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| 189 Appendix A: Critical Methodology My Approach The core of my research involved interviews with welfare recipients, individuals who must negotiate compliance with increasingly complex welfare regulations. My data collection was limited to one county in Northern California , a county I call Bayview. Bayview County was an attractive research site because of its size, racial and ethnic diversity, and its coverage of both urban and rural areas, and because other researchers have conducted welfare research in the county, allowing me to draw upon existing studies. Studying the policies in only one county allows me to control for policy variations that may occur from county to county. While limiting the scope of research to one county may limit some of the findings, the general nature of the questions I asked and the similarities of welfare policies and practices across both the state and the country allow reasonable generalizations about many of my findings. Rules, regulations, and their enforcement all vary from county to county. Limiting the interviews to welfare recipients in only one county is most likely to hinder the generalizability of the interviewees’ responses about rule knowledge. It is likely that welfare recipients’ access to institutional sources of information varies from locale to locale, as office practices and caseloads vary from county to county. Still, the degree to which welfare recipients obtain information from unofficial sources may or may not vary across counties or sites. More importantly, examining the degree to which welfare recipients skirt the rules and their perceptions of the welfare system’s legality offers revelations of until-nowhidden behaviors and beliefs. I began recruiting and interviewing welfare recipients in November 1998 and conducted the final interview in April of 2002. This meant that all the interviews occurred between the time the CalWORKs program was instituted in the county and December 31, 2002, the day that the sixty-month lifetime welfare limit was reached for California families who had been 190 | Appendix A receiving welfare since the beginning of my study. The welfare recipients I interviewed were recipients of TANF and were the heads of household in an aid unit. Not all of the interviewees, however, received cash assistance themselves . Some either were having their cash grant sanctioned at the time of the interview or were excluded from the aid unit. Welfare time limits and work requirements were inapplicable to the excluded cases where only the child or children received aid. Still, all of the interviewees were responsible for compliance with the other welfare rules, including the reporting rules. Moreover, while some of the adults were excluded from the aid calculations done by the welfare office, they all shared the collective income resources with the other members of their households. With the consent of the research participants, I audiotaped the interviews. (Only one interviewee, Carmen, wished not to be recorded. I took notes by hand during her interview.) After each interview, I either wrote or recorded additional notes or observations about the interview and the interviewee. I also discarded any contact information I had for the interviewee and changed his or her name in my notes. I transcribed the recorded interviews, a time-consuming (and for the half I had professionally transcribed, expensive ) endeavor that allowed me to more thoroughly and accurately review and analyze the interviews. I followed each interview with a debriefing, explaining to the participants that I was most interested in their knowledge and assessment of the welfare rules. I carried with me a list of legal and community service referrals and, after the interview, provided research participants with appropriate contact information based on information they shared with me during the interview. The interviews with the welfare recipients generally lasted one to two hours. Most of the interviews occurred in the back corners of restaurants or cafes, though I interviewed four of the participants in their homes. (I interviewed Lisa and Shanelle, who were best friends, in Lisa’s house.) I interviewed one participant, Viola, in a conference room at her drug treatment program. The interviews were semistructured and covered welfare recipients’ knowledge of the rules and of the sanctions for violating the rules and requirements; their means of support and household composition (both reported and unreported); their socioeconomic, educational, and work histories ; their experiences with the welfare office and with its fraud and error control measures; and their attitudes about the welfare rules, the welfare system , and other welfare recipients (see the Interview Schedule, Appendix B). I asked probing questions about sources of income...

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