Despite increased attention to the phenomenon of administrative burdens, we know less about efforts to minimize these burdens, particularly how those efforts affect frontline staff. This article addresses the gap by analyzing documents gathered and generated by the authors as they implemented a guaranteed-income pilot in Ann Arbor, Michigan, intentionally designed to lessen administrative burdens on applicants. The findings highlight the challenges of putting burden-reducing practices into place and the tensions that emerge, including those between reducing administrative burdens and being accountable for the spending of public dollars. Moreover, we contribute to the literature on administrative burden by uncovering an additional role that administrative burdens can serve—namely, as a device to protect an organization’s professional reputation.

Researchers and policy makers who focus on paid family leave have devoted little attention to American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people. To address this gap, the authors investigate earnings stability, parental leave access, and associated outcomes among AIAN mothers in Washington state. Using mixed methods and grounded in an Indigenous theoretical framework, we explore factors that alternately facilitate and impede these mothers’ leave access and related outcomes. Quantitative findings reveal significant perinatal income disruptions, disparities in both earned income and projected paid leave eligibility, and intersectional inequities in projected paid leave eligibility. Qualitative results underscore the serious adverse impacts of insufficient paid leave access for working AIAN mothers, as well as both the inequities and the individual and community strengths they experience after welcoming a new child. This study highlights the need for comprehensive, culturally aligned policies and support structures to address AIAN perinatal well-being.

Administrative burden can impede access to programs for individuals with diminished material and cognitive resources. Research shows that individuals may respond to burdens differently—they are either deterred, express grievances, seek information, or leverage relationships and resources to access benefits. This work overlooks disabled Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) recipients, an important vulnerable population, and primarily uses a top-down deductive approach. We depart from this approach through a bottom-up, inductive, grounded theory analysis of the strategies SSI and SSDI participants use to maintain access to programs. Participants describe their relationship with the Social Security Administration as a “game” in which they strive to meet their basic needs although the agency seeks to minimize benefits. They described strategies to maintain SSI, SSDI, and other public benefits as “playing the game.” Strategies included working off the books, underreporting hours, and vigilantly monitoring benefits to catch overpayments.

This study investigates the local reinvention of imported peer service ideas for antidrug service in contemporary mainland China through the theoretical lens of subject formation, examining the construction of peers in a context where drug use is legally prohibited, morally condemned, and socially surveilled. Based on an 18-month ethnography, the study reveals that becoming a peer in China’s antidrug field is centered on constructing a state-endorsed subject of a “returning-to-society addict.” Within the broader sociopolitical context of social work development, such a process is mediated by local adaptations of social work discourses, reproducing, rather than challenging, existing governance structures. Nevertheless, peer workers are not passive recipients of the constructed personhood. Because they recognize prevalent stigma and discrimination, they deliberately act as peers to mitigate constraints and disruptions in social relations and everyday life, albeit to a limited degree. This study contributes to growing global dialogues on peer models and critical social work scholarship.

Deep canvassing is one of few attitude-change interventions repeatedly shown to work, yet it has not been examined in the context of anticarceral issues. Scholars and advocates also debate whether we should discuss race when promoting racial equity policies—with some concluding we should avoid race and others calling for further development and testing of a variety of methods. This study addresses both gaps by assessing the effects of race-explicit and race-absent deep canvass conversations on increasing support for anticarceral policies and on changing dominant carceral attitudes. Through a randomized, placebo-controlled field experiment of more than 1,400 canvass conversations with Los Angeles County voters, I find that deep canvassing is effective in building support for anticarceral policies. Race-explicit and race-absent approaches have similar effects on policy opinions, but the race-explicit condition may be the only method that changes underlying ideological attitudes about the carceral state.

To increase access to free or reduced-price school meals and alleviate administrative burden on families, school districts use administrative records to certify directly students who receive benefits through other means-tested programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The Direct Certification with Medicaid for Free and Reduced-Price Meals (DCM-F/RP) demonstration expands direct certification, allowing authorized states to use Medicaid data to identify eligible students. This article uses a difference-in-differences approach to examine the demonstration’s effects on administrative burden and access to free or reduced-price meals. It compares changes in outcomes between the 2015–16 and 2019–20 school years among states implementing DCM-F/RP to changes over the same period among comparison states. This analysis finds statistically significant increases in certification through methods that reduce burden, without statistically significant increases in certification for free meals or reduced-price meals overall. It also finds positive effects on access to free and reduced-price meals.

Children’s postdivorce placement arrangements have changed dramatically in recent decades, with growth in shared placement and decline in mother sole placement. This shift has potentially important—yet largely unexamined—implications for economic well-being, in part, because different policies and practices govern child support obligations in shared and sole-placement arrangements. Using Wisconsin court record data merged with administrative income records, we describe economic outcomes during the first four postdivorce years for mothers with different arrangements, based on mothers’ own earnings, child support receipt, and safety net income; we then estimate the impact of shared placement on mothers’ needs-adjusted income. Our primary analyses incorporate an adjustment for partial cost savings from children spending less time in the home and show no net impact of shared placement. The lack of net impact reflects competing roles of lower child support receipts and higher earnings relative to sole-placement mothers with similar characteristics.