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Consistently, investigators have found that those from the lower class have more psychological distress than others (Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend 1981; Dooley and Catalano 1980; Kessler and Cleary 1980; Liem and Liem 1978; Mirowsky and Ross 1989; Turner and Noh 1983). Over the past two decades, the concepts of stressful life events, social support, chronic life strain, vulnerability, and social selection have received attention as important possible mediators of this relationship. In this paper, explore the longitudinal impact of an extreme indicator of low social class, receiving public financial assistance, for the psychological well-being of African American mothers from a Chicago neighborhood. This research is prospective, longitudinal, and epidemiological and involves a total cohort of mothers of first-grade children. The children and mothers were followed up 10 years later. The psychological well-being of welfare recipients is compared to nonrecipients. Welfare recipients are poor in terms of money and they also have a particular relationship to society. Both Simmel and Coser have argued that this relationship centers on their status as receiving assistance and is essential in the very definition of poverty.
...no one is socially poor until he has been assisted and this has a general validity: sociologically speaking, poverty does not come first and then assistance. ...but a person is called poor who receives assistance or should receive it given his sociological situation (Simmel 1965:138).
Coser (1965:140-41) agrees:
Just as in Durkheim's view crime can best be defined as consisting in acts having 'the external characteristics that they evoke from society the particular reaction called punishment,' so I shall argue here that the poor are men who have been so defined by society and have evoked particular reactions from it.
While there is research on the patterns of welfare over time, the events that are linked to the beginnings and endings of welfare (Bane and Ellwood 1994), how welfare relates to family structure (Rank 1986), and the effect of parental welfare on children's outcomes (Offord et al. 1987), there is very little research on the social psychological impact of welfare (see Duncan and Hoffman 1988). In addition we know very little about how persistent welfare recipients differ from those who receive welfare intermittently or those who are from the same community but who do not...