what’s happening at sp2

Speaking about methods for determining the number of people living with homelessness in a city, Dennis Culhane says, “I think that trying alternative approaches like respondent-driven sampling is worth trying. No method is precise, and all have flaws.”

“The question should be: Can we do this in an anti-racist way that does not create another set of violence, which is the state violence that happens through surveillance?” said Desmond Upton Patton, who also founded SAFElab, a research initiative studying violence involving youths of color.

Speaking about a provision of a federal gun law that effectively exempts dating partners from regulations preventing gun ownership or purchase if they have been convicted of domestic violence, Susan Sorenson says, “Closing the ‘boyfriend loophole’ keeps the focus where it belongs: on the bad behavior rather than on the nature of the relationship between the two parties. Closing this loophole will make women safer.”

Speaking about employers colluding to suppress employees’ wages, Ioana Marinescu says, “I suspect those things are all over the place. The benefits of collusion may not be super large, but if the costs are quite low, why not do it if you can extract profit?”

“You can’t budget your way out of poverty,” says SP2 assistant professor Amy Castro. “If you could, all this money that’s been poured into financial literacy would have resulted in upward mobility. And it hasn’t. Because poverty by definition is lack of cash.”

The Forecast Direct podcast at UCLA Anderson features a conversation with Leo Feler and SP2 associate professor Ioana Marinescu regarding research on how enhanced unemployment insurance affected job search and employment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SP2 associate professor Yoosun Park was a recent guest on the New Books Network to discuss her book, Facilitating Injustice: The Complicity of Social Workers in the Forced Removal and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1946. Dr. Park’s book describes the role of social workers in Japanese internment.

The child tax credit can be seen as a type of scale model of universal basic income. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Sheelah Kolhatkar moderates a conversation about this issue between SP2 assistant professor Amy Castro and Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute.

SP2 associate professor Ioana Marinescu is a featured expert in WalletHub’s analysis of the productivity and current conditions of workers across the United States.