As economic inequality in the United States continues to increase, the ways in which Americans cope with and conceptualize the issue itself as well as the disadvantaged groups affected by it has become increasingly salient features of their political attitudes. While important research has been done, particularly by Bartels (2009), showing that Americans share widespread consensus that economic inequality is a negative feature of American society and that Americans do not harbor any innate antipathy towards the poor, more work needs to be done to understand what activates Americans’ sympathy for the poor. This study, building on Burden and Klofstad’s (2005) assessment into the effects of cognitive and affective priming, seeks to understand how issue and subgroup framing alters political expression. I find that the use of the word “feel” in survey questions—as opposed to the word “think”—makes respondents more likely to hold poor subgroups less accountable for their economic circumstances. However, this differential outcome does not manifest when applied to policy-based questions. This indicates that invoking person- or group-based arguments along with affective signifiers shows the best promise for activating sympathy for the poor among Americans.

This thesis breaks new ground in Poor Law Studies. It isolates for detailed scrutiny the treatment of a particular social group, the aged poor. Traditional sources have been approached for new answers to new questions, and in so doing, new methods of source exploitation have been evolved and utilised. The sources have been asked to provide information about dependent old age; the relationship between poverty and the length of the working life; sex differences; the proportion of the population which ended life as parish paupers. Key research has centred around the parish pension, its function, size and real value; crucially, the ability or otherwise of the pensioner to subsist on it. Consideration has also been given to the other components of the network of relief measures adopted by the parishes; relief in kind; housing and the standard of living; medical and nursing care; the role of the workhouse. The investigation has been carried beyond the limits of relief provided by the mechanisms of the Old Poor Law alone, to include external supportive agencies, such as the support of family and charity, which includes both charitable trusts and indiscriminate giving. Some light is thrown on ways the aged contributed to their own maintenance. The thesis tests the general hypothesis that all these various supportive systems produced an interlocking apparatus which involved the whole community in the support of the old, while to discuss their treatment within the limits of the poor law only, results in a narrow, incomplete and distorted narrative, serving only to perpetuate the traditional historical view of a harsh, punitive treatment, needing reassessment in the light of recent historical developments.

viii, 88 p. : ill. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In recent years, researchers have taken a particular interest in the spatial concentration of poverty due to evidence suggesting that people liVing within certain densities of poverty are more likely to experience certain problems or what have become known as neighborhood effects. This analysis is a quantitative study, focused on describing changes in poverty concentration between 1990 and 2000 in United States metropolitan areas. The study reports changes seen at the commonly used 40% poverty concentration threshold between 1990 and 2000, while at the same time considering other concentration thresholds and how changing the threshold by which we evaluate poverty informs the general trends policy makers receive information about when changes in poverty occur. / Committee in Charge: Neil Bania, Ph.D., Chair; Jessica Greene, Ph.D.; Jean Stockard, Ph.D.

Targeting the ultra poor (TUP) is an integrated, grant-based, anti-poverty intervention in rural Bangladesh. It combines productive asset grants (mainly livestock), confidence building, enterprise training, healthcare, cash and social security support for protecting the ultra poor's consumption, promoting their wealth accumulation and preventing the negative effects of illness. This thesis examines TUP's effects on health (i.e., physical, behavioural, psychological and promotional) and well-being (i.e., food consumption) of ultra poor people. It analyses the impact dynamics (i.e., short-, medium- and long-terms) of health and well-being, food consumption vulnerability to shocks and TUP's differential effects on well-being. The thesis examines these issues constructing a more reliable matched panel from the BRAC's original balanced panel dataset, which is quasi-experimental in nature. The estimates using conditional difference-in-difference (DID) approach with household fixed effects indicate that TUP has had beneficial effects on health and well-being including reduced illness, healthcare sought from modern practitioners, self-reported health improvements, clean water, safer sanitation and improvements in overall wellbeing. However, these health outcomes are not sustained in the long-term (even decay) because of the program design and the lack of household preferences to maintain and invest in health outcomes (e.g. sanitation). In contrast, findings confirm the long-term beneficial effects on well-being. It also suggests the use of BRAC's original sample may lead to a downward bias in TUP's impact assessment on health and well-being as it does not adequately control for the differences in initial conditions among the treatment and control households. Analysis reveals that both health and non-health shocks are prevalent to ultra poor households and are associated with their food consumption vulnerability. However, TUP smooths food consumption through direct and indirect mitigating effects. The results also suggest that being a TUP household improves access to NGOs for shock-induced borrowing. However, food consumption insurance role does come at the cost of production efficiency. Further empirical investigation using the quantile treatment effects (QTE) and the conditional quantile difference-in-difference (QDID) approaches point to a minor differential effect on well-being in the medium- and long-terms. Finally, the QDID approach shows that though TUP works best for the poorest of the ultra poor, it impacts well-being positively from the lower to the upper tail of the food consumption distribution. Therefore, estimation methods used to the matched panel confirm a positive and lasting impact of TUP on food consumption, which supports the extreme poverty-alleviating effects of TUP in rural Bangladesh.

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The organisation of this thesis is thematic, in order to disentangle the complexity and significance of the poor laws in a local area. It is a local study of poverty and the operation of the poor laws. The aim of this detailed survey is to consider the role of poor law administration in Surrey within the national context, and by examining the operation of the poor law at the parish level, to understand the experiences of real people, both ratepayer and the poor. The thesis also considers whether the old poor law was fundamentally defective or whether it can be viewed as a valid response to increasing poverty. It stresses, the relationship between the central and local authorities and the administration of poor relief in rural Surrey outside the Metropolitan area and the hundred of Brixton, Wallington and Kingston for the period 1815–1834 (see Map 1.0). It recognises that before 1834, variety rather than uniformity characterised the administration of poor relief in England and Wales. It also argues, that power and authority, within the English state was the product of negotiation between the centre and the localities. Chapter One deals with the historiography of the old poor law and chapter Two considers the decline of rural industry in Surrey, coupled with continuing economic problems in agriculture and falling demand for labour, which had a devastating effect in rural parishes. Chapter Three details the administrative system of poor relief during a period that saw costs of relief rise, while Chapter Four examines the operation of the relief system at parish level outside the workhouse. Chapter Five examines the provision of indoor relief in Surrey, and Chapter Six considers the position of the ratepayers and their ability and willingness to pay increased poor rates, at a time of agricultural depression combined with rising unemployment. Chapter Seven considers the position of the labourer, when endemic poverty meant that a labourer’s ability to provide for his family without asking the parish for assistance was more a matter of luck than personal industry. Seasonal unemployment exacerbated the situation, forcing farm workers on to the parish for assistance, especially in winter months. Chapter Eight considers the unrest of 1830–32, the so-called Swing Riots. Many studies of poor law only make fleeting reference to the riots. This study sees the disturbances as an integral part of the work and includes a detailed investigation into the riots within the social and cultural context. In Surrey, as in other parts of rural southern England, they took place against the background of the progressive pauperisation of labourers, when parishes were finding it more difficult to provide relief for the growing numbers of unemployed, able-bodied agricultural labourers. Labourers saw the riots as a rising against unemployment and the abuses of the poor law system that seemed unable to provide sufficient relief for their needs. The thesis ends by examining the reaction of the parishes immediately after the riots before the introduction of the 1834 poor law, when attempts were made at parish level to alleviate the situation and to stop further unrest.

Climate change affects water resources suitable for human consumption, transforming water quality and quantity. These changes exacerbate vulnerabilities of human society, increasing the importance of adequately protecting and managing water resources and supplies. Growing urban populations provide an additional stress on existing water resources, particularly increasing the vulnerability of people living in poor neighbourhoods. In urban areas, official responses to climate change are currently dominated by Disaster Risk Management (DRM); however, more recently Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has emerged to support the integration of climate change adaptation in water resource planning. Based on a case study of the city of Douala, Cameroon, the thesis examines the operational implementation of both frameworks, combining observations, semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders and a survey carried out in three poor communities. The research highlights the challenges of improving the joining of both frameworks to adequately reach the urban poor, whilst being alert to, and responsive to, the autonomous adaptation strategies the poor autonomously implement and develop. At present, the IWRM and DRM frameworks are implemented separately and do not clearly reach the urban poor who face three major water-related issues (flooding, water-related diseases and water access). Other institutional water-related measures and projects are carried out by authorities in the low-income communities, but the institutions still struggle to manage the delivery of basic services and protect these communities against hazards. The lack of effective outcomes of the institutional water-related measures and projects has led to a strong process of autonomous adaptation by inhabitants of poor communities. Driven by their adaptive capacity supported by the abundance in groundwater resources, they use coping and adaptive strategies to reduce their vulnerability to water-related issues, such as alternative water suppliers. Similarly, the frequency of the flooding hazard has led the urban poor to develop practices to minimise disaster impacts. However, the autonomous strategies developed face limitations caused by the natural and build environment. In this context, the autonomous strategies of the urban poor and the strategies appear to have a strong influence on each other. While institutional projects have initiated spontaneous strategies, other strategies reduce the willingness of the low-income neighbourhoods to participate in the implementation of official, externally derived development projects.

This study is an attempt to discover relationships between particular factors which we felt would be indicators of poverty. Of the many factors suggested by the literature of poverty, we investigated relationships between income level, employment status, health conditions, education level, and age. Using the Vancouver data collected by the Nu-life Study, we designed a program which would indicate the nature and strength of the relationship between these factors. From a definition of our variables, a model was designed using as a basis income adequacy. The available data contained information on other variables which we used, such as - marital status, sex, and number of persons per household. From this the hypothetical construct was formulated around hypotheses relating to four groups which were configurations of the employment status and income adequacy variables. Our statistical analysis was based on the chi square method for measuring significance and consistency. The contigency co-efficient was employed to measure the relatedness of the variables. We found that there were indeed positive links between the factors referred to. However, these links were not as strong as we had anticipated. Although the project could not establish cause-effect relationships, the findings do help to establish some of the components in the poverty cycle. These components would not seem to have equal strength in determining level of income. Further research might investigate why some of these factors had greater bearing on income level than others. For example, the level of education seemed to have a greater effect than did the health factor. Consequently, we see this study as a step in determining the characteristics of poverty. / Arts, Faculty of / Social Work, School of / Graduate

A case study of seven religious institutions in the Greater Boston Area, this paper attempts to analyze the similarities and differences between religious-based and state-based social service programs beginning by examining the motivations of religious leaders and the influence various conceptions of poverty have on religious poverty programs and outreach. The paper begins with an overview of the current literature on the effects of government welfare programs and policies on the populations they target. It then continues with common categorizations of poverty used by scholars to understand government programs and concludes by using these categories as a starting point for understanding the points of view of local religious leaders towards the people they serve.