Homeless families in St. Louis: A report from the field
In May, June, and September of 1998, 169 residents of the largest homeless shelter in Missouri were surveyed in response to the Institute for Children and Poverty's February 1998 request to continue research on homeless families in other areas of the country. Our findings corroborate the New York City data of the Institute for Children and Poverty (ICP), with these notable differences: ” For the women in our study, the experience of childhood violence and abuse was significantly higher than that reported in the ICP study. ” The number of children in homeless single-parent families in which the parent is beyond childbearing years was higher than the ICP-reported average (2.7 children). ” Older respondents were more likely to have graduated from high school than younger respondents. ” Compared to the ICP´ is respondents, fewer of our survey's respondents had previously lived on their own and more had stayed with family and friends. ” Significantly more residents in our study had no medical insurance. In addition, ” We gathered information on how many non-high school graduates had earned their GED and how many had attended or graduated from college. ” Our respondents were asked in what career fields they wanted to work. ” We gathered data on nicotine, alcohol, and drug abuse among our residents. ” We asked respondents if their children had the same father. Based on this survey, we concluded that programs for homeless children aimed at keeping them in school, improving their education, and helping them to form and realize career goals—as well as services such as counseling and mentoring—are necessary to keep homeless children from becoming homeless adults.
When Work Disappears
For the first time in the twentieth century most adults in many innercity ghetto neighborhoods are not working in a typical week. The disappearance of work has adversely affected not only individuals, families, and neighborhoods, but the social life of the city at large as well. Inner-city joblessness is a severe problem that is often overlooked or obscured when the focus is placed mainly on poverty and its consequences. Despite increases in the concentration of poverty since 1970, inner cities have always featured high levels of poverty, but the current levels of joblessness in some neighborhoods are unprecedented. The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today's problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoodscrime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so onare fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work. The disappearance of work and the growth of related problems in the ghetto have aggravated an already tense racial situation in urban areas. Our nation's response to racial discord in the central city and to the growing racial divide between the city and the suburbs has been disappointing. In discussing these problems we have a tendency to engage in the kind of rhetoric that exacerbates, rather than alleviates, urban and metropolitan racial tensions. Ever since the 1992 Los Angeles riot, the media have focused heavily on the factors that divide rather than those that unite racial groups. Emphasis on racial division peaked in 1995 following the jury's verdict in the 0. J. Simpson murder trial. Before
Comparison of a Radiometric Procedure with Conventional Methods for Identification of Neisseria
A radiometric procedure was compared with the conventional cystine tryptic agar (CTA) sugar fermentation method for identification of Neisseria species. Four different ATCC cultures of Neisseria were identified by both procedures with identical results. The only difference noted was that the radiometric procedure required 3 h for completion, whereas the conventional CTA sugar method required overnight incubation. The radiometric procedure was also compared with the fluorescent antibody (FA) and CTA methods for identification of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The organisms examined were gram-negative, oxidase-positive diplococci isolated from 49 clinical specimens sent to the laboratory for bacteriological analysis. Results obtained by both CTA and FA procedures were comparable. However, the radioisotope method appeared to be superior to the other two methods in that only one isolate identified as positive by both the CTA and FA methods was not identified radiometrically, whereas four isolates positive by the radiometric method were not identified by the other two procedures. Thus, a total of seven more positive identifications were made radiometrically than by either of the two other methods. All positive identifications were confirmed by a reference laboratory. These results indicate that the radiometric procedure is more rapid and reliable as compared with both the CTA and direct FA methods and, thus, may serve as a valuable addition to the methodology available for diagnostic microbiology.