Experiences of Hispanic Families with Social Services in the Racially Segregated Southeast: Views from Administrators and Workers in North Carolina.

North Carolina-as a state in the racially segregated Southeast-offers a unique context to understand access to social services for Hispanic families and children. Theories of administrative burden posit that Hispanic families likely face high learning, compliance, and psychological costs. Hispanic families face challenges that compound these costs: limited English language and literacy proficiency, complex household composition, and citizenship status of family members and other household members. With new survey results and qualitative data on social service administrators and front-line workers, we examine how these costs may affect access to programs for Hispanic families who reside in a state with a history of racial divisions that have shaped local policy implementation. Some workers noted transportation barriers and complex application processes as limiting access. While we expected to find that Hispanic families may be disadvantaged by decentralized service delivery in a manner that is similar to the experiences of African American families, workers instead note significant resources that help facilitate Hispanic families' access to programs. Workers view national anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, rather than state and local policy rules or resource constraints, as limiting their capacity to serve Hispanic families.

Means-Tested Public Assistance Programs and Adolescent Political Socialization.

In recent years, scholars have pointed to the politically demobilizing effects of means-tested assistance programs on recipients. In this study, we bridge the insights from policy feedback literature and adolescent political socialization research to examine how receiving means-tested programs shapes parent influence on adolescent political participation. We argue that there are differences in pathways to political participation through parent political socialization and youth internal efficacy beliefs for adolescents from households that do or do not receive means-tested assistance. Using data from a nationally representative sample of 536 Black, Latino, and White adolescents (50.8% female), we find that adolescents from means-tested assistance households report less parent political socialization and political participation. For all youth, parent political socialization predicts adolescent political participation. Internal political efficacy is a stronger predictor of political participation for youth from a non-means-tested assistance household than it is for youth from a household receiving means-tested assistance. These findings provide some evidence of differential paths to youth political participation via exposure to means-tested programs.