A View from the Bottom: Former Welfare Recipients Evaluate the System

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine former welfare recipients' perspectives of the system in which they participated. This research utilizes open-ended responses from a 1999 comprehensive, representative statewide survey of 962 West Virginia TANF recipients to document the conceptual themes that emerge in former welfare recipients' suggestions for changing the current system. The results indicate that while there are common themes (i.e., policy delivery and design) in former recipients' critiques of the welfare system, these individuals are not uniform in their assessments of this program. This research reaffirms the importance of including historically marginalized voices in policy debates regarding policy construction and evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare recipients
• rural Appalachia

Notes

1. This program is West Virginia's version of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF).

2. All expletives and references to individuals, companies, or other entities that could possibly compromise the respondent's confidentiality were deleted.

3. Most of the qualitative coding was conducted independently where the author identified concepts and elaborated on the concepts using constant comparison. The author engaged in weekly dialogues with other members of the research team as well as in periodic meetings with two additional colleagues to assess concurrence with the codes and to explore alternative explanations.

4. This number is the actual number of respondents who focused their comments for change on state specific labor market barriers. Some respondents keep their comments centered on one issue only (i.e., jobs) and others address a multitude of concerns (i.e., eligibility rules, rude caseworkers, and a lack of childcare) in their answers. In order to find out the dispersion of specific suggestions by respondents, the total in each specific category was divided by 665 (i.e., the total number of respondents to the open-ended question). Thus, the cumulative percentage adds to more than 100 percent.

5. Approximately eleven percent of respondents utilized this defensive strategy of social distancing in order to try to negotiate a more positive self image. The most consistent theme in the social distancing is the separation of welfare recipients into categories of those who “deserve help” and those who are “undeserving.” Those individuals who misused the system (i.e., cheated), misrepresented themselves in order to get benefits (i.e., fraud), or are too dependent on the system, fell into the category of undeserving. This and other stigma management strategies are explored in detail in the author's article “'We' Have Never Asked for Help that Was Not Desperately Needed': Patterns of Stigma Management Among Former Welfare Recipients in West Virginia” forthcoming in the Journal of Appalachian Studies.

6. One of the core arguments put forth in this article is that marginalized groups should be included in policy discussions on issues that affect their lives. It is important to note that the findings of this research have been shared with state administrators, policy makers, caseworkers, and the general public. The author is part of an ongoing research collaboration between the West Virginia University's Interdisciplinary Research Task Force on Welfare Reform and West Virginia's Department of Health and Human Resources. To date, our multi-disciplinary research team has conducted four (1999, 2000, 2003, and 2004) statewide representative surveys of welfare recipients, focus groups with welfare recipients, interviews with WVDHHR administrators, and focus groups with approximately 85 caseworkers. All final reports were presented to WVDHHR administrators and put on WVDHHR's website. The research findings were also disseminated to caseworkers and regional managers in eleven statewide training meetings. All have been distributed to over 2500 people including state and local government officials within the state of West Virginia through the West Virginia Public Affairs Reporter (see for example http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/ipa/par/report22_3.pdf.). In addition, most of the reports were presented to the state legislature by members of the research team.

7. It is important to note that in May 2000 the ratio of family support specialists per case in West Virginia ranged from 1:37 to 1:50 with each case representing about 2.5 people (Plein and Williams, 2004).