Understanding the major analytic and quantitative tools used by practitioners engaged in assessing or evaluating human service systems is an essential component of social policy practice. This course will emphasize quantitative program analysis, and students will be asked to analyze an area related to a particular social problem. Students will acquire beginning level skills in the use of a wide variety of analytic and quantitative tools, while gaining in-depth skill in a more limited number of tools and techniques. Competence in these skill areas will be gained by completing a major analysis of a social problem area relevant to social welfare policy.
The underlying theme of this course will be how to increase the rationality of the choice process when applied to complex and rapidly changing human service systems. In short, scientific analysis opposed to political analysis or advocacy is emphasized.
In an era of evidence based practice, community workers, advocates, and evaluators will likely find that they need to interpret and visualize data from a wide variety of sources. Understanding, interpreting and visualizing data (including some basic coding) can make the difference in successfully or unsuccessfully advocating for communities, clients or programs, and for understanding the impact of programs on clients. Increasingly, data relevant to community, participant and client well-being are available from a broad range of sources, whether those be databases of volunteers and donors, the Census, the World Bank, in addition to many others. This course will be focused on the acquisition of concrete applicable skills and strategies for interpreting and visualizing community data, including learning in R, Tableau and QGIS.
Other SW670 Offerings
The course listings below are provided for reference only. These offerings may be subject to changed of cancellation.
No other course offerings found this term.