Why Is It Difficult for Welfare Recipients to Return to Work? A Case Study through a Collaborative Online Community

Social media has been used by government agencies for a wide range of applications including listening to citizens' voices at difficult times, understanding their needs, and helping them to deal with their current circumstances. We have developed a collaborative online community, called NextStep, for the Australian federal government agency, the Department of Human Services, to help parents currently receiving a welfare payment transition into full-time work to become self-sufficient. The community enabled its members to share their experiences and relevant information, and support each other during the transition process. During the one-year trial of the community, we found that participants expressed in the discussion forum the reasons why they were having difficulties (re-) entering the workforce fulltime. We thus decided to analyse the content of the forum with the explicit aim of identifying the barriers to work presented, as it provides some valuable insights into this specific user group and their challenges. In this paper, we describe this analysis. The results indicate that the findings of our analysis are consistent with findings from traditional approaches to uncover barriers to work. Interestingly, the information results from the participants discussing freely and sharing experiences, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in response to a comment or a question provided by a facilitator. It represents the participants' experiences and perceptions and was captured in their own words. We hypothesise that online communities like NextStep could be used to collect data related to "barriers to work" complementing traditional approaches such as interviews and surveys.