Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1981.

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published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The research undertaken in this thesis examines social assistance (welfare) receipt in Canada during the 1981-95 period to determine the forces responsible for the dramatic growth in welfare use observed during the 1990s. The influence of changes in welfare benefits, labour market conditions, and the availability of unemployment insurance on welfare use during this period is examined using two distinct, but complementary approaches. The first approach investigates this issue from an aggregate standpoint, using Survey of Consumer Finances micro data to construct welfare usage rates for employable singles without children (male and female) and lone mothers. Separate analyses are performed for each of these sub-groups using aggregate province level data. The second approach attacks the issue from a microeconomic standpoint, employing duration analysis to examine the path leading individuals from employment to welfare receipt. Using the 1988-90 longitudinal file of the Labour Market Activity Survey, semi-parametric duration models are estimated to determine how the job loss, reemployment and welfare take-up processes are affected by incentives in welfare benefits, labour market conditions, availability of unemployment insurance as well as demographic variables. The estimates from the duration analysis are applied to administrative data on inflows of persons into the pool of non-employed to simulate and decompose rates of welfare incidence over the 1984-95 period. Results from these two approaches present a relatively consistent picture of welfare use in Canada during the 1990s. Both approaches find strong evidence of important labour market effects. Thus, the economic downturn of the early 1990s played a significant role in the growth of welfare use during this period, particularly in Ontario and Quebec. The evidence concerning the importance of interactions with the unemployment insurance system and changes in benefit generosity is mixed. Both UI effects and benefit effects are found to be important determinants of welfare use but only among specific types of families. The simulation results indicate these factors can account for only a minor amount of the variation in predicted welfare incidence in the 1990s.

Clients involved with child protection systems due to issues of neglect are known to have multiple needs. The issues that they confront are personal, situational, and social in nature. The emphasis on risk reduction in many jurisdictions within North America has meant that needs have been given less priority. The aim of the exploratory study was to gain a better understanding of both the nature of needs and risks in cases of child neglect in Ontario, as well as the similarities and differences in the views of clients and child protection workers. It is posited that through the acquisition of knowledge in those areas, that improvements can be made in assessing and planning, in creating agreed upon expectations about the objectives of intervention, and in developing a better balance between the addressing of needs and risks. / For the study, an instrument was designed to measure client perceptions of their problems and needs. It was compared with workers' perceptions of risk as contained in the risk assessment instrument completed by all child protection workers in Ontario. The Client Perception of Problems and Needs Scale was administered to 77 parents receiving services from Family and Children's Services of Renfrew County due to concerns about child neglect. / The finding that participants felt their needs were greatest in dealing with issues of stress, child behaviour and mental health issues, and in coping with socio-economic disadvantage was congruent with the few studies that have been conducted on the perceptions of child protection clients about their needs and problems. The analysis of the risk assessment data provided evidence that reliance on risk reduction at the expense of needs-based approaches, is not warranted. Few similarities were found in the perceptions of clients and workers about the issues of greatest concern. However, it was surprising that few concerns emerged about the clients' living conditions, or the affective interaction between clients and their children. Finally, the study demonstrated that the participants were able to recognize their problems, used various coping strategies for dealing with them, and were able to articulate strengths and resources on which they relied.

Stress and burnout have received a great deal of attention in the child welfare field. This has been due to such issues as the high workload, the complexity of the cases, working with resistant and at times violent clients and the negative work environment of the youth protection agency. These factors have a detrimental effect on the worker's personal and professional resources and undermine the healthy functioning of the agency, all of which ultimately affects best practice with clients. One way in which child welfare organizations could make an effort towards reclaiming clinical practice is to engage in training for its workforce. Training can benefit practitioners by improving their skills and knowledge and this can lead to greater job satisfaction. Agency functioning is improved by having a trained workforce as well as social workers who are knowledgeable regarding agency policies, values and models of intervention. Children and families ultimately benefit by working with practitioners who are equipped with the appropriate skills. These benefits for workers, clients and the agency cannot materialize unless barriers are removed and changes within the agency take place in order to support the effective transfer of knowledge and training.

Much attention has been devoted in the social sciences to the reorganisation of the moral order of society (Smart, 1999). This reorganisation means that responsibility for welfare is now located with the individual. In spite of the salience given to privately held responsibility for welfare in social policy, little work has been carried out on the discourses underpinning this way of distributing responsibility (Finch and Mason, 1993, Duncan and Edwards, 1999, Rowlingson, 2002). Work on this issue is especially timely as New Labour continues the privatisation of responsibility for welfare in a way that, many people believe, neglects a moral dimension. Instead, New Labour favours a more ethical construction that exhorts the individual to do her duty by which they mean she should work for her own betterment and well-being (Levitas, 1998, Giddens, 1998, Jordan, 1998, Lund, 1999). This work begins by situating responsibility as a historically variable and discursive construction, uncovering how the understanding of responsibility changed as the problem focusing the minds of social engineers altered from one of poverty to one of security in the 1970s. While responsibility has only recently been identified as a particular issue for social policy academics (Roche, 1992, Dwyer, 1998, Dean et aI., 2004) philosophers and sociologists have paid close attention to responsibility over the past decade (Bauman, 1993, 1995, Habermas, 1990, 1995, Apel, 1989, 1996, Etzioni, 1995, Schmidtz, 1998, Goodin, 1998). Building on the issues raised by these authors, this work presents a qualitative study of government press releases, interviews with benefits recipients, members of the general public, welfare advisors and welfare benefits administrators to explore the rational structure of the discourses of responsibility for welfare. As a result, I develop the argument that while the reconfigured moral order promotes a private acceptance of responsibility for welfare, people still want a way of interpreting responsibility taking in a more public way.

Bibliography: leaves [271]-280. / Microfiche. / vi, 280 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

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