Public Welfare: Utilization, Change, Appropriations, Service

During the decade of the 1960\u27s there was continually increasing interest in the programs of public welfare. This interest sprang from several sources. Citizens, always worried about welfare expenditures, developed resurgent concern. Recipients, long a quiet group, became more active, forming the National Welfare Rights Organization. And then there was the rediscovery of poverty as a social problem, and a realization that very many Americans were poor, many more than anyone had somehow realized. The general interest in poverty and the measures used to relieve it had an effect on the academic community, generating some sustained and critical attention to public welfare by people other than those identifiid with the social work profession for the first time in many years. Of particular interest were the rates of welfare utilization and the amount of money the client on welfare received. The purpose of this paper is to review literature in the area of welfare utilization analysis, to present some new data in the area, and to present a hypothetical model which accounts for some of the differences in the data, and provides an integration of the mechanism used by welfare agencies to deal with the multiple contingency situation they face