Дисертації з теми "Public welfare administration"

The mission of public child welfare agencies is to help children grow up in families that can provide safety, permanency and well-being. Child welfare systems are notoriously complex and workloads heavy, but all participate in evaluation with the goal of continuous practice improvement. The Qualitative Service Review (QSR) is a tool designed to provide feedback about case practice and to identify trends influencing practice. Feasibly, QSR cannot be performed on every case, so an important element of its utility is the degree to which workers can apply learning from one case to others. Little is known about frontline workers’ experiences with QSR and how these reviews influence application of QSR generated knowledge and practice. Fourteen frontline workers in three state child welfare agencies participated in individual interviews about their experience with QSR and its influence on their practice. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method to describe perceptions of QSR and practice learning. Findings suggest that workers perceive QSR as a practice improvement strategy as well as an evaluation, that it requires a significant time investment, and that it highlights areas of opportunity where best practice expectations can be articulated more fully. Additional themes about the practice environment emerged. Workers described their emotional investment in practice and their perceptions that multiple systems influence practice. The neoliberal influence on public agencies could be heard in participants’ observations that the child welfare work environment is changing from one that measured performance through interaction with families to one that promotes accountability by data collection. These findings have implications for child welfare practitioners and administrators, researchers, staff responsible for conducting QSR reviews, and social work educators.

The fast and easy global movement of capital throughout the financial system, from lenders to borrowers and through intermediaries and financial market participants, has been recognized as a source of instability associated with illiquidity and financial crises. The purpose of this research was to better understand how regulation either enables or constrains capital movement. The theoretical framework comprised 2 contrasting public policymaking models, Arrow's rational-comprehensive model and Kingdon's garbage can model, which were used to derive opposing hypotheses. The research question addressed the nature of the relationship between Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) regulations and the flow of capital into Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) when lenders share their borrower-related loan risks through intermediaries with other market participants. This quantitative study was a quasiexperimental time series design incorporating an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model using secondary data published by the U.S. government. The 2 independent variables were regulatory periods involving 2 CDSs regulations and the dependent variable was capital in the U.S. financial system that is deployed to CMOs. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000's ARIMA model (1,2,1) was significant at p < .05 and was negatively correlated to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008's ARIMA model (1,1,0), r = -.91, n = 18, p < .001. These results suggest that regulations cannot be relaxed and then reinstated with predictable results. The potential for positive social change is from stable financial institutions that mutually benefit depositors and borrowers.

This dissertation studies refugee resettlement in the U.S. and develops a framework for understanding a city's capacity for employing refugees who resettle in the U.S. The study exposes the tension between the humanitarian mission of the U.S. Refugee Program and the objective of immediate employment after arrival.

The research questions include: 1) How do contextual factors in the destination city relate to refugee employment outcomes? 2) How might deeper consideration of the relationship between city factors and refugee economic outcomes inform policy making in refugee resettlement program?

A framework derived from the literatures on urban policy and refugees explores how place-based factors influence initial refugee employment with an embedded comparative case study research design (3 cases, 6 units each). Interview data and 2010 employment outcomes stratified by country of origin and English ability collected on-site in 2011, in addition to public data sets from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics were analyzed. By comparing outcomes of refugees with similar demographic profiles across 3 cities, the research design explores how local policies, attitudes of the receiving community, economic opportunities, ethnic networks, and refugee resettlement organizations influence refugee employment outcomes.

The study finds that when comparing pairs of cases, higher refugee employment rates 8 months after arrival are associated with higher relevant job availability and accessibility in the metropolitan area. Job availability is characterized by lower unemployment, a larger low skill job market, a smaller ratio of refugees to metropolitan area population, resettlement agency outreach to employers, larger co-national communities, linguistic clusters in places of employment, a higher percentage of English speakers in the linguistic group, and Right-to-Work policies. The focus on place-based factors fills a gap in previous refugee literature with a general theory about how the local context of U.S. cities interact with refugee employment. The findings have implications for the U.S. Refugee Program's allocations strategy, terms of cash assistance, outcome measurement, and funding structure. Recognizing the employment capacity of a city for refugees enables program administrators to anticipate the cost implications of resettling refugees in that city.

This dissertation examines how state policymakers develop, evaluate, and select tax policy options, based on case studies of tax policy decisions in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia from 2007 to 2010.

States have been the main locus of tax policy change in the U.S. in recent years, varying widely in their choices of which taxes to raise or cut, and whether to adjust tax rates or the tax base. Because public finance and budgeting research has focused largely on appropriations, as well as tax decisions at the federal level, the dissertation seeks to expand the knowledge base about state tax policy formulation. This is a critically important policy area because state tax systems are threatened by the growth of services, the advent of electronic commerce, capital flows that cross state and national borders, and the aging of the population.

Based on a mixed-methods research strategy involving documentary evidence as well as interviews with 10 to 15 key policy participants in each state, the dissertation found that the three states vary widely in their capacity to generate and refine tax policy options, reflecting ideological and institutional differences. Nevertheless, the states were very similar in one respect: each state made only tangential efforts to expand its tax base and curtail tax expenditures during the worst fiscal crisis in decades. This pattern suggests that it will be difficult for states to carry out the reformers' mantra to broaden tax bases and lower tax rates, a conclusion that is supported by national data.

The case study states also relied heavily on "selective parity" – aligning their tax rates and tax bases with at least some neighboring jurisdictions or comparable states – in making tax policy choices. This practice suggests that states will avoid the gridlock that has marked federal tax policy, because the widespread use of benchmarking provides a rationale for tax increases as well as cuts, while still serving as a moderating factor that pulls states toward regional or national means. States are picking spots on a spectrum of service levels and tax burdens that reflect voter preferences but are also constrained by national and regional norms.

A general hierarchy of taxes constructed from the case studies and also reflected in national data shows that narrowly-targeted levies (such as health facility taxes) and "sin" taxes (such as cigarette taxes) were the most likely to be increased, while broad-based taxes with the strongest revenue performance (such as the personal income tax) were the least likely to be increased. This pattern reinforces the conclusion that states are neglecting the long-term revenue capacity of their tax systems, a finding that is reinforced by a continuous stream of small tax cuts granted in each state, interrupted periodically by larger tax increases – a pattern of "punctuated incrementalism".

Mass notification systems exist to provide rapid notification to members of the public during emergency situations. Since the middle of the 20 ^th century, these systems have evolved to incorporate a variety of different communications methods as technology has advanced. While local governments have used mass notification systems for many years, institutions of higher education generally only began using such systems following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. This study attempted to examine trends relating to mass notification systems and to identify differences in how they have been implemented both in local government and in higher education. While the study was not able to identify statistically valid results due to low response rates, it appears that such differences do exist and further research in this area is needed.

Efforts are currently underway in the US federal context to improve and strengthen evaluation practice and increase the use of evaluation results to inform policies and programs. However, these efforts remain unrealized, due partly to the lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework that views evaluation and related organizational processes and institutions as part of a larger system. Early intuitive theoretical taxonomies of evaluation policy suffer from the lack of connection to specific examples and instances, and are missing clear classification criteria that would allow practical application. To generate a grounded taxonomy of evaluation policy, this study surveyed members of the American Evaluation Association in 2009, asking them to generate examples of evaluation policy, and then to sort and rate these suggested policies. Results are analyzed using the concept mapping method of Trochim (1989), which first translates aggregate sorting decisions into conceptual “distances” on a two-dimensional dot map, then uses hierarchical cluster analysis to generate groupings of ideas. These groupings become the foundation for categories in a theoretical taxonomy. Findings reveal several different dimensions by which participants grouped evaluation policies, including the dimensions of “value” and “policy mechanism.” A values-by-mechanisms taxonomy and instructions for its use in an evaluation policy inventory process are proposed.

The report, A Crucible Moment, published in 2012 by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement described a crisis in higher education surrounding the lack of civic learning and engagement opportunities for students. This crisis has led to decreased political participation and a general lack of knowledge in civics education (National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012). Educating students for citizenship in America's colleges and universities will assist with sustaining the country's democracy by engendering a sense of civic responsibility in young adults that will last throughout their lifetime. This qualitative case study examined the relationship between two institutions of higher education (IHEs) and AmeriCorps programs to determine how the partnerships operated and whether they addressed the recommendations for higher education cited in A Crucible Moment.

IHEs are using A Crucible Moment as a guiding document to think about civic learning and democratic engagement. While many are in the process of creating new initiatives and programs to address those issues, this study focuses on two existing programs that may provide a framework for strategically integrating civic engagement into higher education using a readily available government resource—AmeriCorps. With recent budget cuts impacting education, it is difficult for many IHEs to obtain additional funding to support initiatives directly related to student learning. As a result, finding resources to implement civic learning and democratic engagement opportunities that are often perceived as tangential to the education process is nearly impossible. AmeriCorps, now in its 20^th year of implementation, has had a steady stream of funding and bipartisan support from the government over the years. IHEs that sponsor an AmeriCorps program have the potential to civically engage students and promote mutually beneficial community partnerships.

Using inteorganizational collaboration theory as a framework, I examined two different models of IHE-AmeriCorps partnerships. Based on the levels of collaboration, I was able to assess the degree to which these types of partnerships could be feasible at distinctly different IHEs given their organizational structure and resources. Although the findings of this research are not generalizable, they provide insights into how IHE-AmeriCorps partnerships operate and demonstrate that, in the cases examined, they do implement the key recommendations of A Crucible Moment. As a result, an IHE-AmeriCorps partnership could be an effective and relatively inexpensive way for an IHE to enhance their civic engagement opportunities.

While South Korea is ranked high in education, economies and technological development, the level of South Koreans' happiness has not grown simultaneously. This fact contradicts the common sense that improvements in living standards, such as income or education, lead to gains in happiness or individual wellbeing. In order to examine the phenomenon of decreasing perceived individual wellbeing in light of increasing income levels, I analyze the relationship between societal expectations/pressure and happiness in South Korea, using data from the World Value survey conducted in 2010. The uniquely high concentration on human capital in South Korea has played a major factor for extreme competitiveness. Since the financial crisis in 1997, the competitive job market has produced few job opportunities, which has caused a high level of social pressure. The major finding of this study is that the impact of societal expectations on unhappiness increases as people get older and it is more powerful among people of lower income. Also, social pressure has a greater negative effect on happiness for females than males in South Korea. Even when controlling for independent variables, including job security, wages, and high living costs, I show social pressure to have a first order impact on perceived well-being among Korean citizens. From a policy perspective, low levels of happiness can ultimately cause social instability and loss of human capital. Expected policy implications are increasing the number of college entrance exams and fostering work life balance initiatives. In this sense, the findings of this paper can serve as a guideline for the South Korean government not only to improve the overall economic productivity of South Korean society, but also enhance the quality of life along important societal dimensions.

The growth of mobile phone use has paralleled increased reports of identity theft. Identity theft can result in financial loss and threats to a victim's personal safety. Although trends in identity theft are well-known, less is known about individual cell phone users' attitudes toward identity theft and the extent to which they connect it to cell phone use. The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine how cell phone use is affected by attitudes toward privacy and identity theft. The study was based on social impact theory, according to which people's attitudes and behavior are affected by the strength and immediacy of others' attitudes and behavior. The research questions concerned the extent to which participants connected cell phone use with decreasing privacy and increasing cybercrime, how the use of biometrics affected cell phone users' attitudes and behavior, and what steps can be taken to reduce the misuse of private information associated with cell phone use. Data collection consisted of personal interviews with representatives from 3 groups: a private biometrics company, individual cell phone users who earn more than $55,000 a year, and individual cell phone users who earn less than $55,000 a year. Interviews were transcribed and coded for themes and patterns. Findings showed that interviewees were more likely to see identity theft as a problem among the public at large than in the industries in which they worked. Participants recommended a variety of measures to improve cell phone security and to reduce the likelihood of identity theft: passwords, security codes, voice or fingerprint recognition, and encryption. The implications for positive social change include informing government officials and individual users about the use and abuse of cell phones in order to decrease violations of privacy and identity theft while still promoting national security.

The 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center and the subsequent anthrax attacks highlighted the inability of an antiquated public health system in the United States to respond effectively to emergencies. Little documentation exists to define how public health agencies can improve performance. The overarching research question was the extent to which drills and exercises improve performance in public health emergencies. Adult learning theory and deliberate practice theory were explored in this context. The research data were from 50 state public health departments, which were required to report performance information to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data were examined using Poisson analysis and logistic regression. Results indicated that drills and exercises had no statistically significant impact on public health performance for the 3 performance measures examined; of all predictors, what explained the most variance in reaching performance targets was the number of real emergencies to which a health department had responded in the past. Performing drills and exercises did not predict the likelihood of reaching performance targets. These findings have implications for positive social change for Congressional leaders and other government representatives. Such public servants could use this information to guide their efforts to redirect public health emergency preparedness funds away from drills and exercises and toward other fundamental public health activities. These more focused efforts could facilitate the improvement of public health laboratory capacity, the training of field epidemiologists, and the advancements in technology for enhanced reporting and surveillance.

There is an emerging consensus among public health practitioners and policymakers alike that, given the existence of shared risk factors, the treatment of food insecurity and obesity requires integrated research and policy action. Referred to as the food systems approach, this perspective applies an ecological public health model for the conceptualization of the shared food environments from which food insecurity and obesity stem, and identifies opportunities for intervention centered on the promotion of healthy and sustainable food systems. One such food systems-based intervention that has garnered significant support is the redemption of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits at farmers' markets. However, the vast majority of studies that have examined the implementation of SNAP at farmers' markets have been conducted within a single market and have been designed to measure program impact, rather than the contextual determinants of program adoption and success. This study operationalizes the food systems approach and ecological model in order to examine the relationship between the implementation of SNAP at farmers' markets and macro-level physical food environment characteristics. Results indicate that the prevalence of SNAP-authorized farmers' markets is positively related to food system characteristics relating to local food production and distribution. The findings of this study contribute to the legitimacy of the food system approach and its application of an ecological public health model in the identification, formulation, and implementation of interventions designed to combat food insecurity and obesity. When enriched by the science of food environment assessment and measurement, the ecological model employed by the food systems approach provides a suitable framework for the systematic analysis of the macro-environmental context in which food systems-based interventions are implemented.

The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which teachers' academic and professional characteristics predict their classroom effectiveness, as measured by value-added indicators of their students' growth. Teachers' college transcripts, service records, and district records of classroom assignments are used to examine undergraduate content and pedagogy courses, graduate work, and professional experience; the district's own value-added indices are utilized as the measure of teacher effectiveness. The study examines a subset of 318 teachers who were continuously employed over a four-year period at one of 19 "hard-to-staff" secondary schools in one of the nation's largest school districts. The study finds that local experience and college coursework in the teacher's assigned content modestly predict the teacher's classroom effectiveness, which has implications for hiring practices in public schools.

This dissertation presents a comprehensive framework to analyze municipal water supply reforms in developing countries by adapting the institutional analysis and development framework (IAD) to this sector. It does so by providing a detailed description of all the meaningful components of the IAD framework that apply to municipal water reforms and also provides a structure to evaluate these reforms. It then applies the adapted framework to the municipal water reforms in Jakarta, Indonesia to get a fresh perspective on the situation there.

The application of the framework to Jakarta yields a number of findings, not widely discussed in the literature. For instance it becomes clear that the success of a system involving a diverse set of institutions requires a thorough understanding of the interactions between the different actors, not just a study of the actors themselves. Also, a variety of factors exogenous to the players—like biophysical factors, or the characteristics of the community or rules on the ground—often play crucial roles. These need to be considered while shaping policy. A number of such lessons have been presented in this dissertation.

Finally, this dissertation draws insights from this adaptation to Jakarta which can provide lessons to similar cases in the developing world.

Scholars have proposed numerous explanations as to why the Department of Homeland Security has struggled to mature as an organization and effectively conduct its core mission. We propose an alternative viewpoint that the department lacks key legal authorities and necessitates key organizational transfer in order to rationalize its portfolio. We examine these points through review of legal authorities in select mission areas and through a resource analysis of activities conducted throughout the federal government to execute the homeland security mission. The analysis leads to specific recommendations for transfers and authorities and suggestions as to how the political environment might coalesce around engendering these changes.

In the last two decades, openness of public budgeting processes garnered the attention of governments, non-governmental organizations and donors, evidenced by a proliferation of budget transparency and accountability initiatives worldwide (McGee & Gaventa, 2010; De Renzio & Angemi, 2012). Designed to facilitate productive citizen-government interaction around resource allocation, open budgeting initiatives should contribute to strengthening public trust in political institutions (Sayogo & Harrison, 2012; Hakhverdian & Mayne, 2012). Using corruption perceptions as a measure of public trust, this study analyzes the relationship between the openness evident in the budgeting processes of 70 countries and corruption perceptions over a five-year period, 2006-2010. As a traditionally obtuse, closed process, public resource allocation and expenditure is an arena particularly ripe for "wealth-maximizing" civil servants to engage in corruption (Spada, 2009; Rose-Ackerman, 2004). Open budgeting processes that improve citizen awareness of, and provide opportunities for their participation in, government budgeting processes should theoretically improve, not only the incidence of actual corruption, but also citizens' perceptions regarding the level of corruption within their government (Anderson & Tverdova, 2003; Martinez-Moyano et al., 2007). It was hypothesized that citizens in countries with greater transparency, consultation and public monitoring in their budgeting processes perceive lower levels of corruption and higher levels of government anti-corruption effectiveness. OLS and fixed effects regressions found suggestive evidence to support the contention that consultation and openness were positively associated with perceived anti-corruption effectiveness. In contrast, once confounding factors were controlled for, there was no clear evidence to support the contention that openness, either as a composite or its three sub-components, was negatively correlated with perceived government corruption. Furthermore, the results imply that the cumulative effect of the components of transparency, consultation and monitoring may have a stronger impact on perceptions of anti-corruption effectiveness and government corruption than they do as stand-alone activities.

The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) places citizens' rights to request and discover information in competition with the right of the government to conceal official secrets (Bathory & McWilliams, 1977; Rourke 1957). Simply put, FOI in practice pits secrecy versus transparency, with administrative discretion in the middle. Though FOIA applies to all federal government departments and agencies in the United States, the tension becomes most acute when applied to the most secretive participants in the national security enterprise, the 16 member intelligence community. Secret-keeping can exert psychological and social pressure on organizations (Simmel, 1906; Weber, 1920/2009) that have the potential to impact individual decision making and shape collective norms (Freidman, Landes & Posner, 1991; Keane, 2008; Sandfort, 2000). This effort examines how secrecy impacts transparency initiatives by researching how the US Intelligence Community FOIA programs perform compared to other federal agencies using multivariate analysis of FOIA annual report data in conjunction with an experimental methodology. The research results show that while intelligence agencies release similar information to control agencies, they differ significantly in the how and when that information is provided. In particular, intelligence agencies take longer to respond than peer agencies and offer less information with the response. These findings contribute to theory by leading to a refined model of transparency and contribute to practice by supporting recommendations for policy makers and FOIA program administrators.

This study employed a qualitative case study methodology to examine some of the challenges that are hindering the fragile state of Liberia from benefiting from the use of country public financial management (PFM) systems for donor-financed projects. The study also examined the effects that these challenges pose to the fragile state. It then explored recommended strategies and policies to resolve the challenges. The data for the study was collected from 15 participants through individual in-depth interviews. The cases of the 15 participants were cross-analyzed based on 4 themes and 13 patterns that arose from the participants' data for the challenges, 4 themes and 6 patterns that emerged from the effects of the challenges, and 5 themes and 13 patterns that emerged from the recommended strategies and policies of the participants. The findings revealed the cardinal or major challenges that, as the participants pointed out, obstruct or hinder the effective use of country PFM systems for donor-financed projects in Liberia. Amid the challenges, some were directly linked to government and others to donors. Moreover, the study observed that some of the challenges were interrelated. In addition, the findings also showed the effects that these challenges could pose to the country's future prospect in regards to country PFM systems use. The study then examined the various recommended strategies and policies for government and donors alike that could help solve the challenges the fragile state faces. The findings of this study fill a gap in practical research on fragile states, specifically Liberia, with regards to country PFM systems and add valuable information on how to effectively and efficiently deal with challenges for eventual full PFM adoption.