Political Consequences of Survival Strategies among the Urban Poor

Desmond, Matthew; Travis, Adam

doi:10.1177/0003122418792836

Cited by 39 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…Indeed, exposure to adversities in communities that are disadvantaged to begin with can lead to disengagement and declines in social cohesion, creating a pernicious cycle between the person and his/her community. 20…”

Section: The Social Nature Of Despairmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Despair Really Kill? A Roadmap for an Evidence-Based Answer

et al. 2019

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Two seemingly-associated demographic trends have generated considerable interest: income stagnation and rising premature mortality from suicides, drug poisoning, and alcoholic liver disease among U.S. white non-Hispanics with low education. Economists interpret these population-level trends to indicate that despair, induced by financial stressors, is a shared pathway to these causes of death. Although we now have the catchy term “deaths of despair” (DoD), we have yet to study its central empirical claim: that conceptually defined and empirically assessed “despair” is indeed a common pathway to several causes of death. At the level of the person, despair comprises cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and biological domains. Despair can also permeate social relationships, networks, institutions, and communities. Extant longitudinal datasets feature repeated measures of despair—before, during, and after the Great Recession—offering resources to test the role of economic decline-induced despair in premature morbidity/mortality. Such tests must also focus on protective factors that could shield individuals. DoD is more than a phrase; it is a hypothesis that deserves conceptual mapping and empirical study with longitudinal, multi-level data.

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Section: The Social Nature Of Despairmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Despair Really Kill? A Roadmap for an Evidence-Based Answer

et al. 2019

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“…Damaged or severed relationships with agency representatives thus magnify these enforcement tactics’ threat to life chances. More broadly, state agents’ tie appropriation challenges characterizations of social capital as an unequivocally beneficial component of civil society (Putnam 2000; but see Arneil 2006); this consequence echoes evidence that poor people’s social connections degrade their perceptions of local political capacity (Desmond and Travis 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting to Know You: Welfare Fraud Investigation and the Appropriation of Social Ties

Headworth

2019

Am Sociol Rev

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State-level public assistance agencies completed nearly a million SNAP fraud investigations in fiscal year 2016. These investigations hinge on compiling incriminating information about clients. Drawing on interviews with welfare fraud workers in five U.S. states, this article shows how fraud investigators creatively exploit clients’ social networks to extract such information, and thus use clients’ social ties against them. Investigators gain some information through elective cooperation, when people voluntarily implicate others. Fraud workers say these denunciations typically arise from negative-valence ties (bad blood). Other times, investigators co-opt neutral or positive-valence ties (good will) for enforcement purposes. This co-optation includes eliciting information from unwitting acquaintances and exploiting clients’ own online social networking activity. These findings demonstrate social ties’ appropriability, through which they serve as resources for relational outsiders’ interests. Repurposing welfare clients’ social ties for fraud enforcement presents a two-fold threat to subsistence and social mobility prospects: it imposes punishments—including program disqualifications—while simultaneously damaging social support networks. These enforcement practices reveal appropriability as an unrecognized property of social ties, particularly for socioeconomically marginalized people, and constitute a noteworthy element of contemporary poverty governance.

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“…rates are actually consistent with racial discrimination. 3 The core empirical fact has not changed; one would calculate the same probability of a police-involved shooting given race of the stopped suspect in the sample. The theoretical implication of that empirical fact, however, has changed quite dramatically if we accept the assumption that being stopped by police is a consequence of both race and behavior.…”

Section: Identification: Link To An Empirical Estimandmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The magnitude of the direct effect may be different at different values of the mediator. While one of the four (Desmond and Travis, 2018) cites a paper on natural direct effects , the authors frame this as a robustness check and (1) do not discuss that it entails holding the mediator a value it would realize under a particular treatment or (2) that they need to condition on confounders of the M =⇒ Y relationship in addition to the D =⇒ Y relationship.…”

Section: A Papers Using Robustness Checks In Asr 2018mentioning

confidence: 99%

What is Your Estimand? Defining the Target Quantity Connects Statistical Evidence to Theory

Lundberg¹,

Johnson²,

Stewart³

2020

Preprint

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The link between theory and quantitative empirical evidence is a longstanding hurdle in sociological research. Ambiguity about the role that statistical evidence plays in an argument may produce misleading conclusions and poor methodological practice. This ambiguity could be reduced if researchers would state the theoretical estimand---the central quantity at the core of a given paper---in precise language. Our approach envisions three choices in the research process: (1) choice of a theoretical estimand, which will be informative for theory, (2) choice of an empirical estimand, which is informative about the theoretical estimand under some identification assumptions, and (3) choice of an estimation strategy to learn the empirical estimand from data. Key advantages of this approach include improved clarity on the object of interest, transparency about how empirical evidence contributes to knowledge of that quantity, and the ability to easily plug in new statistical tools for estimation.

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Political Consequences of Survival Strategies among the Urban Poor

Cited by 39 publications

References 64 publications

Does Despair Really Kill? A Roadmap for an Evidence-Based Answer

Does Despair Really Kill? A Roadmap for an Evidence-Based Answer

Getting to Know You: Welfare Fraud Investigation and the Appropriation of Social Ties

What is Your Estimand? Defining the Target Quantity Connects Statistical Evidence to Theory

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