This project studies the working poor, the people employed at the bottom of the labor market who share the neighborhoods, social institutions and families as AFDC recipients faced with welfare reform. By using a combination of survey and ethnographic methods the project will tell us what changes in the welfare system have meant to people's lives. The investigators will return to a sample of 100 working poor families in New York city, originally studied in 1995, and convert them into a longitudinal panel by tracking the households for a total of six years, spanning the `before` and `after` of welfare reform. Five families in each of two neighborhoods, one mainly African American in Harlem and one ethnically heterogeneous in Washington Heights will be studied by intensive ongoing participant observation fieldwork. The researchers will also interview community leaders, school officials, church leaders, police and fire officials, and other experts with long-standing ties to the neighborhoods. The study will focus on features of neighborhoods and social networks which promote social stability, how access to employment information, social support, adolescent monitoring and informal child care change as the welfare system changes; how family and friendship networks function in the changing situation; how transnational linkages cushion the effects of welfare reform; and how people understand and interpret the changing circumstances of their lives.
