Examining Low-Income Single-Mother Families’ Experiences with Family Benefit Packages during and after the Great Recession in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent economic recession triggered by the global pandemic has renewed scholarly interest in the role of social welfare systems in supporting economically vulnerable families when they experience employment instability. This article unpacks the patterns of the cash and in-kind components of the monthly family benefit packages that US low-income single mothers accessed during and after the Great Recession. We used the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation and an innovative analytic procedure involving family benefit package plots, group-based trajectory modeling, and logistic regression modeling. We found that low-income single mothers more often used in-kind basic-needs packages and less often used packages that bundle a cash benefit or a childcare subsidy, regardless of their dynamic employment status. Our findings challenge the effectiveness of the US work-based welfare system in ensuring the economic security of economically vulnerable families and contribute to the policy discussions on unconditional basic income and President Biden’s American Families Plan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".