Project Director

Hood, Ralph W., Jr., 1942-

Department Examiner

Ross, David F., 1959-

Department

Dept. of Psychology

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Social assistance programs throughout the nation have experienced major obstacles to both funding and service provision related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study examines one strategy that a local Chattanooga nonprofit organization, Chattanooga Endeavors, explored to increase the rate of participation in a 21-day online program that assists justice involved individuals to address goals related to employment, education, and public assistance. The organization has access to judgment orders from Hamilton County (TN) Criminal Court and has used this information to identify individuals who have been sentenced to serve a prison term and who are eligible for an outreach program that it operates in prison. Because many of judgment orders (81%) are for individuals who have been sentenced to a period on community supervision and not prison, the organization wanted to see if the information it had on those individuals could be used to make them aware of assistances that is available to them without going to prison. The initial interest of researchers was to determine if there was any information that was predictive of an increased probability that they will voluntarily attend a two-hour online orientation. However, because the majority of the sample selected for this project (N=150) were not able to be contacted by telephone, findings were indeterminate. Researchers speculate that the reasons for this can be helpful to Chattanooga Endeavors to develop an outreach for this segment of the correctional population with attention to factors of convenience, incentive, and stigma – all critically important to the rates of up take for any social assistance program.

IRB Number

21-119

Degree

B. S.; An honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Science.

Date

5-2022

Subject

Participation; Social service

Keyword

Take-up; social assistance

Discipline

Applied Behavior Analysis | Community Psychology

Document Type

Theses

Extent

43 leaves

DCMI Type

Text

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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