Link to multiple choice question samples

Some suggestions/advice:

1. This is a study guide, not a blueprint. You should use this to complement or supplement your class notes and the readings. If you have class notes.
2. The links below are here because they supplement the material we discuss in class. Use them as reference guides, memory jogs, whatever helps. But we also have the assigned readings and class discussion.
3. If I were studying for this test, I’d spend less time trying to memorize details and more time trying to make connections between different concepts–much of the subject matter of this course is interconnected, and the more you can relate one to another, the better they’ll stick in one coherent schema that your brain–despite your best efforts to resist–is trying to build on the fly. And they’ll help in understanding the concepts of welfare and poverty. For example, Social Security is a type of program (insurance vs means-tested …), with a history, with a population that is served, with a funding base, with political constituents and opponents, and it fits within welfare programs in a certain way (‘deserving’ populations vs ‘means-tested’ programs should ring a bell), providing some measure of security for those out of the workforce because of age (retiree age) or disability.
4. Welfare organizations. You could take other programs and look at them similarly (and remember those questions you can ask about them). We discussed many in class, and one county is pretty much like another in terms of the kinds of services and supports, and agencies, though they might have different names from state to state. Some of these organizations are public, some are non-profit, churches and places of worship are involved, etc. You should have some idea about what that network–or patchwork, as the case may be–can look like. It certainly would be social capital that more vulnerable households would want to understand. Then there is bureaucracy–so many agencies are bureaucratic, so understanding what that means for how they’re organized and how people might interact, not interact, or mistrust (and remember how that is all related to Lareau’s work as well, and Hays’ chapter), would be good to think about. Work and welfare are related. How? How is welfare funded?  You can also look at this first half of the course as a story, stories generally being easier to remember and make connections than disparate facts. Start with the history from week 3, the origins of the Welfare state (this diagram might be helpful).
5. Tests (mine anyway) are designed evaluate learning, not simply recall or recognition. I tend to ask students to show their abilities to apply learning to novel situations or examples, so the more examples you can think up to see how well you can think about these areas the better prepared you’ll be for that kind of test (e.g., how is poverty functional, and for whom? Can you take a welfare program and go through some of the basic questions you might ask to explain and examine it? Come up with your own examples, rather than memorizing those in your notes or lecture material). We’ll have some time in class Friday to go over this, so your responsibility is to be ready with questions, and devise a study strategy.
6. Remember the exam will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday.
7. If you need extra time and have a documented disability, make sure that you have a form filled out to take Tuesday’s exam in the learning center or testing center (Tuesday you’ll want to be in class for the group exam).

Key concepts, ideas

• Welfare–How is it a multi-dimensional concept?
• Speaking of concepts, we have woven these into the story
• Explanations for poverty and welfare (the three ‘philosophies’ we’ve talked about). These might be useful when thinking about welfare policies and their assumptions.
• Explanations for the persistence of poverty (here, too)–what are their relative merits? How can an understanding of the problem be used to propose ways to address poverty? 
• Bureaucracy–What is it, anyway? And why is it important, especially for understanding welfare?
• Distinctions between social insurance and means-tested programs, ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ populations
• Social welfare programs–what’s out there, how to classify/analyze them?
• History of welfare–How has it changed over time (I’m not looking for detail here, more the big picture–who provides it, how, how are recipients perceived, etc.)?
• Social theory and welfare–we spent a week discussing Fox Piven and Cloward’s thesis of the functions of social welfare and at what point the US Government began to create a ‘welfare state’. There was a general description of the thesis, the Roosevelt period, the 1960s, the business backlash, and you might be asked to speculate as to how powerful their thesis might be in explaining the future of welfare, or recent events, like the passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka ‘Obamacare’) or the Occupy Wall Street movement, Medicare Part D, or responses to the police shootings of unarmed black men in the last several years (and ensuing Black Lives Matter movement). Rather than focus on specific details, understand the authors’ argument, and how it tries to explain the emergence, expansion and contraction of federal welfare intervention over time, as a response to the worst effects of economic disruption that can lead to high unemployment and civil unrest, counterpressure provided by the business lobby. If you can draw it graphically–like a model (as we did on the board a few times), you might find it easier to identify the parts of the model (explanation). And begin tying other concepts to specific terms and concepts in the model.
• Capitalism and markets–this is important for understanding the theory we discussed on the origins of the US welfare state. It begins, they contend, with capitalism as a fluid economic system, and the historically traumatic effects that had on labor and people’s livelihoods at a few points in our history.
• Welfare reform–know what sanctioning is all about; understand the rationale behind work and family values enforcement, and the rules that govern them (from Hays chapters 2–3); what underlying philosophies characterize reform? How is or could it be measured? How funded? Has it affected the social work profession?
• Social class (remember the clips from People like us)–know what it is, how it can affect social mobility.
• Human and social capital–what are they, how do they interact with welfare and social work?
• Social mobility–how does this relate to class, inequality, stratification?
• Structural and individualist arguments, philosophies–you should know what these are
• Annette Lareau’s book (Unequal Childhoods)–what is her thesis, what institution does she use to develop her argument, and what are the implications for people’s interaction with the welfare system? How do patterns of childrearing practices differ from one school or social class to another? On what dimensions can we compare them, and what’s the connection with social welfare? With bureaucracy?
• With the above concepts, learning implies your ability to fit them into the schema of understanding you’re building about welfare and poverty, rather than just being able to define them. In other words, can you come up with examples/illustrations to show you understand them? If you prefer to think about this as a story, a narrative, to help you connect ideas and concepts and events, rather than devise torturous mnemonic devices, try this page’s organization: it organizes topics and concepts by week (or this one has lecture page material by week).

What you should have read:

Readings through week 5. Don’t forget the lecture page links in each week’s readings–they’ll be helpful as reference guides. For the most part, I won’t test you on detail in small group discussion material, but you do need to understand the relationship between welfare and taxes, for instance, where the welfare money comes from, who pays it, how much of the budget does it comprise, how federal and state governments differ, etc. 

Studying for the exam . . .

Now . . . this seems like a lot of material. For one thing, you should be amazed at how much you’ve learned. But don’t be overwhelmed. Some things have been more important than others. As you organize your studying, organizing the material from the course as well in your mind–how does it fit together? We’ve discussed some big ideas, such as how or why the U.S. government stepped in to provide ‘direct relief’ (the authors’ term for welfare) historically, and how we can explain why direct welfare relief like cash or public works expands and contracts over time. We’ve talked about poverty and why it persists (e.g., this gets into social mobility, human and social capital), and how some arguments attribute poverty to individuals, others to structural barriers (but also authors like Charles Murray promoting a ‘Big Brother’ philosophy of dependency; and we’ve discussed some of the “highlights” historically, and tried to explain how welfare in the U.S. has developed. And the latest development or trend has been welfare ‘reform,’ or PRWORA, which Sharon Hays analyzes in her chapter from week 5. We’ve also discussed some other welfare programs, and you should have a good idea of how to go about examining a program and how it works. If you think of trying to understand it as a whole, as a story, working from abstract, theoretical concepts like why we have welfare and why poverty persists, and working on down to some of the concepts that help explain these bigger questions, or how well the policy fits the explanations, I think you’ll have better success than if you try to break it up into pieces and memorize each. We’ll discuss in class . . . Friday. So come prepared to use that time to your best advantage.

Here’s a couple of sample multiple choice questions from previous tests (don’t panic if there are things here we haven’t discussed–we wouldn’t cover them on the exam. This is just to give you a flavor for how my questions are put together):

Women generally are responsible for child-rearing in our society. This can complicate their ability to enter the work force. This would be one way to explain

1. the theory of the urban underclass;
2. women’s difficulties in changing their ascribed or ascriptive statuses;
3. the ‘devolution’ of the Head Start program to allow for more control by state governments.
4. the process of feminization of poverty.

What does author Karen Seccombe mean when she says that the ‘welfare problem’ isn’t about welfare, but about the insecurity of low-wage work?

1. Low-wage work doesn’t offer health benefits and may complicate securing child care and affordable housing for many poor single mothers;
2. Low-wage work doesn’t make single mothers eligible to receive social security;
3. If poor single mothers had access to low-wage employment, they could begin to develop human capital and work their way out of welfare;
4. Few women would be willing to have children if they had to rely solely on low-wage employment.

answers here!

Questions I have received (from studious students in past terms):

1. Could you explain again what you mean by a program being more Stigmatized? So we talked about two kinds of programs–the ‘social insurance’ programs (like Social Security, unemployment, workers’ compensation, Medicare), and the ‘means-tested’ programs (TANF, SNAP, Medicaid …). The so-called ‘insurance’ programs are perceived by many as having been earned–people draw unemployment if they worked, same with Social Security and Medicare and workers’ compensation. The others are for people who qualify, they have to pass a ‘test’ to determine their ‘means’ and eligibility. They are often seen as the ‘undeserving’, as if their need to ask for help is a failing. Hence the idea that those programs, and mainly their recipients, are stigmatized.

Maybe this page would help.

2. I think I understand this, but this may be helpful to others: What is Latent and Explicit Functions? Do we need to know the differences? The explicit function is the stated function of, in this case, a welfare agency.  Sharon Hays examined the ‘self-sufficiency’ that TANF was designed to encourage among recipients (the 50% still eligible after welfare reform in 1996, anyway). As she describes the rules and hoops required, it becomes less clear that the program leads to self-sufficiency or the development of desirable human capital, but it definitely pushes TANF recipients into low-wage jobs (the latent function, as well as greater social control over how they access services, versus self-sufficiency).
3. What is Liheap?
4. Why did FEMA replace the FERA? Different things. FERA was part of Roosevelt’s emergency recovery plan from the stock market crash (it was replaced by the Works Progress Administration, in the 1930s). FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency–they’re the agency responding first to natural disasters, mostly.

Other questions I’ve received from students:

1. What is Bureaucracy?
2. What is a Union and how has it changed? A union represents workers. In the mid 1930s workers gained the right to organize and bargain collectively with employers their working conditions. Remember the business pressure–it has led to the decline of unions representing workers, until now most unions are of the public employee kind (rather than, say, the Teamsters, United Auto Workers, United Mine Workers, etc.).
3. How did technology affect the welfare state as a disruption? The mechanization of agriculture left some 20 million African Americans, working on farms in the American South, displaced, leading to a mass migration to cities in search of opportunity (and often met with discrimination, isolation in economically depressed pockets of inner cities, and overt racism, including in welfare offices).
4. The Bonus Army and the response by the government. WWI veterans, some destitute after the stock market crash in 1929, marched on Washington, DC in mass to demand a ‘bonus’ promised to them by Congress (much later, but they couldn’t wait). Congress voted, the House approved, Senate voted it down, and General MacArthur burned down their makeshift settlement and sent them packing, penniless. We watched the video clip because it was an example of the choice government makes when civil unrest (in this case from the Great Depression) happens–do they accommodate the groups demonstrating, or do they seek to silence them or suppress the movement?
5. What was FDR’s plan? You’re probably referring to the New Deal, which was a series of proposals designed to respond to the stock market crash and Great Depression, and put Americans back to work.
6. Hoover Supply Side vs FDR Demand Side. Hoover was unprepared to respond to the crisis he faced. He felt that the best way was to help banks and large economic actors, who would then create jobs and wealth. But they weren’t hiring (and one could argue, as with the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008, their risky investment practices were part of the problem). FDR was listening to different economists, who theorized that putting average people to work, even if the government became the employer of choice (and the business community wouldn’t like it because it would have to raise wages to compete for workers), was the best way to stimulate the economy and keep money circulating in local communities.
7. Bell Curve Thesis (If that is something needed to know). Yes, that would be good to know.
8. Discretionary vs Non discretionary spending. These both refer to Congress, and its ability to decide how tax revenue should be spent. Discretionary spending comes from income tax. Non-discretionary is the payroll tax, which goes to fund Social Security, Medicare, and Supplemental Security Income, mostly. Look at the links in the National Priorities Project from the week 2 Friday discussion.
9. Conflict Theory. Don’t need to know this, but one way to think about theory is to ask what drives change–conflict or adaptation? Conflict theory suggests that things like civil unrest lead to change (sound familiar??). It’s often contrasted with functionalist theory, which suggests that things are the way they are for a reason–because it’s functional for society. Herbert Gans poked fun at the idea that something like poverty could actually be ‘function,’ in the process showing how it functioned to perpetuate poverty, but also to benefit many groups. Sort of like saying Jim Crow laws (that allowed ‘separate but equal’ facilities based on race) were functional (for whites).
10. Can you give examples of structural and individualist arguments? Think of structures as influencing how people think and behave. Media. Family (parents have a lot of influence over how kids behave). Culture. Laws. Social class, how we’re brought up. The economy has an influence over people’s economic fortunes.

The individualist view would say that everyone can pull him/herself up from the bootstraps and escape poverty and be a success, and so people who are poor or unable to hold a job have failed. What structures might help explain the ‘failure’ of someone to get a college degree, a well-paying job, avoid jail time, etc.?

So the individualist view in welfare says structures don’t matter much–it’s what individuals do. The structural view doesn’t excuse bad individual behavior, but it does help explain why everyone doesn’t have an equal opportunity to achieve the so-called American Dream. Remember the example from class–if every so-called ‘lazy’ person woke up tomorrow, vowing to never be lazy again, would poverty and the need for a welfare state go away (hint: no)?