Research Methods for Social Policy Analysis

SW832, Section 001

This course covers research methods for assessing the nature and extent of needs for social intervention, evaluating the success or failure of existing social welfare policies, and determining the anticipated consequences of alternative policies and interventions. Also considered will be values and assumptions underlying policies and research, similarities and differences between methods for developing social policy knowledge and those for basic knowledge development, strategies to promote utilization and dissemination of research results, and methods of studying community, regional, national, and comparative international policies. Possible topics will be: community needs assessment techniques;
subjective and objective measures of program and policy consequences; aggregation problems within and across communities, regions, or countries; analysis of time series data; archival and other historical methods of research; case study techniques; analysis of cross‐sectional, panel, and comparative international data as natural experiments; the design and analysis of formal social experiments; meta‐analysis of existing research results; and benefit‐cost analysis and other related methods.