Intergenerational poverty and scarce financial resources can create and sustain detrimental behaviors and outcomes among adolescents. Efforts to increase financial literacy and job-related skills, however, can offer youth from low-income households knowledge, skills, and opportunities otherwise unavailable to them. Targeted interventions that combine financial literacy and job-readiness components may help adolescents disrupt the cycle of intergenerational poverty by increasing economic awareness, adaptive financial behaviors, and work-related skills. Drawing on career construction and asset theory, the present study examined changes in financial knowledge and labor skills among youth from low-income households (N = 111) over the course of their participation in the Road to Success curriculum as well as how changes varied across demographic characteristics of participants. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, t-test analyses, and MANCOVA. Results indicated several improvements from Wave 1 to Wave 2 as students developed job-readiness and financial literacy knowledge. Potential educational and policy implications are discussed.
Although social exclusion and inclusion are pivotal to the discipline of social work, there is not much theoretical clarity about what it actually means and its consequences. Despite recent research, current definitions are problematic. For example, exclusion is used as a deficit view and is sometimes a synonym for poverty, marginalization, unemployment, isolation, or solitude. In addition, research often ignores inclusion as a counterpart term and strength-based perspective. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by arguing that a shift is needed from focusing on exclusion toward understanding paths of inclusion among marginalized families and that social inclusion is better conceptualized as a spectrum (not a dichotomy) and a developmental phenomenon (vs. a predetermined one). This article ends with implications for researchers and practitioners focused on immigrant/minoritized families.
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