Saturday, March 28, 2015

Happy Social Work Month!

While it's nearly over, March IS Social Work Month, so in honor of this auspicious occasion, we were asked by our publisher, Oxford University Press, to share a few thoughts.

Well, if you actually know us or have seen us speak, that is a very dangerous request!  We tend to go on and on and on.....  especially when it's a topic we really care about.

It wasn't hard to figure out what to write about, though, because The New York Times, of all places, published an Op-Ed piece titled Social Programs That Work.  That article was written by Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and a former Senior Advisor to the President for Welfare Policy during George W. Bush’s administration.  His article looked at the need to fund social programs that are effective from a policy perspective.

Besides writing books and teaching classes, we ACTUALLY work with agencies to do (what else?) program evaluation.  So we often get a real snapshot of what is going on in the trenches with regard to the very topic of Mr. Haskin's article.  In our article, which you can find on the Oxford University Press Blog, we look at some of the real-life situations facing agencies today and suggest one solution for identifying effective social programs within agency settings.


While not specifically about R, you can probably see where our heads are, and how we think all this R stuff that we have been working on fits into the larger picture of social work practice!

We would love to hear what YOU think!  Be sure to leave a comment on the bottom of the blog post on Oxford's site!  We will be checking in frequently to see what others think about our ideas.

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