Andreas Cebulla

Meta-Evaluation: Discovering What Works Best in Welfare Provision

Numerous programmes designed to encourage welfare recipients to move into work and off benefit have been evaluated in the United States. Many have randomly assigned potential participants into ‘experimental’ and ‘control’ groups to generate unbiased estimates of the effectiveness of the programmes. The results of the evaluations have been selectively influential in shaping policy developments on both sides of the Atlantic, but a thorough understanding of the diversity of experience has been lacking. Applying meta-analysis techniques to a specially constructed database of evaluations in over 50 US sites, this article reports on the first programme-level, systematic meta-evaluation of welfare-to-work programmes. The results confirm the superiority of approaches that prioritize immediate work over human-capital investment but reveal that caseload characteristics and local environment can be equally important as or even more important than programme design. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential and limitations of meta-evaluation.

The mutual constitution of risk and inequalities: intersectional risk theory

In this article, we examine the conceptual importance of integrating risk and intersectionality theory for the study of how risk and various forms of inequality intersect and are mutually constitutive. We argue that an intersectional perspective can advance risk research by incorporating more effectively the role of such social categories as gender and race into the analysis of ‘risk’ as an empirical phenomenon. In doing so, the intersectional perspective articulates more clearly the connection between the social construction of risk and, on the one hand, the reproduction of new and complex social inequalities and, on the other, intersections of social class, gender, ethnicity and other social categorisations. We trace the intellectual division between risk and feminist-inspired intersectionality research, showing how these approaches can be aligned to study, for example, risk-based welfare and social policy. We use a discussion of general directions within welfare policy to illustrate how an intersectional perspective can be used to show the ways in which new governance strategies create new divisions and reproduce existing forms of social inequality. We conclude the article with a call for a new research agenda to integrate intersectional frameworks with risk theory in order to provide a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between social inequality and risk.

Class or Individual? A Test of the Nature of Risk Perceptions and the Individualisation Thesis of Risk Society Theory

The theory of risk society claims that ‘individualisation’ has led social class positions to loose their significance in explaining risk and risk perceptions in late modernity. Using social survey data from England, this proposition was put to an empirical test for three types of risks: income loss, accident or illness, and poor customer service or advice. Regression analyses revealed that class position only affected perceptions of the risk of income loss, whereas the risks of accidents or illness and of poor customer service or advice were strongly shaped by welfare and value orientations. While other indicators of individualisation derived from the data failed to explain variations in risk perceptions, the strongest effect on current risk perceptions was the experience of risk events in the past, and awareness of and drawing on support systems. The findings demonstrate the need for risk theory to differentiate between types of risks and to draw out more clearly their sociological contexts in order to grasp fully the nature of perceptions of risk prevailing in late modern society.

When welfare-to-work programs seem to work well: Explaining why Riverside and Portland shine so brightly

Of welfare-to-work programs evaluated by random assignment, two stand out as having exceptionally large estimated effects: one in Riverside, California, and the other in Portland, Oregon. The authors use data from 24 evaluations and the tools of meta-analysis to examine why. The findings indicate that the apparently superior performance of these two programs in increasing the earnings of participants is only partly attributable to program design (for example, the type of services provided, the use of sanctions, and the quality of program administration). Differences in caseload characteristics and site characteristics are probably more important. However, Riverside and Portlands relatively large effects in reducing the percentage of participants on the AFDC rolls appear mainly attributable to the design of the programs run in these sites.

Proximal Adolescent Outcomes of Gang Membership in England and Wales

Objectives: This article aims to apply a “turning points” framework for understanding the developmental impacts of gang membership in a British sample of young people. The study explores the proximal impact of gang membership on offending, victimization, and a number of attitudinal and experiential outcomes that have been theorized to mediate the relationship between gang membership and offending. Method: The authors used data from the Offending Crime and Justice Survey, a rotating panel representative of young people in England and Wales that measured gang membership using the Eurogang definition. The effects of gang membership onset were tested using a propensity score analysis approach. Results: As previously reported with American data, gang onset has an impact on offending, antisocial behavior, drug use, commitment to deviant peers, and neutralization techniques. In addition, gang membership increases the probability of unwanted police contact, even adjusting for offending through a “double robust” procedure. Conclusion: Despite differences in social context, history of gangs and level of violence, we encounter more similarities than differences regarding consequences of gang membership. The impact on unwanted police contact deserves further research and policy attention.

Risk through the years – a statistical portrait of young people's risk perceptions and experiences relative to those of older generations

Youth and adolescence are associated with significant changes in a persons life. According to risk theory, the changes experienced by young people today are fundamentally different from those experienced by previous generations and entail a greater degree of uncertainty. In this paper, survey and interview data are used to describe how contemporary risk experiences of young people in Britain differ from those of older generations, highlighting, in particular, their greater frequency and difference in type. Young people are also more likely to be worried about risk, and this remains the case well beyond the years of adolescence. In dealing with these real or anticipated risks, young and adolescent people turn to the traditional sources of family and friends to obtain advice. Using career decisions as a case study, we show that, whereas young people and their parents often share their risk assessments as they take into account each others decision-making context, understanding is reduced if career paths diverge.

Working beyond the state pension age in the United Kingdom: the role of working time flexibility and the effects on the home

ABSTRACT The present and future security of employee-pension funding remains at the forefront of public debate across Europe and beyond. In the United Kingdom, to finance future pension entitlements it has been suggested that the state pension age be increased. This paper presents the results of analyses of four major national social surveys that have explored the working and living conditions of workers in paid employment after the state pension age. Comparing the circumstances of these workers with workers just below that age illustrates the extent to which it constitutes a break in the working and domestic lives of older people. The findings suggest that, in order to accommodate older workers in the workplace, more attention may need to be placed on informal as well as contractual arrangements of flexible working. Beyond part-time working, older workers rarely take up additional or alternative flexible working arrangements. At the same time, older workers continue to experience housework as burdensome, while in partnered households the gendered division of domestic labour prevails. Research and policy have yet to consider in depth these risks associated with working longer in life.

Perceptions of labour market risks: Shifts and continuities across generations

In the risk society thesis, most notably forwarded by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, the labour market plays a key role in individualization processes. While for previous generations, family and personal networks, and also government institutions, were important in providing access to and mobility within the labour market, cohorts entering the labour market since the 1970s and onwards are perceived to be living in a modern ‘risk regime’, requiring each individual to make choices and decisions in relation to a market that no longer accommodates employment based on kinship and friendship. Based on data from 58 qualitative interviews with parents and their adult children, this article examines more closely these purported changes. The study’s main observation is that important changes towards increased perceived individualization have taken place from one generation to the next. While affirming the disjuncture posited by Beck between a ‘collectivized past’ and an ‘individualized present’, this study’s empirical evidence from two generations of individuals indicates that the disjuncture is muddier and more complex than previously understood.

The Cost‐Effectiveness of Welfare‐to‐Work Programs: A Meta‐Analysis

This article uses the tools of meta-analysis to assess costbenefit studies of 50 mandatory welfare-to-work programs that were targeted at Aid for Families with Dependent Children recipients and evaluated by random assignment. The findings suggest that the costs of a typical evaluated welfare-to-work program probably exceeded its benefits from the perspective of the government, but those assigned to the program, and possibly society as a whole, may reap small positive net benefits. However, there are individual programs that are very cost-beneficial. Further analyses of the determinants of the cost-benefits of welfare-to-work programs to government and society as a whole show that some services are cost-neutral, but others entail net costs, which are sometimes substantial. The findings suggest that less successful programs might be made more cost-beneficial by dropping vocational training and basic education as program components, leaving mainly lower cost components, such as mandated job search and sanctions, but also possibly the more costly financial incentives.

The risk society hypotheses: an empirical test using longitudinal survey data

This paper seeks to test the influential ‘risk society’ thesis using quantitative data from the major UK longitudinal surveys. Two hypotheses are derived from the thesis: distanciation (the claim that more recent generations understand and manage their social lives in relation to risk and uncertainty in substantially different ways from those of their parents’ generation) and reflexivity (the view that individuals are increasingly aware of their status in a detraditionalised social order and of their responsibility to manage their own life course). Empirical testing shows that greater distanciation and reflexivity can be identified in a comparison of the education, employment and partnership experience of earlier and later cohorts, but that these factors vary substantially for different social groups. Success in planning one’s life and attaining the occupational status to which one initially aspired is increasingly associated with greater satisfaction and, with respect to career objectives, repeated change in jobs. But these outcomes are least likely to be available to those from the manual working class, especially those whose aspirations remain within that group. Risk society increasingly offers opportunities to ‘write one’s own biography’, but it is important to be clear that success in doing so is socially structured.