welfare

apparently dont want to admit to a welfare clerk that they have a dirt floor or live
without a toilet.
Venkatesh, knowing that traditional survey methods dont necessarily produce reliable results
for a sensitive topic like prostitution, tried something different: real-time, on-the-spot data
collection. He hired trackers to stand on street corners or sit in brothels with the prostitutes,
directly observing some facets of their transactions and gathering more intimate details from the
prostitutes as soon as the customers were gone.
Most of the trackers were former prostitutes,an important credential because such women were
more likely to get honest responses. Venkatesh also paid the prostitutes for participating in the
study. If they were willing to have sex for money, he reasoned, surely theyd be willing to talk
about having sex for money. And they were. Over the course of nearly two years, Venkatesh
accumulated data on roughly 160 prostitutes in three separate South Side neighborhoods,
logging more than 2,200 sexual transactions.
The tracking sheets recorded a considerable variety of data, including:
* The specific sexual act performed, and the duration of the trick * Where the act took place (in
a car, outdoors, or indoors) * Amount received in cash * Amount received in drugs
* The customers race * The customers approximate age * The customers attractiveness (10 =
sexy, 1 = disgusting) * Whether a condom was used
* Whether the
* If it could from the neighborhood * Whether the * Whether the * Whether the
customer was new or returning be determined, whether the customer was married. employed.
affiliated with a gang.
prostitute stole from the customer customer gave the prostitute any trouble, violent or
otherwise sex act was paid for, or was a freebieiSo what can these data tell us?
Lets start with wages. It turns out that the typical street prostitute in Chicago works 13 hours a
week, performing 10 sex acts during that period, and earns an hourly wage of approximately
$27. So her weekly take-home pay is roughly $350. This includes an average of $20 that a
prostitute steals from her customers and acknowledges that some prostitutes accept drugs in
lieu of cash,usually crack cocaine or heroin, and usually at a discount. Of all the women in
Venkateshs study, 83 percent were drug addicts.
Like LaSheena, many of these women took on other, non-prostitution work, which Venkatesh
also tracked. Prostitution paid about four times more than those jobs. But as high as that wage
premium may be, it looks pretty meager when you consider the jobs downsides. In a given year,
a typical prostitute in Venkateshs study experienced a dozen incidents of violence. At least 3 of