Data Skills for Social Service Agencies

Social workers regularly work with a variety of data in organizational settings, including (but not limited to) client service data, financial data, program data, and community data. These datasets and data systems constitute important assets of organizations, and are critical for decision-making and ensuring the efficient use of resources. Organizational data systems evolve naturally over time as data collection methods, data storage formats, and organizational needs change. As these systems change, and new types of data are introduced, incompatibilities often arise which make the data unusable for many of the problems that organizations are trying to solve. The purpose of this course is to provide students with an overview of working with and making value of different types of organizational data. The course is built around two important analogies -- the data lake and the data pipeline. Through these analogies, students will be exposed to critical activities and important skills that are necessary for transforming messy data into systems that are useful for generating actionable insights. Students will be exposed to major approaches for storing, managing, cleaning, and integrating data, which include both traditional tools within spreadsheets as well as code-based solutions.

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