Mary Ager Caplan

Financial Coping Strategies of Mental Health Consumers: Managing Social Benefits

Mental health consumers depend on social benefits in the forms of supplemental security income and social security disability insurance for their livelihood. Although these programs pay meager benefits, little research has been undertaken into how this population makes ends meet. Using a qualitative approach, this study asks what are the financial coping strategies of mental health consumers? Seven approaches were identified: subsidies, cost-effective shopping, budgeting, prioritizing, technology, debt management, and saving money. Results illustrate the resourcefulness of mental health consumers in managing meager social benefits and highlight the need to strengthen community mental health efforts with financial capabilities education.

Personal Accounts of Poverty: A Thematic Analysis of Social Media

ABSTRACT The field of social work seeks to enhance human well-being by addressing the needs of people living in poverty. Three billion people around the world use the internet daily, and 65% of them use social media. This article qualitatively identifies emergent themes about the lived experiences of poverty from people who reported either being poor or having have been poor, using selected social media posts (N = 1,495) on the website Reddit. We found that the experiences of poverty bring arduousness and hardship, which necessitates an arsenal of survival strategies and skills. It was also found that some people who were poor experienced the saving grace of unexpected charitable acts, which eased their burden. Moreover, these experiences manifest in vestigial feelings and behaviors even when one is no longer poor. An understanding of the lived experiences by poor people themselves is a foundational task for social work educators, practitioners, and researchers.

Changing Social Work Students' Perceptions of the Role of Government in a Policy Class.

ABSTRACT Understanding student political attitudes—feelings about government and perceptions of its role—has long been of interest to social scientists. One factor that may influence political attitudes is belief in a just world, a complex psychological construct well established in the literature. Our study explores changes in social work students’ perception of a supportive role of government and their beliefs in a just world after one policy course using a pretest and posttest design. Student perceptions changed toward a more supportive government role, but there was no significant change for belief in a just world. The study contributes to empirical evaluation of the social work education policy class in terms of the Council on Social Work Education competencies.

TANF leavers and economic self-sufficiency: results from a study in Georgia

ABSTRACT Since 1996 the U.S. government has stated the primary purpose of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is to help needy families achieve self-sufficiency. Twenty years after welfare reform this cross-sectional, survey study tests this proposition with a sample of 60 former TANF recipients in Georgia. Applying three different operational definitions of economic self-sufficiency (ESS), between 4% and 17% of respondents were self-sufficient. Implications include advancing the methodology, operationalization, and debate around ESS in addition to questioning the fundamental premise of welfare reform: that simply working in the current economy lifts most TANF leavers from poverty to ESS.

Qualitative inquiry using social media: A field-tested example:

Social media is a rapidly expanding set of technology tools that people use to communicate, learn, interact, document, create, and participate in societies worldwide. It is also transforming how social work, among other professions, conducts qualitative research. This study outlines a field-tested method used to analyze data from Reddit, a major social media platform used by 6% of online adults in the United States. It provides a step-by-step account of a Reddit-based qualitative thematic analysis from a social work heuristic lens on the subject of poverty. To our knowledge, no such account of mining social media big data from Reddit for social work practice exists in the literature. Philosophical, ethical, and practical considerations of this method are discussed.

Beyond Income: A Social Justice Approach to Assessing Poverty among Older Adults with Chronic Kidney Disease

ABSTRACT How social workers define and assess poverty is a matter of economic and social justice. Recent conceptual and measurement advances point to a multidimensional definition of poverty which captures material, social, and political deprivations. Using data from a survey, this article describes how nephrology social workers assess poverty among older adults living with a chronic kidney disease (N = 52). Results suggest respondents already conceive of poverty as a multidimensional experience, support awareness-raising about poverty, and primarily assess poverty by employment status, income, access to transportation, and education. Opportunities to expand poverty assessment in future work are promising.