| This research examines three theoretical models—human capital, welfare dependency, and employment barrier perspectives—and their use in explaining welfare, employment, poverty and working poverty status of individuals between ages 18 and 65 during the period of welfare reform. Two sets of data, both surveyed in August 1998, provided the empirical basis for conducting secondary data analyses in this study. First, the 1996 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data from the U.S. Census Bureau is used, with a nationally representative sample of 46,562 working-age individuals in the United States. Second, a St. Louis survey data, which offered a sample size of 108, is used to validate the local-level applicability of the SIPP data and also to additionally investigate the impact that perceptions of employment barriers have on welfare, employment, poverty, and working poverty status. Analyses involve conducting maximum likelihood estimations of logistic regression and multinomial logistic regression models to test the hypothesized relationships of these perspectives in an all working-age sample, a past-welfare use sub-sample, and a post-welfare sub-sample.; Results from the SIPP data indicate that the employment barrier perspective consistently affect all four dependent variables significantly in the all working age-sample and the past-welfare use sub-sample. Both childcare and transportation stands out as major employment barrier variables significantly affecting welfare use, employment, poverty, and working poverty. While the welfare dependency perspective presented little or no statistical significance in the past-welfare use sub-sample, findings from the post-welfare sub-sample reveal that having less than 5 total years on welfare has negatively significant effect on the likelihood of being working poor. As expected, both the human capital perspective and demographic variables explain significantly the likelihood of all four dependent variables throughout the analyses in individual and combined models for each sample. Additional to these findings, the logistic regression results from the St. Louis data indicate that perceiving transportation and discrimination as barriers to finding good jobs have statistically significant association with the likelihood of being on welfare, employed, poor, and working poor. |
