Term
| Describe Abraham Flexner and his opinion regarding social work as a profession |
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Definition
o He was a famed critic of the medical profession who was asked to analyze social work as a profession. Flexner found that SW strongly exhibited some professional traits-- it was intellectual, derived its knowledge from science and learning, possessed a “professional self-consciousness,” and was altruistic.
o However, he found SW lacking in several important criteria, mainly those of educationally communicable technique and individual responsibility and the deficiency was the broadness of its boundaries. Flexner believed that this lack of specificity affected the possibility of professional training because the occupation of SWs is “so numerous and diverse.”
o He felt that SWs were mediators rather than responsible parties and there was a deficient in meeting criteria of professionalization of “assuming large individual responsibility”-- professional authority or autonomy.
o Viewed social work as a non-profession |
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Term
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Definition
| o Social Policy deals with the integrative system and the over-all quality of life. Social Policy refers to efforts to shape the overall quality of life in society as a whole. Not the social services alone but the social purposes and consequences of agricultural, economic, manpower, fiscal, physical development, and social welfare policies that form the subject matter of social policy. |
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Term
| Describe Social Welfare Policy |
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Definition
| o Social Welfare Policy is a sub-category of social policy. Refers to the societal responses to specific needs or problems such as poverty, child maltreatment, etc. Social Welfare Policy are those things related to the problem of dependency or specific categorical programs. Social Welfare Policy concerns those interrelated, but not necessarily logically consistent, principles, guidelines, and procedures designed to deal with the problem of dependency in our society. |
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Term
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Definition
| Choice Analysis a process of looking at options available to planners to deal with social welfare problems that may be transformed into proposals, laws, or statutes that form programs. |
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Term
| Describe the two major Bases of Allocation |
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Definition
• Universal provisions: are made available to the entire population as a social right. Assumes that all people are “at risk” at some point for common problems. Example is Social Security for the elderly with a disability. Has little stigma and fits with the democratic notions of equal treatment for all.
• Selective provisions: the allocation of benefits based on individual economic need. Generally determined through an income test; those below a certain level of income are eligible to receive benefits. Critics say it is more cost effective to have benefits for all versus trying to figure out who does and does not get them.
• Categorical: Also mentioned by policy makers, refers to the particular categories of poor people. For example, low income women and children, elderly individuals, or those with a handicap |
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Term
| Describe types of Social Benefits |
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Definition
• In-Cash (monthly unemployment checks) or
• In-kind (tax credits, free clothing, job training, subsidized housing). |
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Term
| What are the possible delivery structures of benefits or services? |
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Definition
• Decentralized: Children’s Services, Foster Care and Adoptive Programs
• Centralized: Often more convenient for clients and can lessen the duplication of services.
• Coordinated services |
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Term
| How are benefits financed? |
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Definition
• Taxation (social security),
• Voluntary contributions (private agencies)
• Fees (for services charged by both private nonprofit and for-profit agencies). |
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Term
| What is a stake holder and what is the importance of a stakeholder? |
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Definition
o A stakeholder is number of political players; advocates, professionals, and lawmakers who represent a variety of interests and constituencies (including insurance companies, parents, women concerned about abuse and exploitation, attorneys, people worried about strength of families, etc.).
o stakeholders are all the actors interested in and potentially affected by a policy, such as interest groups, public officials, individuals and their families, civil servants, business and corporations, professional organizations, and labor unions.
o Important stakeholders in social welfare policy include the beneficiaries of those policies, such as public welfare recipients or people receiving SS check and each group has particular assumptions and concerns regarding policies and the problems to which they are intended to respond.
o Stakeholders play a major role in each of the stages of policy development. |
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Term
| What are the three major theories of policy making? |
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Definition
Pluralism
Public Choice Theory
Elitist Model |
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Term
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Definition
• Pluralism: assumes a sort of “marketplace of ideas,” in which numerous groups and interests compete for power and influence in making policy.
• Individuals are able to participate in decision making through membership in organized groups. These groups have relatively equal power… the essential assumption in pluralism is that all voices will be heard and power is widely diffused rather than centralized. |
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Term
| Describe Public Choice Theory |
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Definition
• Public choice theory: the traditional economist’s view of marketplace behavior stresses individuals pursuing their own private interests. Public choice theorists assume “that all political actors-- voters, taxpayers, candidates, legislators, bureaucrats, interest groups, parties, bureaucracies, and governments-- seek to maximize their personal benefits in politics as well.”
• Explain the interests of politicians and bureaucrats are to win elections and to expand their point of view. Voters are often concerned with how policies will affect them. |
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Term
| Describe the Elitist Model |
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Definition
• Elitist model: contrasts with pluralist approach; this model sees policy as reflecting the goals of an elite group of individuals-- the “power elite”
• The power elite represents the interests of wealthy citizens and the leaders of well-financed interest groups. |
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Term
| What are the possible problems with the three major theories of policy making? |
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Definition
o Pluralism: • There is the argument that not every voice manages to make it to the debate and that certain powerful persons and groups can prevent those with threatening or opposing ideas from reaching an audience and presenting their ideas in public. • Membership groups vs. institutions • Problem with power o Public choice theory: that all invlolved want to maximize their personal benefits which could leave others in need out
o Elitist Model:Model only reflects the needs of the elite group and not the marginalized or middle class |
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Term
| Describe Mother's Pensions. Who were they designed for and how did they change over time? |
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Definition
o Mother’s pensions: women with children were productive workers of a sort and had a right to insurance against widowhood, the primary threat to their livelihood, just as men had a right to insurance against industrial accident. •
-Never intended for unwed mothers
• 2 aspects of mothers’ pension movement: • These programs were aimed at children of parents of worthy character-- meant women who were widowed or who had disabled husbands • The laws were based on a traditional model of the family in which the mother was expected to stay in home and care for her children-- implied that being a wife and mother was analogous to a career and widows were entitled to support when this career was disrupted. There were no work provisions or expectations in these laws. • Gov’t didn’t play a major role until the Great Depression because private agencies almost immediately ran out of money and had to rely on state and local gov’ts for assistance. o Aid to Dependent Children (ADC): a program established to serve single mothers with small children, basically the same group targeted by state mothers’ pension laws. This is the program that later was called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in recognition of the fact that mothers as well as their children were receiving assistance. • Policymakers thought that AFDC would be temporary and wither away, but by the 1950s policymakers realized that the program was not going to wither away and was providing benefits to a number of people considered “undesirable.” • The program grew to an alarming rate, which called for welfare reform-- 2 categories: • “Suitable home” and “man in the house” • Efforts to move people off welfare and onto self-sufficiency through rehabilitating the recipient or else removing environmental barriers. • Social service strategies, institutional strategies, human capital strategies, job creation and subsidization strategies, and child support strategies |
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Term
| Describe Social Security and Inequality for various groups |
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Definition
o Didn’t provide a firm safety net for low-wage earners
o Women - face particular problems in the SS system. Because they were not seen as the primary wage earners in the early years of the program’s development, it was expected that their benefits would most likely come through their positions as wives or widows of male beneficiaries.
• Women take more frequent breaks from the workforce to care for children, elderly, and disabled relatives and therefore receive lower SS benefits.
o Farm workers and domestic servants were initially excluded from Social Security Act. Not until the 1950s were farm laborers, domestic servants, and self employed groups included in the old-age insurance program. |
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Term
| Describe the Social Security Crisis of the 1980s |
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Definition
| o 1980s benefit payments threatened to exceed incoming tax revenues. o Due in part to the serious inflation of the preceding decade. Benefit payments threatened to exceed incoming tax revenues. o Congress and the Reagan administration responded to the depletion of the reserve fund with a series of mostly incremental adjustments. These included: advancing the age at which people were eligible for benefits, increasing the payroll tax paid by workers, and initiating taxation of the benefits received by people with incomes above certain levels. o These changes created large surpluses in the reserve fund that were thought to prepare the country to handle the retirement of the baby boomers. |
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Term
| What are the layers in the Onion Metaphor? |
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Definition
The Outer Layer
The Middle Layer
The Core of the Onion
The Very Inner Core |
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Term
| Describe the Outer Layer in the Onion Metaphor |
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Definition
| The outer layer consists of recipients who receive assistance for two or fewer years. These people generally have comparatively high education, ability, and motivation and, with few supports, will reenter the labor market in a short time. They only thing this group needs is short-term financial help and some assistance in regaining entry into the labor market. |
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Term
| Describe the Middle Layer in the Onion Metaphor |
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Definition
| o The middle layer is composed of people who receive assistance for two to eight years and are often on-and-off-again recipients. These people have limited options. They generally have some basic skills and education, but the employment opportunities do not exist to elevate them out of poverty on a permanent basis. Their fortunes are highly related to the function of the economy. Appropriate interventions for members of this layer are educational/vocational preparation. |
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Term
| Describe the Core of the Onion in the Onion Metaphor |
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Definition
| The core of the onion is composed of recipients who remain on assistance for eight or more years; sometimes referred as system dependent. This is the group we usually picture when discussing public welfare. In addition to low earning capacity brought on by lack of education, training, job experience, this group also faces barriers to self-sufficiency such as drug abuse, psychological problems, health problems, abusive personal relationships, and so on. This group is often suspected of lacking motivation and of possessing values that are not conducive to work. This group requires extensive interventions to achieve self-sufficiency than do members of the outer two layers. |
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Term
| Describe the Very Inner Core of the Onion Metaphor |
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Definition
| The Very Inner Core are those people who are permanently functionally limited due to severe physical or emotional impairment. Self-sufficiency is not a reasonable objective. Goal is to provide non-stigmatizing ways of providing support. |
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Term
| Describe the rights of children as they shifted over time. Changes in public sentiment and why changes occurred |
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Definition
o PG 240
Many people, particularly those in the middle and upper classes, had begun to believe firmly in the right of children to a certain level of care and the right of government to step in and enforce the provision of adequate care when parents were judged to be unable to provide such care
o Two general developments in the 19th account for the changing attitude:
• The position of children in the economy changed, radically, and along with this, the method of valuing children.
• First reason: In the 19th century, the concept of the “useful” child who made a valuable contribution to the famly economy gradually evolved into the “useless” child of the 20th century who is economically worthless, and costly. Reasons for this transformation:
• decline in useful tasks that could be performed by children in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, and the rise of the compassionate family.
• Second Reason: stemmed from the changed conception of the value of children; before the 19th century, the relationship between parents and children in this country followed English common law. Under this law, children’s rights were considered to be unimportant and father’s held all the power in the household, not the mothers. Two new legal principles emerged: one was the recognition of equal rights between mother and father and the second was the recognition by the legal system of children as being of paramount importance, vital to the future of society, and therefore objects of the courts protection |
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Term
| What is Parens Patriae and how does it apply to child welfare? |
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Definition
| Children can become wards of the state under this principle. Child advocates argue that children should be treated differently than adults by offering rehabilitation rather than punishment |
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Term
| Describe the American value systems and their effect on public assistance policies and opinions |
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Definition
| We value o Marriage and Community- Helping others is bad as it will cause laziness and depression but our sense of community and desire to help others wants to help those who are suffering o Work- a moral virtue;welfare allows people to survive without working so we see it as a contributor to immorality o Independence – people should take care of themselves o Traditional Nuclear Family- we value marriage and traditional families so female-headed, single parent families are seen as suspect o Humanitarianism- we don’t want people to suffer when we have the power to help |
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Term
| Describe the reasons and opinions about why poverty occurs and what can be done about it |
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Definition
-Blocked opportunity thesis is the idea that if you provide opportunities to be healthy and housed then they won’t need welfare o Two types of reform • Make work Pay • Make them Suffer Strategies
-The unequal distribution of income
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Term
| Describe what we know about the population of people receiving TANF |
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Definition
o 65% are minority group members
o 7% of white mothers receive aid while 25% of black mothers receive aid
o Mothers average 30 years of age versus 34 for mothers not receiving aid;
o 8% are teenagers
o 17% are 39 or older
o Nearly half 45.2% never completed high school compared to 14.5 percent of non-recipients
o 65% had spells of longer than 8 years receiving aid
o Mothers on AFDC had 2.5 children compared to 2.1 children of those not receiving aid
o Usually single mothers |
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Term
| What is meant by "Dependency"? |
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Definition
Dependency occurs when an individual is not adequately fulfilling a role )for example, providing physical care for his children) and social institutions are not providing adequate supports to enable the individual to fulfill a role (for example, good quality, affordable child care is not available) and this causes problems for the community that requires a response.
• When an individual is doing everything necessary to fulfill a role and the appropriate social institutions are functioning well enough to support the person’s role performance, it is referred to as interdependence. |
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Term
| Describe George W Bush’s “faith based initiative” |
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Definition
-Idea is that Bush wanted to turn dependency issues over to churches and let them deal with it. So he allowed church and state to take care of a lot of the dependency issues(P43. 3)
-Argued that faith could accomplish what secular programs could not
-Proposed that religous groups had the right to contract with federal agencies and use federal dollars for services for people in need |
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Term
| Describe Changes in welfare rolls following welfare reform (PRWORA) |
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Definition
| The first decade following PRWORA saw a reduction in rolls due to a strong economyIn 1996, Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). For the prior 60 years, the receipt of financial assistance by the needy was considered a right of citizenship; the federal gov’t cast itself in the role of leading the states toward more progressive and humane social policies; staying home and parenting children was defined as a legitimate social role for the mothers of small children; and the reality that work was not available for all people was at least implicitly accepted. This has all changed-- financial assistance is now to be granted only on a temporary basis; the federal gov’t has abdicated its leadership role and now seeks only to get out of the way of the states; women are expected to be in the labor market; and it is assumed that jobs are available for all people of they will just look hard enough and accept whatever comes alone. |
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Term
| Describe Family preservation policy (why, when, successes, problems, trends) |
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Definition
| The idea of how we went from preserving the family to protecting the child. Placing out for adoption vs preservation, we went back and forth |
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Term
| Describe Macro practice and micropractice as methods to deal with dependency |
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Definition
| Macrolevel policy involves the nroad laws, regulations, or guidelines that provide the basic frameworkfor the provision of services and benefits. Microlevel policy is what happens when macro level and mezzo level policies are translated into client services. Working with the individual to make them fit into society better. And vice versa where you work with policy to reintegrate the individual back into society |
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Term
| Describe Social Security and Inequality for various groups |
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Definition
· At first, farm workers and domestic
servants were excluded from the Social Security Act; the vast majority of
both occupations were African American.
· There are inequalities in Social
Security, esp. among women, African Americans, and Hispanics; they don’t earn
as much therefore get less at retirement
o Women take more frequent breaks from
the work force to care for children, elderly family members, and disabled
relatives and therefore receive lower social security benefits |
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Term
| Family preservation policy (why, when, successes, problems, trends) |
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Definition
The child welfare system was being severely criticized for breaking up families and not providing services to rebuild them. The foster care system showed problems with many cases being not temporary, but long-term situations, many children were not in one stable foster home but placed in a series of homes, and there was rarely any kind of long term plan for the children.
· Permanency planning also became an issue because of the rise in children needing foster homes, but a decline in the foster homes available.
· For these reasons, Family preservation was developed in 1974 with the Homebuilders program.
· Successes: It recognizes the rights of children to be protected but does it in such a way as to maximize the rights of the parents to rear their own children. The potential cost savings are significant. It is a policy liked by liberals and conservatives alike. `
· Problems: Some believe it removes accountability from the individual and places it on society. Some believe it is not a substitute for the more expensive treatments because severe problems will not go away over such a brief period.
· Trends: It doesn’t seem to be leading to a reduction in foster care. A movement toward Kinship care is developing. |
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Term
| Surge in child abuse reporting in the 1950’s (why?) |
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Definition
· The discovery of child abuse by the medical profession. “Battered Child Syndrome.”
· By 1966 every state had passed a mandatory child abuse reporting law. |
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