Research Interests
- Work and families – especially low-earning families, stratification, and opportunity
- Poverty, welfare, and workforce development policies and programs
- Economic sociology theory
Roberta (Bobbie) Iversen, PhD, MSS, associate professor in SP2, uses ethnographic and related forms of qualitative research to extend knowledge about economic mobility, particularly among families who are working but still poor. Her ethnographic accounts illuminate what low-income working parents need from secondary and post-secondary schools, job training organizations, employers, their children’s public schools, and public policy in order to earn enough to support their families through work. Housing policy in Milwaukee and workforce development programs and policy in New Orleans, Seattle, St. Louis, and Philadelphia were improved by findings presented in Iversen’s 2006 book, Jobs Aren’t Enough: Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families, co-author A.L. Armstrong. The ethnographic research was made possible by multiple independent grants from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Because the labor market has changed dramatically over the past 30+ years and there are not enough well-paying jobs in the U.S., Dr. Iversen’s second book, What Workers Say: Decades of Struggle and How to Make Real Opportunity Now, illustrates those changes through voices of workers in many different occupations. What Workers Say is currently in production at Temple University Press and will be released in late June 2022. This book draws upon Iversen’s interview-based research through welfare reform (1990s), the tight labor market in the late 1990s, and the two recessions in the 2000s and their anemic recoveries that persist and are compounded now by the economic downturn during the coronavirus pandemic. What Workers Say expands ideas about what is considered and compensated as “work” and provides new ways that expanded work in the form of compensated “civil labor” can foster people’s capabilities and result in increased personal, family, and community flourishing.
Iversen’s research provides master’s and doctoral students with real-life examples that extend their understanding of poverty, welfare, work, stratification, social policy, social programs, and mobility. In 2019, Dr. Iversen received the Excellence in Teaching Award in SP2 for the Standing Faculty. In 2014, Dr. Iversen was named to the inaugural class of Fellows of the Society for Social Work and Research. From 2013-2018 she served on the Executive Committee of the Mayor’s Shared Prosperity Philadelphia anti-poverty initiative. At SP2, Iversen served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs (2000-2005) and Faculty Director of the Master of Science in Social Policy (MSSP) program (2009-2016).
