Research Guides: #Social Work: SOCW 2362: Social Welfare as a Social Institution

About SOCW 2362

Course Description
Learning Outcomes

This course offers a historical and contemporary examination of legislation and resulting programs, policies, and services in the context of the social welfare system in the United States. Special attention is given to the political, economic, environmental, and social conditions that prompted the development of legislation to meet the needs of vulnerable populations. Societal responses to legislation are also considered.

Describe characteristics of legislation.
Differentiate between legislation and policy.
Explain how legislation influences service delivery and identify current proposed or recently passed state or federal legislation that will influence services.
Trace the history of major pieces of social welfare legislation, including the political, economic, environmental, and social conditions affecting vulnerable populations that prompted the legislation's development.
Describe how political ideology and social constructions of vulnerable populations influences the development of social welfare legislation.
Describe how political ideology and social constructions of vulnerable populations influence societal responses.
Compare and contrast the residual, versus institutional, view of social welfare.
Articulate how social workers can actively and ethically engage in the political process to address social justice issues.

Social Work and the Law

Websites

Library of Congress - Statues at Large
Recommend using the search term "Social Work" or "Social Welfare" with quotes for search.

Example Articles

Public Regulation of Social Work
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Effective public regulation of Social work is a priority of the profession. What has been achieved to date and what are the main deficiencies in existing legislation and its enforcement? This article analyzes the accomplishments in this area and suggests important steps for the future.
Political Parties and Public Policy: Social Welfare Policy from Carter to Bush
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Recent studies have concluded that the U.S. system of separation of powers is surprisingly effective in producing legislation, even under conditions of divided government. This article goes beyond the question of how much legislation is produced, and evaluates the two major parties' success at fulfilling their platform pledges on social welfare policy between 1977 and 1992.
Race and social welfare policy: The Social Security Act of 1935
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Examines the racial politics of social welfare in the United States. Basic provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935; Historical and institutional context of old-age insurance; Politics of public assistance in 1935; Influence of race on social welfare policy.
Social Work and Substantive Justice: The International Institutes' Response to Discriminatory Immigration and Naturalization Laws, 1924-1945.
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The article discusses International Institutes social workers' reactions to ethnic discrimination in U.S. naturalization legislation and immigration policy from 1924 through 1945. An overview of anti-Asianism in U.S. migration policies toward Chinese, Koreans and Japanese immigrants is provided. The role race and gender played in attaining U.S. citizenship is discussed.

E-books

Law and Social Work Practice by Raymond Albert
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Collection: Proquest Ebook Central
ISBN: 9780826148919
Published: 2000-01-01
This completely rewritten and updated new edition of a practical text continues to provide a firm introduction to law and legal processes and their relation to social work practice. Using Clinton's welfare reform act of 1996, Albert provides a conceptual framework to illustrate how socio-legal problems emerge in the welfare state, and presents the skills base necessary for effective social work response.
Social Work, Law and Ethics by Jonathan Dickens
Collection: Ebook Central
ISBN: 9781136211133
Published: 2012-12-20
Law and ethics are two vital aspects of social work - all social workers need to practise according to the law and their codes of ethics and conduct. However, the relationship between the law and social work values and ethics is not without its tensions and this book takes a problem-based approach to explore the dilemmas and challenges that can arise.

Websites

United States House of Representatives
United States Senate
Congress.gov
The United States Congress. Recommend using the search term "Social Work" with quotes to search Current Congress or All Congress resolutions, bills, committee reports, or congressional reports.
Federal Laws and Regulations
Learn some of the basics about U.S. laws, regulations, and executive orders, and discover resources to find out more.
Govinfo
Govinfo provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
Texas Legislature Online
Recommend using the search term "Social Work" with quotes to find results of bills and ammendments.
USA.gov
You can search USA.gov in a few different ways to find official U.S. government information, programs, and services.

Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP)
The CGP is the finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive information for historical and current publications as well as direct links to the full document, when available. Users can search by authoring agency, title, subject, and general keywords, or click on "Advanced Search" for more options.
GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office)
GAO is an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress as the "congressional watchdog," GAO investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars. With virtually the entire federal government subject to its review, the agency issues over 900 reports and testimonies a year.
Green Book (House Ways and Means Committee)
Presents background material and statistical data on the major entitlement programs and other activities within the Committee's jurisdiction. Over the decades, the Green Book has become a valuable resource and standard reference on American social policy.
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Provides program descriptions and historical data on a wide variety of social and economic topics, including Social Security, employment, earnings, welfare, child support, health insurance, the elderly, families with children, poverty and taxation.
Housing and Community Development Research
It provides reports, executive summaries, case studies, and guidebooks span the fields of housing and urban development, including the original electronic data sets generated by PD&R sponsored data collection efforts, including the American Housing Survey.
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Some publications are available for downloading in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) which allows the document to be downloaded, viewed, and printed with all of its original formatting and graphics.
Medline Plus
MedlinePlus is a service of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
National Criminal Justice Reference Service Virtual Library
Established in 1972, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is an Office of Justice Programs (OJP) resource offering information to support research, policy, and program development. The NCJRS Virtual Library contains bibliographic information and abstracts of more than 230,000 collection resources and over 80,000 online materials, including all known OJP works.
PubMed.gov
PubMed is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health–both globally and personally.
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The PubMed database contains more than 32 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central (PMC).
PubMed Central
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection.
USA Spending
They track how federal money is spent in communities across America and beyond. Learn more about government spending through interactive tools that explore elements of the federal budget, such as federal loan, grant, and contract data.

Social Welfare

The term “social welfare” does not have a precise definition. Currently, social welfare refers to a wide range of activities and services by volunteers, non-profit organizations and governmental agencies providing help to needy persons unable to care for themselves; activities and resources designed to enhance or promote the well-being of individuals, families and the larger society; and efforts to eliminate or reduce the incidence of social problems.

-Social Welfare History Project

E-Books

Social Work and Social Policy by Catherine N. Dulmus; Ira C. Colby; Karen M. Sowers
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Collection: Proquest Ebook Central
ISBN: 9781118176993
Published: 2013-01-22
A comprehensive overview of domestic and global social welfare policy Written by a team of renowned social policy experts sharing their unique perspectives on global and U.S. social welfare policy issues, Social Work and Social Policy helps social workers consider key issues that face policymakers, elected officials, and agency administrators in order to develop policies that are both fair and just.
Transformation of the Welfare State by Neil Gilbert
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Collection: Proquest Ebook Central
ISBN: 9780195140743
Published: 2002-08-15
Since the early 1970s, debate has raged over the "crisis of the welfare state." As the United States successfully exported its bootstrap brand of capitalism and an ever-broadening range of public activity came to be viewed through the prism of profit and loss, social welfare policies wereclosely scrutinized worldwide.

Websites

Credo Reference - Social Welfare
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Find reference articles from online encyclopedias, similar search terms, videos and images regarding "Social Welfare."
Social Welfare History Project
Find historical resources from different eras, discussion of different issues and how they were addressed over time, and programs that strived to help through history.

Articles

Distinctive Dates in Social Welfare History
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Exploring history from 1792 B.C. to 1994 these are important dates in Social Welfare.
Differences Between Residual & Institutional in Social Work
The residual and institutional models are two different approaches to addressing social welfare issues, such as poverty, hunger and health problems, with the government providing funding and social work.
What Are Some Example Views on Residual and Institutional Social Welfare?
Both residual and institutional social welfare often fall under the same polarized arguments that affect welfare in general, with the view opposed to welfare being that it limits personal freedoms (in terms of property rights in particular), and that redistributed taxation is a form of theft, with the favorable view stating that welfare is practical, democratic and humanitarian in nature.

Also, view the Public Policy & Research Organizations for organizations involved in Social Welfare.

OECD - Social and welfare issues
Effective social policy protects individuals and their families, and helps them lead a fulfilling life. We identify policies that help individuals and their families, and make societies and economies work more effectively.
Pew Research - Religion
The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life began as the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, a project to examine the benefits and risks that arise when religious and government institutions interact. The Pew Research Center is nonpartisan and presents its data through data sets, authoritative analysis, and aggregated news.
Social Welfare Bills - GovTrack
Use this page to browse bills in the U.S. Congress related to the subject of Social Welfare, as determined by the Library of Congress.
Social Welfare Legislation, 1993
The note discusses the new initiatives and changes in Social Welfare in 1993. Among the major initiatives were provisions designed (1) to restrain increases in medical care costs under the Medicare program, and (2) strengthen eligibility requirements under Medicaid.
Social Welfare Research Toolkit: Open Social Welfare
Database of open access resources provided by UC Berkley.

The Affordable Care Act, Labor Supply and Social Welfare
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This paper converts Congressional Budget Office estimates of the labor supply effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into social welfare effects for each of the major individual provisions of the law. The sum of these negative, individual welfare effects can be reduced, almost to zero, by utilizing alternative assumptions about labor supply elasticities and the ability of individuals to perceive changes in marginal tax rates. Incorporation of previous estimates of the welfare-enhancing aspects of the ACA would likely outweigh the small, negative (and possibly negligible) welfare losses caused by the laws labor supply distortions.
Do Race, Racial Disproportionality, and Disparities Remain Foci of Child Welfare?: Words Matter.
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The extent of the representation of concepts of race, racial disproportionality, racial disparities, and diversity in child welfare journal publications and authorship are the foci of this content analysis study. This study highlights recommendations for increasing the research and scholarly publications by authors from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds as a means for increasing the emphasis on race, racial disproportionality, racial disparities, and diversity in research, scholarship, policy, practice, and the future education of social workers specializing in the field of child welfare.
Growth, inequality and social welfare: cross-country evidence
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Concerns about rising inequality are at the forefront of many current policy debates. This paper uses a large cross-country dataset on growth and changes in inequality to assess the importance of these changes in inequality for changes in social welfare. Changes in inequality are on average small, less volatile than growth, and uncorrelated with growth. This implies that most of the variation in changes in social welfare within countries over time is due to differences in average growth performance. Equivalently, the additional growth in average incomes required to “compensate” – in terms of social welfare growth – for a typical increase in inequality is quite small. The main policy implication is the importance of overall economic growth for improvements in social welfare. Our work also suggests that it is difficult to find robust correlations between policy and institutional variables and changes in inequality, indicating that there is no simple recipe for enhancing equality.
Making a difference: human service interest group influence on social welfare program regulations
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This article examines the influence of special interest groups on social welfare policies during the Clinton Administration. Results indicate that greater financial resources, a liberal position, and increased political access helped political advocacy groups gain control over decision-making in the executive branch and influence social welfare policies.
Need, Compassion, and Support for Social Welfare.
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Funding for social welfare depends on citizen support. Drawing on evolutionary psychological approaches to politics, we study two types of need that might shape citizens' welfare support by regulating their feelings of compassion. One type of need is a recipient's absolute need. The other type is acute need created by sudden misfortune, such as sudden job loss. Across four studies, we find that absolute and acute needs independently affect compassion and welfare attitudes. This leads to potential inefficiencies in judgments: People who have fallen far are judged more deserving of compassion and access to welfare even when they are not in an absolute sense the most impoverished.