Japanese Journal of Social Welfare

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the Pension System, Child Allowance, Child Support Allowance, and Public Assistance System are set to alleviate the income security of women. The study examines the inter-system analysis as well as the coverage of these four systems, focusing on "positioning of women" and "the meaning of income security." The results of this study are as follows : First, the women covered in the income security system are in fact individuals who slipped out of the patriarchal model. That is, even if they are separated from the patriarchal model, these women are still carrying out the role of wife or mother based on the sex role model. Second, the four systems, the recipient range, the system purpose, the security reason, and the benefit level each had its own peculiar structure and coverage, and the continuity between systems could not be found. Consequently, this shows the defect of income security and the exclusion of particular types of women from the income security system.

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From April 2007, a new reverse mortgage system has been introduced for households requiring Public Assistance. This new system was created chiefly for the purpose of avoiding the unreasonable situation whereby persons who have not executed their obligation to support an elderly parent inherit that parent's property after the parent's death. Yet it is also thought that the gist of introducing a new system of this nature conversely fosters a major discrepancy between the principle within civil law of property inheritance and the support obligation. This paper provides an investigation of such logically problematic points regarding this new system. At the same time,as a method for stimulating the execution of the support obligation by relatives in households having strained economic circumstances, it is emphasized that already existing measures within the Public Assistance Program should be actively utilized.

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This research is aimed at revealing the effects of(1)the relationship of the family member who is the main caretaker of the person with mental disorder and(2) the household income for each relation as it affects the disability pension receipt status of people with mental disorders. Responses to the self-administered questionnaire were collected from 2,844 members of the National Federation of Families with the Mentally 111 in Japan (response rate 30.8%). The results showed the following. (1)As the age of the people with mental disorder advances, there is a generational shift in the relation of the caretaking family member from "parents" to "siblings." (2) The percentage of disability pension recipients is higher with "siblings" compared to other relations. (3)Lower income households have higher percentage of disability pension recipients. (4)Relation and increase/decrease in household income impact the disability pension receipt status. The respondents analyzed are presumed to be a group with relatively high awareness of disability pension. There are, however, differences in disability pension receipt status depending on relation and household income. This demonstrates that family background variables must be considered and that support measures must be put in place to suit specific situations.

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In recent years,services to facilitate the discharge of people with mental illness from psychiatric hospitals have been expanding nationwide, as the need to alleviate "social hospitalization" of people with mental illness has gained national attention. The purpose of this study is to explore the determining factors to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness by comparing the individual cases that did and did not succeed in community discharge, using the Boolean approach. The study examines how the combination of four independent variables - age, sex, total length of hospital stay, and length of time in training for community living - determined the desired outcome, discharge, which was the dependent variable in the analysis. Results show that more than six months of training prior to discharge is a necessary condition.and that age and total length of hospital stay are not absolute conditions for discharge. However, the analysis yields different sets of conditions when the cases are controlled for sex.

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