Students' school belonging is critical to overall functioning. Most past studies of school belonging's antecedents focused on individual-level and proximal environmental factors, neglecting broader socioecological factors such as income inequality. Hence, this study examined whether income inequality is associated with students' school belonging.…

A college degree is often viewed as a key step toward better employment and higher earnings. Many community college students, however, never graduate and cannot reap the financial benefits associated with a college degree. Although existing research suggests that financial aid interventions can modestly improve students' short-term academic…

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious, widespread problem that negatively affects women's lives, including their economic status. The current study explored whether the financial harm associated with IPV begins as early as adolescence. With longitudinal data from a sample of 498 women currently or formerly receiving welfare, we used latent…

Earning a college degree increases a person's life outcomes in income, employment, health, and quality of life. The average person with a bachelor's degree earns almost twice as much as a high school graduate and nearly triple that of someone who did not finish high school. The unemployment rate for people with bachelor's degrees is about…

Numerous sources of data about family incomes, taxes, wages, unemployment, wealth, and poverty were used to analyze the impact of the economy on living standards in the United States in 1994-1995. It was discovered that most individuals in the United States are worse off in the 1990s than they were at the end of the 1970s. Between 1979 and 1989,…

Compared demographic characteristics, incomes, and selected expenditures of two representative samples--male-headed households who pay child support and female-headed households who receive it--based on data from 1985 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Results showed major disparities in levels of living of these two samples, based on measures of per…

The study is concerned with empirically deriving a labor supply function for members of poor families. It contains a definition of poverty as well as a brief summary of the characteristics of families in poverty in 1966 and a review of the existing literature on the supply of labor by the poor. A general model of labor supply based on family…

The Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) is a welfare reform initiative based on enhancing welfare recipients' incentives to get a job and requiring long-term welfare recipients to participate in employment-focused activities. The effects of the MFIP were compared to those of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program through…

The characteristics, earnings, employment experiences, and material well-being of California welfare recipients after leaving welfare were examined by comparing the postwelfare experiences of groups who exited welfare before and after institution of California's welfare reform program CalWORKs. The first group (pre-CalWORKs group) exited welfare…

Selected characteristics of the Spanish origin population (Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, and other Spanish) and labor force in the United States are presented in this chartbook, compiled from the March 1976 Current Population Survey. Divided into four sections, the chartbook looks at the size and composition of…

The cost-effectiveness and 3-year impacts of California's Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN) program, which is a statewide initiative aimed at increasing the employment and self-sufficiency of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), were evaluated by studying follow-up data for 33,000 people from 6 counties who entered…

The 5-year impacts of mandatory welfare-to-work programs on welfare recipients and their children were examined by using a rigorous research design called a social experiment to examine 11 welfare-to-work programs in 6 states (California, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Oregon). Four employment-focused and seven education-focused programs…

The findings of the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS) were analyzed to identify ways of improving the process of moving people from welfare to work. Selected lessons from the analysis were as follows: (1) welfare-to-work programs that rely on adult basic education programs for the general population are unlikely to improve…