Among those that face the greatest risk for contracting Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) are black adolescents between the ages of 13 and 24. Nearly one-third of new infections occur among this demographic. Among all youth, black men have higher rates of contracting HIV in comparison to any other race/ethnicity. This study focuses on the roles of the family, primarily parental communication and relationship factors, and school, primarily peers, and teachers, and how they are associated with sexual health behaviors (condom use, HIV testing, etc.); their impact, in short, on shaping health behaviors. This dissertation study examines the following questions among Black adolescent males: (1) Are there mediational relationships between parent support, self-efficacy beliefs about sex, sense of belonging at school, parent relationships, parent attitudes about sex, peer knowledge, racial discrimination, and HIV sexual risk behaviors? (2) Are self-efficacy, sense of belonging, parent support, parent attitudes towards sex, parental relationships, and peer knowledge predictive of HIV testing (ages 14-26)? Using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Add Health is designed to explore health and social context from adolescence to adulthood (Carolina Population Center). Includes a nationally representative sample of U.S. adolescents from grades 7 through 12, over four waves (1994-95, 1996, 2001-02, 2008 ) and collects data on respondents’ social environment, family environment, behaviors and choices, physical health, education, goals and achievements. The main analytic strategy to addressing research question was a multinomial analysis and a structural equation model. The results indicated that parent support positively predicted HIV testing among Black males at waves 1 and 3. Results also indicated that parent attitudes was negatively associated with males being tested at both waves 1 and 3. These results our important because the eco-developmental theory suggests that microsystems are the most influential with respect to adolescent HIV/Sexually transmitted disease risk behaviors now extending to HIV testing.

This research examines how aspects of a weakened social structure potentially impact SNAP participation over the course of the Great Recession among elderly low-income heads of households. The objective is to understand how individual characteristics, as well as structural factors of a weakened economy, a growing low-wage labor market, and a shrinking safety net, impact participation in SNAP.

This research will specifically ask the following questions:

How does participation in SNAP change throughout the course of the Great Recession when the structural vulnerability of poverty framework is examined?

Do differences in SNAP participation change by structural factors associated with poverty across states?

This research brings a new approach to investigating the relationship between determinants of SNAP participation as a function of poverty in relation to structural factors throughout the Great Recession. Instead of asking how SNAP participation affects labor force participation, this research adds to the literature by exploring what factors act as a determinant to SNAP participation in times of economic uncertainty.

A binary logistic multilevel regression was conducted using secondary data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation 2008 Panel. The sample included low-income (150% of the Federal Poverty Line) heads of households, aged 18-64.

Social work education programs accredited by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) are expected to cultivate the knowledge and skills students require to competently challenge social injustices and advance social and economic justice in their professional practice (CSWE, 2008a). Because social work educators play a key role in this effort (Gil, 1998; Van Soest & Garcia, 2003), this study explored educators' beliefs have about their ability to fulfill this role. This exploration integrated teacher efficacy theory (Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, & Hoy, 1998) and ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1994) to determine to what extent the educational context as well as the personal and professional characteristics of educators affected these beliefs. Over 500 full-time social work educators responded to a request to complete a 56-item online survey instrument regarding their efficacy beliefs about their ability to integrate social justice content into their teaching in addition to information regarding the educational context in which they taught as well their personal and professional characteristics.

These educators reported a high level of efficacy beliefs about their abilities to (a) facilitate student engagement and (b) encourage student learning when integrating social justice content into their teaching. In addition, the educational context was demonstrated to be influential on educators' efficacy beliefs. In particular, an educators' resolve to integrate this content and the availability of programmatic support proved significant. Further, educators' ethnic identity as well as the mastery experience of integrating human rights content proved most relevant to one or both sets of efficacy beliefs. In addition, from respondents' written comments, the effects of program mission and integration, faculty preparation and engagement, students' positionality, and the challenge of connecting an abstract concept to concrete practices were each revealed as relevant to efforts to integrate social justice content into teaching. Finally, implications for future research including the need to establish whether educators' efficacy beliefs reflect their actual teaching performances as well as the practical application of these findings for social work education programs are provided.

This dissertation study contributes to the research on restorative conferencing with youth offenders by exploring the ways digital storytelling provided unique opportunities for participants in the Young New Yorkers program to engage in restorative justice values and critically reflect on their crime. Using narrative identity theory as a theoretical lens, and multimodality as an analytic framework, findings suggest that the YNY program's curriculum scaffolds restorative justice values through a narrative identity work to assist participants in the deconstruction of their crimes. Analysis of participant digital stories demonstrated participants took personal responsibility for their crimes and were able to identify the individual and environmental factors which promoted their criminal behavior. Further, participants were able to critically reflect on their offense and enhance their capacity to contribute to and work in collaboration with others in their community. Findings from this study highlight the affordances of digital storytelling as a practice for engaging youth in re-storying their offender identities promoting the development of a prosocial identity.

Over the past several decades, research has demonstrated that minoritized groups, such as Black and Indigenous communities, disproportionately experience adverse child welfare outcomes. However, there is a significant gap in understanding the experiences of Asian American families involved with the child welfare system, which hinders a comprehensive assessment of maltreatment issues and the effectiveness of prevention and intervention practices in this diverse community. This dissertation employs data from the California Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS) between 2014 and 2020 and used logistic regression and survival analysis to examine racial disproportionality and disparities in disposition and recidivism outcomes, along with the predictors thereof, among various Asian ethnic groups. The findings reveal that Asian American children generally experience fewer prior referrals and recidivism incidents related to maltreatment. Their dispositions are also more likely to be determined with the 30-day timeframe compared to specific racial/ethnic groups. Nonetheless, disparities persist among different Asian subgroups, particularly among Southeast Asian groups such as Laotians, Hmong, and Cambodians. The density of the Asian American population serves as a protective factor that reduces the risk of substantiation and re-report for Asian American families, although it does not impact case recurrence. This study challenges the model minority myth by revealing ethnic disparities among Asian subgroups and their unique positions in relation to other racial groups. The insights gained aim to inform policymakers and practitioners in developing culturally sensitive interventions and policies tailored to the specific needs of each racial and ethnic group within the child welfare system.

Guided by the theory of inhibition and confrontation, this dissertation examines the relationship between stressful life events, family communication and PTSD development among diverse (46.9% Latina/o, 18.4% Armenian, 18.4% White, and 16.3% other) west coast public school adolescents (n=98) referred for counseling in schools. Secondary analysis of a cross-sectional survey was conducted and revealed that all adolescents in this sample endorsed at least one stressful event in their lifetime with an average of 7 lifetime events, including illness, death, and indirect and direct violence exposure. Exactly half of the sample reported PTSD symptoms in the clinical range with re-experiencing and arousal symptoms the most commonly endorsed. Adolescents reported both open and problem family communication with higher open family communication scale scores than problem family communication. Bivariate relationships showed that open family communication was negatively associated to PTSD symptom severity, the number of lifetime stressful events and problem family communication was positively associated to PTSD symptom severity, and family storytelling style was negatively associated to avoidance symptoms. However, in the full regression model only the number of life events and problem family communication appeared to have an independent effect on PTSD symptom severity scores. Testing for potential moderation effects of family communication found no interaction terms significant in this sample. Implications and directions for future research are discussed, including the importance of reducing problem family communication in order for the protective effects of open family communication to flourish and the potential benefits of PTSD screening in schools.

The National Association of Social Workers “Code of Ethics” states that social workers have a duty to ensure that families are treated with dignity, respect, and a right to self-determination. However, social workers often find themselves working in institutions that contradict these principles, one of which includes the “child welfare” system. In Los Angeles the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) markets themselves as the “largest child protection agency” in the United States and is responsible for ensuring the safety of over 2 million children. To “protect” children the system relies on the use of investigations, surveillance, and family separation processes. These processes have had significant generational impact on communities who are poor and Black, Latinx, or Indigenous. Due to this, several “child welfare” researchers are currently debating if the system should continue to exist in its current state, undergo drastic reformation, or cease to exist in its entirety. The current study attempts to add to this debate by seeking to better understand the context in which the system operates and its relation to the carceral state as described by system stakeholders and individuals impacted by the “child welfare” system in Los Angeles County. Using a Carceral Ecosystem framework the study begins to interrogate the discourse around “child protection” and how it has been used as justification for the involvement of families within the system, the proliferation of surveillance and surveillance technologies, and subsequent family separation. In further extending the Carceral Ecosystem framework, the study situates abolitionist praxis as perturbation event that encapsulates both imaginative possibility and realistic strategy towards a post-“Child Welfare” future.

Since the 1970s, globalization, changes in technology, and the weakening of unions have transformed employment relations in the United States. One indication of this transformation is the rise in precarious employment, or “employment that is uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg, 2009, p. 2). Existing research indicates that young people between the ages of 16 and 24 are more likely than workers from other age groups to be in precarious work. There is also a growing body of literature on the relationship between employment and short- and long-term health outcomes, including psychological distress and depression. However, much remains unknown about the pathways and mechanisms linking employment trajectories with health outcomes for young adults, which will be critical for designing effective program and policy interventions. This dissertation used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to create a multi-dimensional measure of precarious employment, and to assess the relationship between changes in precarious employment and changes in self-rated general health, mental health, and behavioral health. First, it used latent class analysis to identify precarious employment groups at Wave III and Wave IV, and assessed the factors associated with precarious employment at that time. From there, the precarious employment groups from Wave III and Wave IV were linked, in order to create a variable representing change in precarious employment over time, and factors associated with the change in precarious employment were assessed. In addition, this study assessed whether participation in job-training made a difference, in terms of the change in precarious employment over time. Lastly, generalized linear models were used to assess the relationship between changes in precarious employment and changes in health. Findings indicated that age, gender, race/ethnicity, and education significantly associated with precarious employment at Wave III, and with the change in precarious employment from Wave III to Wave IV. There was not a significant relationship between participation in job-training and changes in precarious employment. Lastly, changes in precarious employment were not associated with changes in health. It is argued that these findings have important implications for policy and practice; however, more research is needed, in order to better understand emerging adults’ experiences in precarious employment today.

Research shows that violence exposure, trauma, and education are inextricably linked, cyclically influencing one another and impacting adolescents’ current and future well-being. These experiences are caused and often exacerbated by racism embedded within institutions. This complex relationship between trauma and exposure to violence negatively impacts adolescents’ behavioral and academic functioning within schools. Experiences of trauma and post-traumatic stress impact adolescents throughout their lives, trickling down into schools perpetuating the inequities that uphold marginalization. While the impact of violence exposure and trauma on individual youth has been clearly delineated, research has failed to highlight their institutional causes. Understood as an individual problem, the concept of trauma creates and maintains a deficit framework that blames students and their communities for experiencing systemic causes of harm. Through this pathological approach to addressing violence-related trauma, harmful policies and practices within schools are masked. Research that is unclear on the complex ways institutions reproduce or even create harm renders the systemic causes of violence-related trauma invisible. To challenge the individual deficit approach to trauma-informed care in schools, a constructivist grounded theory multiple case study design was used to explore how teachers and school staff perceive, are impacted by, and respond to the manifestation of trauma derived from community violence exposure in three High Schools in Los Angeles County, California. Findings draw from critical race theory and healing justice to inform a conceptual framework that describes how individual responses to trauma can be situated within institutional power dynamics. The framework from this study details the nexus between teacher education programs, district policies, resources, staff biases, and collective well-being through four main themes: (1) these teachers and school staff determine what constituted trauma for a student, even with minimal information; (2) individual experiences embedded within institutional factors encourage paternalism as the main response to trauma in schools; (3) this response leads to the demoralization of those caring for students; and (4) combined, each of these factors holds a cumulative impact on current and future students. I conclude by discussing the need to identify institutional causes of trauma to understand better and meaningfully address the (re)production of violence-related trauma in schools.

When foster youth emancipate from the child welfare system they no longer have professionals overseeing decisions about contact with their biological parents. While there is a general awareness in the field of child welfare that former foster youth often do choose to reconnect with their biological parents as adults, there has been scant research investigating former foster youths’ lived experiences of contact with them. Little is known about the potential functions of these relationships as sources of support, conflict, healing, or resilience. Without an understanding of how decisions about contact are made, and how such contact impacts their lives, it is not possible to assess how prepared, or unprepared, emancipated youth are when they leave the child welfare system to negotiate these relationships in whatever manner is most beneficial to them.

This qualitative study utilized interpretative phenomenological analysis in order to describe the experiences of a small sample (N = 8) of emancipated youth. This research also investigated the potential for theories of emerging adulthood, attachment and ambiguous loss, and resilience to contribute to a theoretical framework that could aid in understanding their experiences and decision making processes with regards to their relationships with their biological parents. Data were collected primarily via two rounds of in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and topics explored included descriptions of contact, ways in which relationships with biological parents served as supports and challenges, how emancipated youth made sense of their decisions about contact, identity development, forgiveness, and closure.

Overall, participants described their biological parents as still struggling with the issues that led to foster care placement, and their relationships with them were often both supportive and challenging in different respects. For some, having children of their own had changed their relationships with their biological parents in rather complex ways. Despite the presence of difficulties in many of their relationships, participants expressed a great deal of empathy for their biological parents. Many had gone through a process of forgiveness in order to move on from the past. Practice implications and the applicability of theories of emerging adulthood, ambiguous loss, and resilience were also explored.