Previous efforts to study the relative social position of AFDC recipients, as a welfare class, have produced conflicting interpretations of their social position. A comparison of the fifty states over a fifteen-year period indicates that the income position of AFDC recipients, as a welfare class, continued to recede from the income position of the middle class. But the relative status distance between the welfare class and the middle class has increased more slowly in states exhibiting the social structure characteristics of a relatively undifferentiated middle mass. These findings support conclusions about the continually worsening position of the welfare class, but are also consistent with the idea that the concept of “minimum standard of living” formulated by welfare elites is influenced by the social structure of a state.
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