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Although the foreclosure crisis is considered over, some areas of the U.S. continue to suffer from high foreclosure rates. This research presents findings from in-depth interviews conducted with 18 service providers who worked with families to prevent their foreclosures in Cleveland, Ohio. The research focused on better understanding the landscape of the Cleveland foreclosure experience. Service providers provided insight into families' experiences with the foreclosure process. The three main themes developed from the interviews included: (1) clients lacked knowledge about the mortgage process; (2) lenders exploited clients' lack of knowledge, setting them up to fail with predatory mortgages and targeting specific groups; and (3) mortgage servicers were inflexible, inconsistent, incompetent, and lacked regard for clients, except for local servicers. The findings provide implications for housing research, policy, and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employed a unique theoretical approach and a series of participant-based ethnographic interviewing techniques that are traditionally used in cognitive anthropology to examine and compare social work and anthropology students' cultural models of the causes of domestic violence. The study findings indicate that although social work students and anthropology students share understandings of a general model of domestic violence, social work students agree on distinctive elements of this model that anthropology students do not. These findings are important in better understanding the role social work education plays in developing social workers' understandings of the roots of domestic violence. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)