Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "Social Policy"
Now showing items 1-20 of 21
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Contextual Selection and Intergenerational Reproduction
(2020-05-15)Neighborhood and school contexts shape a wide range of children’s life outcomes and reproduce race- and class-based inequalities. However, neighborhoods and schools are, of course, not randomly assigned. Which families ... -
Criminal Justice, Self-Sufficiency, and the Life Course: Social and Economic Insecurity After Incarceration and Conviction
(2018-05-11)This dissertation examines previously unexplored aspects of the socioeconomic wellbeing of individuals who have passed through the American criminal justice system, expanding upon prior work both substantively and temporally. ... -
Essays Exploring Urban Violence
(2016-08-18)Despite continued interest in understanding the problem of urban violence in the United States, fundamental scholarly and policy-relevant questions remain regarding the nature of urban violence, its consequences, and the ... -
Essays on Child Protective Services Reporting
(2020-05-14)At the nexus of state and family, the child welfare system is central to governmental efforts to manage marginality and deviance. U.S. child protection authorities (Child Protective Services, or CPS), tasked with protecting ... -
Essays on Education Quality and Inequality in Federal Systems
(2018-07-09)This three-paper dissertation studies education systems where decision-making power and funding is shared across different levels of government, their achievement levels and inequality across socieoconomic groups. The ... -
Essays on Policing, Legal Estrangement, and Urban Marginality
(2018-04-30)How do parents and youth in American cities understand policing in their everyday lives? This dissertation tackles this question using three cases. The first empirical chapter visits Washington, DC, in 2012-2013. I draw ... -
Essays on Schools, Crime, and Punishment
(2015-05-19)This dissertation consists of three essays on schools, crime, and punishment. The first essay — stemming from collaborative work with Christopher Jencks, Anthony Braga, and David Deming — uses longitudinal school and ... -
Experiences of Doubling-Up Among American Families With Children
(2018-07-17)Facing rising rents and economic insecurity, many American families live “doubled-up” in extended households. Households are considered doubled-up if they contain any adults besides the householder and her romantic partner. ... -
Gentrification, Race, and Immigration in the Changing American City
(2015-08-19)This dissertation examines how gentrification—a class transformation—unfolds along racial and ethnic lines. Using a new conceptual framework, considering the city-level context of immigration and residential segregation, ... -
(Hiding) in Plain Sight: How Class Matters Differently Among Low-Income Students in Suburban Schools
(2016-05-18)U.S. suburbia is rapidly changing, becoming home to increasing numbers of poor families and immigrants. However, traditionally disadvantaged students who attend well-resourced middle-class suburban schools have been largely ... -
Household Instability During Childhood and Young Adult Outcomes
(2017-05-11)This dissertation argues for a more holistic conceptualization of children’s exposure to change in their residential environments through three empirical chapters. Changes in parental romantic relationships, the focus of ... -
How Social Adversity and Opioid Prescription Intersect With the Criminal Justice System and Recent Mortality in the United States
(2019-08-05)This dissertation advances a contextual understanding of the consequences of opioid prescription that extends beyond the realms of medicine and health. The first empirical chapter sets the scene by considering how contemporary ... -
Paying Taxes: Understanding Americans’ Tax Attitudes
(2015-05-12)This dissertation examines American attitudes about taxation. Surveys and interviews shed new light on how Americans think about four fundamental questions: Should one pay taxes, and if so, how much? Who pays their fair ... -
Prediction and the Moral Order: Contesting Fairness in Consumer Data Capitalism
(2019-05-17)Corporations increasingly gather massive amounts of personal data to mathematically predict how individuals will behave and then treat people differently based on these predictions. This dissertation unpacks the moral ... -
Social Structure, Space, and the Dynamics of Income Inequality
(2020-05-13)This dissertation explores the consequences of rising income inequality for different aspects of social life in the United States. Across three disparate domains, it shows that some of the most pressing social problems are ... -
Start, Start Again: The College Pathways of Economically-Vulnerable Mothers
(2015-05-15)How do returning college students navigate the rapidly diversifying landscape of higher education options available to them today? Adopting a life course perspective, I argue that the college persistence of non-traditional ... -
The Organization of Conflict in American Local Government
(2018-05-11)Politics is fundamentally about conflict: where it takes place, what outcomes are at stake, and how the dividing lines are drawn. At the state and national levels in the United States, political parties are often at the ... -
The Process of Building, Sustaining, and Using Cross-Occupational Collaborations
(2019-04-22)Cross-occupational collaboration is difficult, as work and occupations scholars show, but can be overcome in a variety of ways. To better understand cross-occupational collaboration, I propose that researchers look at the ... -
Tribal Lands, Tribal Men, and Tribal Responsibilities: World Renewal Fathers With Criminal Records and Their Perceptions of Work and Fatherhood on and Off-Reservation
(2020-01-08)The spatial concentration of inequality is one of the most enduring findings in the social sciences (Sampson 2012, Sharkey 2013, Wilson 1987, 1996), yet these theories do not encompass the experience of rural tribal ... -
Whose Bills? Corporate Interests and Conservative Mobilization Across the U.S. States, 1973-2013
(2016-05-14)In recent decades, conservative groups have become increasingly active in mobilizing corporations to press their interests not just on the U.S. Congress and federal agencies, but also on legislatures in the fifty U.S. ...