Research Guides: Social Work Policy & Practice: SWRK 5702

Overview

This guide is designed as a starting place for students in SWRK 5702: Social Policy. You may want to use other parts of this guide when doing your policy research, especially the specific policy area pages (Economic Justice, Community Development, Aging, etc.) but the resources below are suggested starting places.

Gathering Background Information

Encyclopedia of Social Work This link opens in a new window
Updated monthly. From NASW and Oxford University Press, this is a continuously updated reference work with over 700 edited articles, including 400 overview articles on key topics ranging from international issues to ethical standards in the field of social services.

NASW Online Policy Briefs
Full text of briefs are contained in the book Social Work Speaks: NASW Policy Statements. Call Number Ref HV88.N36. Most recent edition: library use only.
CRS Reports
The Congressional Research Service is a nonpartisan agency that produces research reports and briefs on major policy issues and any topic requested by a member of Congress. This official site is publicly available and includes recent reports. SLU database ProQuest Congressional includes historical reports going back to 1914.

Finding Scholarly Articles

See the "Finding Research Articles on Policy" tab on this guide for more options. Below are the databases to start with. If you are looking for articles that assess the efficacy or efficiency of a program or policy, try the following search strategy.

Combine a term that describes your program or policy (e.g. homelessness) with one of the following terms:

evaluation
program evaluation
assessment
social impact assessment
research
evaluation research
outcomes

Social Services Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Indexes and abstracts over 1,000 journals and magazines in the social services in addition to social work dissertations.
PAIS Index This link opens in a new window
Produced by the Public Affairs Information Service. Covers economic, political and social issues.
SLUth - Search Plus This link opens in a new window
SLUth searches nearly 100 databases at once, allowing you to cast a wide net when starting your search for scholarly articles. You will need to make use of the filters, options, and narrow search terms to narrow down your search results!

News, Think Tanks & Policy Organizations

See the "News Sources & Think Tanks" tab on this guide for a listing of some major think tanks concerned with a wide range of issues. See the tab on the guide that most closely matches your topic for more organizations and government entities that may care about policy on your topic. In addition to these and the sources below, you can absolutely search on the web, but be sure to check Media Bias/Fact Check and/our scour the organizations website and about pages to make sure you're aware of the organization's point of view and/or advocacy initiatives.

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Good source for newspapers from the United States and other countries. After you run a search you can narrow results by different attributes such as geographical region, publication name or publication type. You can also limit by date range.

Legislative & Government Resources

Congress.gov This link opens in a new window
Congress.gov is the official site for federal legislative information from the U.S. Congress. Track legislation, and see recent prior legislation.
ProQuest Congressional This link opens in a new window
Provides access to a wide variety of Congressional Publications, including Congressional Hearings. Testimony during Congressional Hearings provides background and perspective of people and organizations impacted by potential legislation. Click "Search for Hearings" and then use the "witness search" feature to search by name or witness affiliation.

Executive Orders via the Federal Register
The Federal Register is the official publication place of executive orders. This site includes the full text of all executive orders back to 1994 and includes links to other related and/or superseded executive orders.
National Conference of State Legislatures
The National Conference of State Legislatures is a bipartisan group of state legislators and their staff. The NCSL web site provides research on policy and issues from the state perspective. Some content is restricted to members of the NCSL, but there is a lot of good information that is available to the public .
Search USA.gov
Use USA.gov to search .gov, .mil, .us and selected other domains that include official local, regional, state and federal government agencies as well as quasi governmental agencies such as the Smithsonian. Find agencies at the federal, state, and local level that deal with the issue of interest to you.

Statistics & Data

Policy Map
Online data and mapping tool for obtaining geographic data from authoritative sources like the Census, BLS, CDC, and dozens of other federal agencies and private data providers. It has thousands of indicators on demographics, the economy, housing, lending, quality of life, education, health, and more. Data is available at the neighborhood census block group in many cases, up to a national level, depending on the data.

ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States This link opens in a new window
The Statistical Abstract of the U.S. includes brief statistics on almost every topic. The focus is on the U.S. but some international statistics are included. This is a great source to start with to find which agency or organization has collected more in-depth statistics.
Social Explorer This link opens in a new window
This tool provides easy mapping and report creation functions for U.S. Census data on population and housing, as well as statistics on religion, crime and health.