Topics in Social Work

SW513, Section 001

This course is taught by various members of the program faculty. Each version of the course has its own subtitle, some being offered one time only while others are repeated and may evolve into regular courses with their own course number and title.

Topic Description / Additional Information

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 section of SW 513 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.

​This course is open to undergraduate students and graduate students.