| 来源类型 | Report |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| American Family Diaries: An ethnographic approach to understanding barriers to opportunity | |
| Aparna Mathur; Robert Doar; Nicholas Eberstadt; Kathryn Edin; Bruce D. Meyer; Robert A. Moffitt; Sally Satel; W. Bradford Wilcox | |
| 发表日期 | 2018-06-25 |
| 出版年 | 2018 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Executive Summary Ethnographic research, which involves extensive observation and interviews, provides detailed information on individuals and households not available through other methods. Unlike typical surveys, which provide quantitative data on predetermined questions, ethnography involves more open-ended interviews with opportunities to explore difficult complex issues and obtain information not available through traditional approaches. A combination of qualitative information from ethnographic research and quantitative information from administrative data can provide richer insights and a more complete understanding of policy issues than from either source alone. Ethnography has featured in several important books by prominent sociologists, and more recently in economic research. These studies provide in-depth perspectives on their subjects and provide crucial context to understand their circumstances and decisions. However, ethnographic methods suffer from their own limitations, particularly selection bias, attrition, and subjects changing their behavior in response to monitoring. Careful study design can mitigate some of these problems, and these limitations are offset to some degree by the advantages of ethnography’s open-ended approach. We propose a study aiming to answer questions relating to barriers to work and opportunity: What is holding people back? Why are they not accessing all of the programs for which they are potentially eligible? Why is some money not reaching them? And how are they supplementing incomes if what they get through these programs is insufficient? Our study would focus on able-bodied adults without dependents, using data from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Many of the barriers identified in the report—including lack of education, problems with job-training programs, criminal histories, marginal tax rates, drug abuse, and lack of work history—are salient challenges for this demographic group. Introduction Ethnographic research is gaining traction as a means to explore more deeply the lives of study participants in their daily environments. As opposed to typical household surveys—which are often conducted by government agencies and provide quantitative data on household measures of well-being, such as income, consumption, and welfare access—ethnographic research relies on qualitative data collected through interviews and extended observation. It requires following individuals and households beyond simple questionnaires to get a better understanding of the motivations, behaviors, and attitudes toward the challenges they face. A combination of qualitative information from ethnographic research and quantitative data from administrative data can provide richer insights and a more complete understanding of policy issues than either set of data by itself. In recent years, several sociologists and some economists have written books and papers relying on ethnographic research to document the lives of people struggling with low-wage work or facing homelessness. Kathryn Edin has written several such books with topics including the plight of single mothers on welfare,1 why low-income mothers were bearing children without marrying,2 and unwed fathers and the problems faced by low-income men.3 Her most recent book includes a look at those who appear to be in extreme poverty and the multiple ways in which they make ends meet.4 Matthew Desmond’s Evicted documents the struggles of eight men and women in Milwaukee in their search for stable housing as they are evicted from their homes. While Desmond’s focus is on housing and homelessness, the lives of these families are characterized by drug addiction and incarceration, dependence on food banks and churches to provide some basic needs, and all the hardships that come with living in poverty.5 In a less conventional approach, Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider use ethnographic research methods to collect detailed and frequent data on families’ cash flows. In their important new book, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty, Morduch and Schneider detail the financial challenges faced by poor and middle-income households. The frequency and detail of their data provide insights unavailable from monthly or annual surveys, which in turn are complemented by the qualitative insights of the many interviews from their ethnographic research.6 Other recent, prominent books, such as J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, are not technically ethnographies because they are written as memoirs. However, Vance’s memoir provides a comprehensive, qualitative exploration of how communities in the Appalachian region fared after the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs. While economic insecurity clearly plays a role in the lives of these people, the author also holds a certain culture partly to blame for people’s misfortunes.7 In contrast, Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story profiles people who lost their jobs in automobile manufacturing in the town of Janesville, Wisconsin. She tracks their stories after the loss of these jobs, their attempts to retrain and to return to school, and their struggles to adapt to different work environments as well as the loss of stability in their family lives.8 Finally, Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis highlights the inequality in opportunity facing children from poor families compared to children from richer families. These differences show up in everyday lives as the lack of time that poor parents have to read to their kids, less time spent together at family dinners, and the inability to sign up kids for piano lessons, clubs, and sports activities. This book also discusses the decline in social trust and institutions, as well as the loss in family and job stability among middle-class working-age families.9 While several other books could be reviewed and mentioned here, the lesson from these diverse studies is that there is a great need to understand how our policies can better serve those in need. Often, well-intentioned policies may not reach or work well for significant demographic groups, and it is important to understand why and how to improve the design of those programs. Looking only at budget outlays, one can argue that we spend enormous amounts of money every year on antipoverty programs. Michael Tanner estimates that this reaches almost $1 trillion in combined federal and state spending on different programs to help low-income people with cash, food, education, health care, and housing.10 Yet what is holding people back? Why are they not accessing all the programs for which they are potentially eligible? Why is some money not reaching them? And how are they supplementing incomes if what they get through these programs is insufficient? These are some of the questions motivating our working group. In seeking to answer them, researchers face two challenges: (1) designing surveys to ask the right questions and obtain accurate answers and (2) identifying families most in need, who may often be left out of traditional data collection methods. We begin this report with a short overview of how experimentation has come to occupy an important place, not just in sociology but also in economic policy. We then provide an overview of the research methods employed in traditional ethnographic research, particularly relying on the studies outlined above, and how these methods have been applied in economic research. We also review some of the advantages and disadvantages of ethnographic research methods. Finally, we build on the conversations in our working group to outline a proposal for an ethnographic study and what we hope to accomplish. While experimentation and ethnographic research may appear as different approaches to answer policy questions, they share a fundamental similarity in the use of an innovative survey design to get at answers that may be elusive or tough to discern when using more traditional data sets. For example, as we review in the next section, experimentation in economics has allowed us to answer questions relating to racial discrimination in hiring, which would not be possible with direct surveys or administrative data. At the same time, ethnographic research has allowed us to delve into the lives of poor families to understand how such families meet their need for cash and income and their day-to-day struggles. Again, such understanding may never truly come from the use of large data sets, especially because many questions may never even be asked in the survey. More broadly, one can think of both experimentation and ethnographic research as types of field research that focus on a particular group within a broader population and that aim to go beyond traditional analysis to answer deeper and more difficult questions. Read the full report. Notes |
| 主题 | Poverty Studies |
| 标签 | Economic opportunity ; Economics of Work and the Family ; employment ; Human Dignity Project ; opportunity ; Poverty studies ; SNAP ; social welfare ; Unemployment ; Welfare reform |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/american-family-diaries-an-ethnographic-approach-to-understanding-barriers-to-opportunity/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206566 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Aparna Mathur,Robert Doar,Nicholas Eberstadt,et al. American Family Diaries: An ethnographic approach to understanding barriers to opportunity. 2018. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| American-Family-Diar（846KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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