Developing a Youth Participatory Action Research Program for Latine Youth in an Emerging Community.

In this practice note, we document the development of a youth participatory action research (YPAR) program designed by and for Latine youth residing in a small but rapidly growing Latine community. Our community-academic team partnered to cocreate a YPAR curriculum focused on supporting Latine youth in learning about research and developing their own research projects. Participants in the pilot year worked on Photovoice projects centered on topics they identified, including preventing colorism and machismo and increasing access to mental health services. We reviewed lessons learned from this work, including challenges engaging young people and creating linguistically inclusive spaces.

Material Hardships, Perceived Stress, and Health among Low-Wage Hospital Workers.

Many service, clerical, and technical hospital workers deemed essential during the pandemic have wages that do not reflect the essential nature of their work and do not earn enough income to cover basic expenses. Thus, many experience material hardships related to food, housing, and medical care. Previous studies have shown strong relationships between material hardships and health; however, they do not fully explain the role of stress as an intervening mechanism. This cross-sectional study analyzes an online survey with 257 lower-wage hospital workers to examine the relationships between hardships and health, and how perceived stress mediates these relationships. Path analysis revealed that financial and food hardships were related to mental health through perceived stress, while medical hardship was directly associated with physical health. These findings add to the evidence that workers' hardships either directly or indirectly contribute to negative mental and physical health outcomes through perceived stress. Future investigations should further examine relationships among material hardships, stress, and health, and advocacy efforts should focus on raising wages for essential hospital workers.

Redefining Resilience and Reframing Resistance: Empowerment Programming with Black Girls to Address Societal Inequities.

Black girls in the U.S. experience high levels of discrimination and adversity. Resilience is a term used within social work, psychology, and health professions to indicate positive adaptation to adversity, trauma, or stress. This article examines traditional and alternative models of resilience through analyses of quantitative and qualitative data from an evaluation of a year-long empowerment program for 33 Black girls (mean age = 14.97 years). Based on critical consciousness theory and Black feminism, this program was designed to empower participants through critical reflection and development of positive gendered racial identity. Quantitative analyses found no change over time in traditional measures of individual resilience. However, alternative measures of collective resilience show positive change. Specifically, quantitative analyses reveal that participants developed increased awareness of structural inequalities faced by Black girls/women and decreased adherence to neoliberal ideologies of personal responsibility and individual striving. Additionally, qualitative analyses show that participants critically reflected on their experiences of oppression, developed mutual support and positive gendered racial identity, and engaged in collective action. These findings demonstrate positive effects of empowerment-based programing, challenge the utility of traditional, individually-focused models of resilience, and reframe Black girls' resistance to injustice as an alternative, collective form of resilience.

How different are their experiences and outcomes? Comparing aged out and other child welfare involved youth.

This paper adds to the growing body of research examining the experiences of youth aging out of the child welfare system. Through a comparison of youth aging out with two other groups of child welfare-involved youth-those whose families received child welfare services but were never placed out of home and those who were in out-of-home placement but did not age out-it presents a profile of their care careers and other system involvement (e.g., mental health, justice system). Analyses indicate that young people aging out of care have experienced significant amounts of time in out-of-home placement, a great deal of placement instability, and high levels of other system involvement. In general, their involvement is more extensive than that of the two comparison groups. However, the justice system involvement of youth who experienced out-of-home placement but did not age out is just as high as that of youth who have aged out. This finding highlights the importance of devoting resources not only to youth aging out of care but also to similarly-aged young people with prior child welfare involvement.

"You Have to Keep in Mind That You're Dealing with People's Lives": How Hospital Service Workers Enact an Ethic of Care.

The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the need to examine the health and safety of all workers, especially frontline workers, like hospital service workers (HSWs). Given ongoing pandemic-related challenges like healthcare labor shortages, attention to HSWs is essential. This paper draws from 3 waves of in-depth interviews conducted with HSWs from 2017 to 2020 to understand the evolving nature and challenges of their work from their perspectives. By analyzing the interviews, we found their approach to labor consistent with a feminist ethic of care. The ethic of care framework understands care as a public responsibility necessary for a functioning society. Workers perceived the ethic of care to be consistently violated by their employer, which contributed to poor working conditions, threatening the well-being of workers and patients alike. Drawing from workers' experiences and insights, the ethic of care framework can inform organizational changes to improve both occupational health and patient care.

How Low-Paid Parents Navigate The Complex Financial Landscape Of Benefits Cliffs And Disincentive Deserts.

Policy makers are concerned that benefits cliffs-the phenomenon by which low-paid workers abruptly lose public benefits as their wages increase-may disincentivize work. The related concept of disincentive deserts refers to occasions when pay increases have little or no effect on a worker's financial well-being because of the resulting gradual reductions in public benefits. Little is known about how low-paid workers navigate this complex financial terrain. Based on in-depth interviews with twenty-five low-paid parents, this article reveals that parents' decisions about how much to work when facing benefits cliffs and disincentive deserts are based on their nuanced assessments of their currently available resources-financial, material, and emotional-of which public benefits are just one small piece. The primary driver of parents' decision making is their ability to care for their families. In no case did they base their decisions solely on a particular wage, income level, or ability to maintain public benefits. Thus, economic modeling, which draws conclusions about the impact of public benefits policies based solely on financial resources from work and benefits, is insufficient for understanding how parents make difficult choices when time, stress, and health are also relevant factors. The article concludes with recommendations for policy makers to expand and simplify public benefits.

Key Components of the Batterer Intervention Program Process: An Analysis of Observational Data From Two Community-Based BIPs.

Qualitative research on batterer intervention programs (BIPs) has primarily consisted of interview-based studies of clients and facilitators. To date, no research has utilized observational data to understand how BIPs "work," or the processes occurring in BIPs that promote prosocial behavioral change. Forty-four observations of BIP group sessions were conducted. Two key processes were found: "facilitator processes" (e.g., managing group dynamics and engaging clients in learning) and "client processes" (e.g., mutual aid, help-seeking, and support). More observational research on BIPs is needed to uncover the full range of processes occurring during BIPs and that can link group processes to client outcomes.

From Child Welfare to Jail: Mediating Effects of Juvenile Justice Placement and Other System Involvement.

This study examines the effects of child welfare, mental health, and drug/alcohol system experiences on jail involvement, as mediated by juvenile justice placement, for Black and White youth/young adults. The sample was comprised of individuals born between 1985 and 1994 with child welfare involvement in an urban Pennsylvania county (N = 37,079) and an out-of-home placement (OOHP) subsample (n = 8,317). Four path models were estimated (two full samples, two subsamples; separate models for Black and White youth). For all models, juvenile justice placement was positively related to jail involvement. For the full samples, out-of-home child welfare placement was associated with an increase in juvenile justice placement. Within the Black placement sample, child welfare placement experiences had complex relationships with juvenile justice placement. Providing drug/alcohol services may be a protective factor for Black youth prior to juvenile justice contact. Articulating these relationships helps identify youth most at risk of justice system involvement and better targets services, especially mental health and drug/alcohol services.

Are girls really becoming more delinquent? Testing the gender convergence hypothesis by race and ethnicity, 1976-2005.

Historically, girls have been less delinquent than boys. However, increased justice system involvement among girls and current portrayals of girls in the popular media and press suggest that girls' delinquency, particularly their violence and drug use, is becoming more similar to that of boys. Are girls really becoming more delinquent? To date, this question remains unresolved. Girls' increased system involvement might reflect actual changes in their behavior or changes in justice system policies and practices. Given that girls of color are overrepresented in the justice system, efforts to rigorously examine the gender convergence hypothesis must consider the role of race/ethnicity in girls' delinquency. This study uses self-report data from a large, nationally representative sample of youth to investigate the extent to which the magnitude of gender differences in violence and substance use varies across racial/ethnic groups and explore whether these differences have decreased over time. We find little support for the gender convergence hypothesis, because, with a few exceptions, the data do not show increases in girls' violence or drug use. Furthermore, even when girls' violent behavior or drug use has increased, the magnitude of the increase is not substantial enough to account for the dramatic increases in girls' arrests for violence and drug abuse violations.

Social Justice for Crossover Youth: The Intersection of the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice Systems.

Social workers are critical to promoting racial and social justice. "Crossover youth," a term used to describe youths who have contact with both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, are an especially vulnerable but often overlooked population with whom social workers engage. A disproportionate number of crossover youth are African American. Empirical research on crossover youth is growing, but such scholarship rarely engages with a human rights and social justice perspective. African American children and youths have a distinct place within the history and current context of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. These systems have historically excluded them or treated them differently; now, African American youths are overrepresented in each of them, and evidence suggests they are more likely to cross over. The purpose of this article is to describe the historical and current context of crossover youth, with a particular focus on African American youths, to provide the foundation for a discussion of what social workers can do to promote racial and social justice for crossover youth, including specific implications for practice and policy, as well as broader implications for human and civil rights.

The impact of sexual abuse in the lives of young women involved or at risk of involvement with the juvenile justice system.

Girls in the juvenile justice system have high rates of past sexual abuse. To better understand the relationship between sexual abuse and justice system involvement, we analyzed survey interviews with 169 young women involved or at risk of involvement with juvenile justice, comparing girls who experienced sexual abuse with those who did not. Girls experiencing sexual abuse had more negative mental health, school, substance use, risky sexual behavior, and delinquency outcomes. These findings highlight a need for interventions to assist girls who have experienced abuse and efforts to prevent abuse and improve child welfare and social service systems.

Patterns of mental health, substance abuse, and justice system involvement among youth aging out of child welfare.

Although research on youth aging out of the child welfare system has increased, there has been limited focus on how their experiences vary. In particular, there is a need to examine patterns in the involvement of these youth in other systems, which indicate constellations of challenges facing these young people as they transition out of care and into adulthood. Using administrative data from a large birth cohort of individuals born between 1985 and 1994 whose families have been involved in the child welfare system, this article presents an analysis of the mental health, substance abuse, juvenile justice, and criminal justice system involvement of youth who have aged out of child welfare. Using a 2-step cluster analysis, we identify 5 subgroups of youth. Two of these groups, accounting for almost half of the youth, have little other system involvement and have child welfare care careers of relative stability. The other 3 groups, consisting of just over half of the youth, have much more extensive other system involvement, as well as care careers marked by instability and a greater proportion of time spent in congregate care.

Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Differences in School Discipline among U.S. High School Students: 1991-2005.

The present study uses large nationally representative samples of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and American Indian students to examine current patterns and recent trends (1991 to 2005) in racial, ethnic, and gender differences in school discipline. We found that Black, Hispanic, and American Indian youth are slightly more likely than White and Asian American youth to be sent to the office and substantially (two to five times) more likely to be suspended or expelled. Although school discipline rates decreased over time for most ethnic groups, among Black students school discipline rates increased between 1991 and 2005. Logistic regression analyses that controlled for racial and ethnic differences in socio-demographic factors suggest racial and ethnic differences in school discipline do not result from racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic status. Future research and practice efforts should seek to better understand and to eliminate racial, ethnic and gender disproportionality in school discipline.