Administrative burdens as a family affair: Navigating racialized safety-net systems post-welfare reform

Objective

Analyzing ethnographic data collected after welfare reform in the United States, this study explores the family-level consequences of safety-net administrative burdens.

Background

Administrative burdens reproduce racial inequality and have material, psychological, and temporal costs for individuals. Less attention has been paid to how such burdens impose costs not only for the person interfacing with the state but also their families. This study uses an “intersectional family justice” lens to (1) examine the full impact of administrative burdens more broadly, as one component of family burdens and (2) highlight the role of agency in families' heterogeneous, multi-level response strategies.

Method

We conducted a team-based, secondary analysis of 35 family profiles from a longitudinal ethnography detailing the perspectives and experiences of low-income Latinx families with children from 1999 to 2002 at the San Antonio, Texas site of Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study. Through multiple stages of coding, we examined how families experienced and responded to administrative burdens in safety-net systems in the post-welfare reform context.

Results

Families primarily faced two types of barriers when interfacing with safety-net systems (system-level and ideological) and engaged in two types of response strategies (individual-level and network-level). Both barriers and responses had reverberating implications for family well-being and processes.

Conclusion

Because safety-net administrative burdens, often rooted in racialized and gendered logics of “deservingness,” can create substantial disruptions for navigating everyday family life, their costs are more fully understood not only as individual-level burdens but as a family affair.