Poverty Research & Policy

For this episode, we hear from Dr. Casey Stockstill about research she did to better understand economic and racial segregation in preschools. Dr. Stockstill spent time observing in two highly rated preschools in the same city: One was a Head Start location where nearly all of the children were students of color and from lower income families and the other was a private preschool in a more affluent part of town where nearly all the students were white and from higher income families. Her observations offer insights about how inequality and segregation in early childhood education can play out in the classroom for students and their teachers. 

2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low Wage Work, by Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein. The book was based on interviews with low-income single moms that took place between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Edin and Lein detailed the women's household budgets, the strategies they used to support their families, and the unforgiving choice between welfare and low-wage work.  In this episode, we hear from Kathryn Edin about what she learned from talking to these mothers and about the changes in U.S. antipoverty policy in the 25 years since Making Ends Meet was published.  A transcript for the episode is available at https://www.irp.wisc.edu/resource/kathryn-edin-on-the-25th-anniversary-of-making-ends-meet/.  

Where we get information about money and how to manage it can have long-lasting impacts on financial security and wealth accumulation. While there are some commonly shared sources of information that shape our attitudes and beliefs, there are also some significant differences across racial and ethnic groups. In this episode, Dr. Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana joins us to discuss her recent paper titled, “Race and the Financial Toolkit: Bridging Cultural Theories to Understand Behavior and Decision Making in the Racial Wealth Gap.” Rucks-Ahidiana is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research investigates how race informs gentrification, how the news media represents gentrification, and how culture contributes to the racial wealth gap. She is also a former IRP Emerging Poverty Scholar.

In this episode of the Poverty Research & Policy Podcast, we hear from Brieanna Watters and Robert Stewart about a paper they coauthored* on Native Americans and Monetary Sanctions involving the criminal legal system. They discuss how Native American experiences in relation to the legal system are often unique, how the rural nature of Indian Country matters when it comes to policies around fines and fees, and how their research in Minnesota finds higher levels of fines and fees for Native American defendants, particularly in areas near reservations.  Watters is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota, and Stewart is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.  *The paper discussed in the episode was coauthored by Stewart, Watters, Veronica Horowitz, Ryan Larson, Brian Sargent, and Christopher Uggen. You can find it in a special issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences at https://www.rsfjou

In this episode, we hear from José Pacas about data challenges involved in measuring rural poverty in the Supplemental Poverty Measure or SPM and how the subtleties of poverty measurement can have real world implications for the lived experiences of low-income people in rural places.  Dr. Pacas is currently serving on a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel on Evaluation and Improvements to the Supplemental Poverty Measure. He is Chief of Data Science and Research at Kids First Chicago and was previously a researcher at IPUMS at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Pacas was a 2019-2020 fellow in the IRP Scholars in Residence Program. 

People experiencing homelessness are more often part of the background in movies than featured as the protagonists. But when they are the focus of a film, the ways that they and those who feel moved to help them are portrayed can have a big impact on how the public and policymakers think about homelessness and possible solutions. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Whitney Gent about what she and her coauthor found in their analysis of films featuring homeless characters from 1983 to 2018, and in particular the concepts of visibility and agency. Gent is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She earned her doctorate in rhetoric, politics, and culture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a graduate research fellow with IRP during her doctoral studies.

When the pandemic hit, many people who study child maltreatment, abuse, and neglect were worried that some children might be at greater risk due to more time at home and other factors that the pandemic could exacerbate. But at the same time, many children had less access to other adults who might be able to notice if something was wrong. For this episode, we talked with Dr. Lindsey Bullinger of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy about how she and her colleagues went about trying to measure rates of child maltreatment early in the pandemic when many families needed to stay at home.

In this episode, we hear from Professor Prentiss Dantzler about how perceptions of who lives in public housing – and who deserves that type of support – have developed over the past century, and how that has affected the urban poor and particularly people of color. His research includes reviewing the congressional testimony around the issue of providing housing for returning World War II GIs. Dantzler is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and a former IRP Visiting Scholar.

In this episode, we hear from Dr. Quentin Riser about how family income instability in early childhood affects children's school readiness and later outcomes. He talks about how administrative data, such as in the Wisconsin Administrative Data Core, can offer a more complete picture of the financial ups and downs that young families face, and how that can matter for children later on in school.  

IRP recently had the privilege of hosting New York Times reporter and author Andrea Elliott and NYU Professor of Social Work Darcey Merritt for a conversation about Elliot’s book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City. They talked about the family in the book, the child welfare system and race, how we think about meeting the needs of children, and how we can do better.   

When the pandemic hit the United States in March of 2020, Anna Gassman-Pines and her colleague Elizabeth Ananat were already conducting a text message survey among service workers who had children. As early-pandemic lockdowns and business closures began, Gassman-Pines and Ananat were able to pivot and began asking the people they were surveying about job and income loss, challenges that stemmed from school and childcare shifts, whether they were able to access government benefits, and about their own mental health. In this podcast episode Gassman-Pines offers an overview of their findings and discusses how what they learned fits within the larger context of low-wage work in the United States. Transcript:  Dave Chancellor: [00:00:04] Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm Dave Chancellor and, for this episode, I got to speak with Anna Gassman-Pines about the experiences early in the COVI

For this episode of the Poverty Research and Policy Podcast, we hear from Professor Amy Castro about the concept of Basic Income, and what she and her team are learning from data coming in from pilot projects around the country.  Professor Castro is Founding Director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research and an Assistant Professor of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. --- Transcript:  Judith Siers-Poisson: Hello, and thanks for joining us for the poverty research and policy podcast from the Institute for research on poverty at the university of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm Judith Siers-Poisson. For this episode we are going to be talking with Professor Amy Castro about the concept of Basic Income, and what she and her team are learning from data coming in from pilot projects around the country.  Professor Castro is Founding Director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research and an Assistant Professor of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Cast

In this episode we hear from Dr. Amelie Hecht about universal free school meal programs and how the pandemic may have shifted the outlook for this kind of program. Dr. Hecht is a fellow in the IRP National Poverty Fellows Program where she is in residence at the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation at the federal Administration for Children and Families.  Transcript:  Dave Chancellor: Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I’m Dave Chancellor for this episode. We’re going to be talking to Dr Amelie Hecht about universal free school meals and how the pandemic may have shifted the outlook for this kind of program as we look ahead. Dr. Hecht is a fellow in the IRP National Poverty Fellows program, where she’s in residence at the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation at the Federal Administration for Children and Families. She completed her Ph.D. in Health Policy and management at

For this episode of the Poverty Research and Policy Podcast, we hear from Juan Pedroza about immigration in the United States, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and how place matters when it comes to thinking about immigrant health. Pedroza is an Assistant Professor of Demography, Migration and Inequality in the Sociology Department at the University of California Santa Cruz and was a fellow in IRP's Emerging Poverty Scholars Program. You can find more of Professor Pedroza's work at www.socialdemography.xyz/ and follow him on twitter at @ijuanathesaurus If you would like to connect with other resources from the Institute for Research on Poverty, sign up for our email lists.

In this episode, Judi Bartfeld shares how the COVID-19 pandemic, and the social safety net’s response to it, has affected food insecurity in the United States. She also explains how the permanent increase in SNAP benefits that took effect October 1, 2021, fits into the larger picture of ensuring that people have consistent access to nourishing foods. Dr. Bartfeld is a professor in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison and is also a food security research and policy specialist in the Division of Extension at UW, and is an IRP faculty affiliate.

In this episode, Mustafa Hussein talks about living wage ordinances that were passed in the 1990s and 2000s in cities across the United States. These ordinances were only directed at relatively small groups of lower wage workers in these cities, but Dr. Hussein and his team set out to see if these smaller ordinances would have larger impacts on these local labor markets. Dr. Hussein is an assistant professor of health policy and economics at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and an IRP faculty affiliate.

In this episode, we hear from  IRP Affiliate J. Michael Collins, Professor of Public Affairs and Consumer Science at UW-Madison and the director of the Center for Financial Security. He talks about whether parents from different racial and ethnic groups and with varying income levels are more or less likely to give their children an allowance. He also explains what parents might be hoping to achieve by giving their child money that they manage themselves, and whether that translates into more financial capability as a young adult.

In this episode we hear from Adrian Huerta of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Huerta shares his research that came from talking to gang-associated youth in high school, what their education experiences looked like, and how that translated to what they thought about the options they had when it came to going to college.

For this episode, we hear from Maia Cucchiara, a professor of Urban Education at Temple University. She talks about low-income mothers’ experiences with parenting education courses, which are designed to teach parenting techniques and about things like child development. They might be offered in schools or community settings and participation is sometimes voluntary, sometimes included as part of participation in other programs, and sometimes mandated as part of a court decision, for example. The interview draws on a paper she wrote on the hidden curriculum of parenting education. We hear about what was taught in the classes she observed, what wasn’t, and why that matters.

There's a sort of conventional wisdom that during recessions, more  people enroll in college or stay in college longer when jobs are scarce. But it's not clear that this "benefit" extends to everyone. In this episode, Howard University economist Andria Smythe talks about her research looking at how college outcomes of young adults shifted during a recession and how she found that those from disadvantaged backgrounds' levels of college completion were hurt more during a recession.