Many working families continue to struggle in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the deepest and longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. In Children of the Great Recession, a group of leading scholars draw from a unique study of nearly 5,000 economically and ethnically diverse families in twenty cities to analyze the effects of the Great Recession on parents and young children. By exploring the discrepancies in outcomes between these families—particularly between those headed by parents with college degrees and those without—this timely book shows how the most disadvantaged families have continued to suffer as a result of the Great Recession.

Several contributors examine the recession’s impact on the economic well-being of families, including changes to income, poverty levels, and economic insecurity. Irwin Garfinkel and Natasha Pilkauskas find that in cities with high unemployment rates during the recession, incomes for families with a college-educated mother fell by only about 5 percent, whereas families without college degrees experienced income losses three to four times greater. Garfinkel and Pilkauskas also show that the number of non-college-educated families enrolled in federal safety net programs—including Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or food stamps)—grew rapidly in response to the Great Recession.

Other researchers examine how parents’ physical and emotional health, relationship stability, and parenting behavior changed over the course of the recession. Janet Currie and Valentina Duque find that while mothers and fathers across all education groups experienced more health problems as a result of the downturn, health disparities by education widened. Daniel Schneider, Sara McLanahan and Kristin Harknett find decreases in marriage and cohabitation rates among less-educated families, and Ronald Mincy and Elia de la Cruz-Toledo show that as unemployment rates increased, nonresident fathers’ child support payments decreased. William Schneider, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Jane Waldfogel show that fluctuations in unemployment rates negatively affected parenting quality and child well-being, particularly for families where the mother did not have a four-year college degree.

Although the recession affected most Americans, Children of the Great Recession reveals how vulnerable parents and children paid a higher price. The research in this volume suggests that policies that boost college access and reinforce the safety net could help protect disadvantaged families in times of economic crisis.

IRWIN GARFINKEL is the Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems and co-founding director of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC) at Columbia University.

SARA MCLANAHAN is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

CHRISTOPHER WIMER is Research Scientist at the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC) at Columbia University.

Winner of the 2019 Western Social Science Association Best Book Award

“Immigration is a topic that frequently frustrates social scientists: we revere careful data analysis but such analysis seems to have little impact on popular perspectives and public policy. Along comes this gem of a volume to help us understand why: frames matter as much as facts. Drawing on a wealth of research as well as their own analysis of media content and opinion surveys, the authors offer a remarkably nuanced view of the cues and wordings that shift public attitudes to be more or less favorably disposed to immigrants and immigration reform. With results that are sometimes surprising but always informative, Framing Immigrants will be required reading for anyone hoping to break through America’s immigration policy stalemate.”

—MANUEL PASTOR, professor of sociology, American studies, and ethnicity and director, Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, University of Southern California

“Immigration and immigrants are topics about which many people have strong opinions paired with misinformation or no knowledge. Thus media framing can have an outsize impact, for both good and ill. Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan do a terrific job of sorting out what impact the media have on the politics of immigration, when, how, why, and to what effect. An exemplary piece of research.”

—JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

“Framing Immigrants delivers an authoritative account of the power of frames. Combining content analysis of news coverage with original survey experiments, the authors show that not only do frames differ starkly across news organizations in ways that reveal their political stripes, but also that frames matter. The ways in which the media frames immigrants—and especially unauthorized immigrants—significantly affects public opinion, preferences, support for the Dream Act, the deportation of unauthorized immigrants, and comprehensive immigration reform. Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan take the readers along a compelling and surprising journey, and provide a rich, interdisciplinary resource that will inspire future generations of immigration researchers.”

—JENNIFER LEE, Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine

While undocumented immigration is controversial, the general public is largely unfamiliar with the particulars of immigration policy. Given that public opinion on the topic is malleable, to what extent do mass media shape the public debate on immigration? In Framing Immigrants, political scientists Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan explore how conservative, liberal, and mainstream news outlets frame and discuss undocumented immigrants. Drawing from original voter surveys, they show that how the media frames immigration has significant consequences for public opinion and has implications for the passage of new immigration policies.

The authors analyze media coverage of several key immigration policy issues—including mass deportations, comprehensive immigration reform, and measures focused on immigrant children, such as the DREAM Act—to chart how news sources across the ideological spectrum produce specific “frames” for the immigration debate. In the past few years, liberal and mainstream outlets have tended to frame immigrants lacking legal status as “undocumented” (rather than “illegal”) and to approach the topic of legalization through human-interest stories, often mentioning children. Conservative outlets, on the other hand, tend to discuss legalization using impersonal statistics and invoking the rule of law. Yet, regardless of the media’s ideological positions, the authors’ surveys show that “negative” frames more strongly influence public support for different immigration policies than do positive frames. For instance, survey participants who were exposed to language portraying immigrants as law-breakers seeking “amnesty” tended to oppose legalization measures. At the same time, support for legalization was higher when participants were exposed to language referring to immigrants living in the United States for a decade or more.

Framing Immigrants shows that despite heated debates on immigration across the political aisle, the general public has yet to form a consistent position on undocumented immigrants. By analyzing how the media influences public opinion, this book provides a valuable resource for immigration advocates, policymakers, and researchers.

CHRIS HAYNES is assistant professor of political science at the University of New Haven.

JENNIFER MEROLLA is professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside

S. KARTHICK RAMAKRISHNAN is professor of public policy and political science at the University of California, Riverside.

Honorable Mention 2018 Society for Social Work and Research Outstanding Social Work Book Award

Watch Kristin Seefeldt discuss her book Abandoned Families: Social Isolation in the 21st Century. March, 2017.

“This is a remarkable narrative of how institutions that traditionally promote social mobility and inclusion have abandoned striving families in Detroit, a city that has also been forsaken. Based mainly on intensive interviews of low- and moderate-income mothers from 2006 to 2011, Kristin S. Seefeldt’s riveting account of their struggles and her thoughtful policy suggestions to address their plight make Abandoned Families a must-read for scholars, policymakers, and lay readers. I strongly recommend this book as one of the most powerful studies of urban inequality in the last half century.”

—William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University

“The study of poverty has advanced, like all good science, through increasingly specialized studies of declining employment, growing segregation, sky-high incarceration, increasing debt, and much more. In Abandoned Families, Kristin S. Seefeldt reassembles the big picture of U.S. poverty, demonstrating that the poor have been abandoned by each and every institution with which they engage. It’s a tale of wholesale systemic failure that makes it clear that, when it comes to poverty policy, no one’s minding the store.”

—David B. Grusky, Barbara Kimball Browning Professor and director, Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

Education, employment, and home ownership have long been considered stepping stones to the middle class. But in Abandoned Families, social policy expert Kristin Seefeldt shows how many working families have access only to a separate but unequal set of poor-quality jobs, low-performing schools, and declining housing markets which offer few chances for upward mobility. Through in-depth interviews over a six-year period with women in Detroit, Seefeldt charts the increasing social isolation of many low-income workers, particularly African Americans, and analyzes how economic and residential segregation keep them from achieving the American Dream of upward mobility.

Seefeldt explores the economic and political obstacles that have altered the pathways for opportunity. She finds that while many low-income individuals work, enroll in higher education, and attempt to use social safety net benefits in times of crisis, they primarily have access to subpar institutions, which often hamper their efforts to get ahead. Many of these workers hold unstable, low-paying service sector jobs that provide few paths for advancement and exacerbate their social isolation. Those who pursue higher education to gain qualifications for better paying jobs often enroll in for-profit schools and online programs that push them into debt but rarely lead to secure employment or even a degree. And while home ownership was once the best way to establish wealth, Seefeldt finds that in declining cities like Detroit, it can saddle low-income owners with underwater mortgages in depopulated neighborhoods. Finally, she shows that the 1996 federal welfare reform and other retrenchments in the social safety net have made it more difficult for struggling families to access public benefits that could alleviate their economic hardships. When benefits are difficult to access, families often take on debt as a way of managing. Taken together, these factors contribute to what Seefeldt calls the “social abandonment” of vulnerable families.

Abandoned Families is a timely, on-the-ground assessment of hardship in contemporary America. Seefeldt exposes the shortcomings of the institutions that once fostered upward mobility and shows how sweeping policy measures—including new labor protections, expansion of the social safety net, increased regulation of for-profit colleges, and reparations—could help lift up those who have fallen behind.

KRISTIN S. SEEFELDT is assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan.