While it is well documented that families involved in Child Protective Services (CPS) are likely to experience housing insecurity, the mechanisms that may account for the association between housing insecurity and child maltreatment remain unclear. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study (FFCW) to examine associations between housing insecurity and child maltreatment risk. We assess three explanations for associations between housing insecurity and child abuse and neglect risk: a spurious association that is fully explained by economic factors, a direct association, and an indirect association that is mediated by maternal stress. Our results suggest that housing insecurity is directly associated with neglect risk and influences abuse and neglect risk through maternal stress. Our findings highlight the need for a more equitable housing assistance program that serves more low-income families that are at risk of maltreatment, as well as increased attention to housing insecurity by child welfare agencies as a point of intervention.

Volunteer organizations can potentially partner with mainstream professional services to provide better parenting support to immigrant parents. This qualitative study of cooperation between professional agencies and volunteer organizations known as migrant volunteer and community organizations (MVCOs) aims to understand the extent to which professionals and volunteers can transform frame divergence from an obstacle into an advantage. Using frame analysis, this article explores the difficulties these groups encountered when they attempted to work together in two immigrant neighborhoods in Amsterdam. The divergence of the frames each group employed to define cooperation and its aims fueled mistrust and prevented attempts to work more closely together. The possibility of positively employing frame divergence to develop innovative solutions through frame reflection and reframing was hampered by the frame divergence itself, which was rooted in a long-standing controversy concerning roles, power relations, and patterns of inequality between the people involved.

The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) provides cash reimbursement to family day care, child-care centers, homeless shelters, and after-school programs for meals and snacks served to children. Despite young children’s known vulnerability to fluctuations in nutritional intake, prior literature has largely neglected the contributions of the CACFP to reducing household food insecurity. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), we examine the association between CACFP provider participation and food insecurity, controlling for the nonrandom selection process into child-care centers that participate in CACFP. We find that accessing child care through providers that participate in the CACFP results in a small reduction in the risk of household food insecurity. Given the known cognitive and health consequences associated with food insecurity during early childhood, our results indicate the importance of improving access to the CACFP.

Parental expectations for their children’s education can have positive effects on child development, and thus they are appealing targets for interventions. We posit that a universal and progressive Child Development Account (CDA) started at the child’s birth may help to develop and maintain parental educational expectations. As a first step in assessing this proposition, we analyze data from SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK), an experiment designed to estimate the effect of CDAs on parental educational expectations for very young children. We assess the level and durability of expectations from birth to age 4 and find that SEED OK positively affects parents’ expectations for their children’s education at age 4 (N = 2,167) and that the proportion of mothers whose expectations remain constant or increase between birth and 4 years old is higher among those in the treatment group than among those in the control group.

Communities are increasingly turning to coordinated models of service delivery, often called sexual assault response teams (SARTs), to decrease fragmentation and increase the quality of services for rape victims. Drawing on institutional theory, we qualitatively analyze data from 24 interviews with SART professionals to explore how providers understand the organizational dynamics that shape the adoption and practice of SART models of service delivery. Our analysis identifies a process of legitimizing SART that draws on discourses of the moral imperative to treat rape victims better and the logic of coordination, which is further institutionalized by creating systems of support for SARTs. A simultaneous process of decoupling reveals ongoing resistance to the moral imperative and the logic of coordination, as well as inconsistent and incomplete implementation. Implications for theory and SART practice are discussed.

Studies of street-level discretion tend to focus on what influences workers’ behaviors and the consequences of their choices for advancing or compromising policy goals, but studies rarely focus on the space before action, that is, the processes through which workers make decisions and, in particular, how they deliberate with one another about practice problems within groups dedicated to improving social service delivery. Drawing from two qualitative studies of peer discussion groups, a study of teams of child welfare workers and a study of interorganizational groups composed of employment service workers, we find that workers in each setting grappled with similar types of problems but differed in their focus on specific clients or routine tasks, how they sought to legitimate their responses, and the extent to which their proposed solutions modified established approaches to practice. Our analysis suggests that features of the accountability contexts associated with the two policy fields help explain observed differences.