfare claimants' experiences of administrative errors. Analysis of 19 interviews with Israeli benefit recipients uncovered two themes. The first related to the process of correcting errors, including identifying and communicating them to the system. The second theme addressed the consequences of errors: on the one hand, economic and emotional costs including loss of trust in the system, and on the other, acquiring bureaucratic skills. These findings highlight bureaucratic errors as a critical and unique site of learning burden, as well as the need for a human contact to allow claimants to better deal with their consequences.