Policy Analysis for Social Workers offers a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to understanding the process of policy development and analysis for effective advocacy. This user-friendly model helps students get excited about understanding policy as a product, a process, and as performance—a unique “3-P” approach to policy analysis as competing texts often just focus on one of these areas. Author Richard K Caputo efficiently teaches the purpose of policy and its relation to social work values, discusses the field of policy studies and the various kinds of analysis, and highlights the necessary criteria (effectiveness, efficiency, equity, political feasibility, social acceptability, administrative, and technical feasibility) for evaluating public policy.

This social work book is the first of its kind, describing practical steps that social workers can take to shape and influence both policy and politics. It prepares social workers and social work students to impact political action and subsequent policy, with a detailed real-world framework for turning ideas into concrete goals and strategies for effecting change. Tracing the roots of social work in response to systemic social inequality, it clearly relates the tenets of social work to the challenges and opportunities of modern social change. The book identifies the core domains of political social work, including engaging individuals and communities in voting, influencing policy agendas, and seeking and holding elected office. Chapters elaborate on the necessary skills for political social work, featuring discussion, examples, and critical thinking exercises in such vital areas as: Power, empowerment, and conflict: engaging effectively with power in political settings. Getting on the agenda: assessing the political context and developing political strategy. Planning the political intervention: advocacy and electoral campaigns. Empowering voters Persuasive political communication. Budgeting and allocating resources. Evaluating political social work efforts. Making ethical decisions in political social work. Political Social Work is a potent reference for social work professionals, practitioners, and students seeking core political knowledge and skills to practically advance their work. For specialists and generalists alike, it solidifies political action as vital for the evolution of the field.

This brief resource sets out a rights-based framework for policy analysis that allows social workers to enhance their long-term vision as well as their current practice. It introduces the emerging P.A.N.E. (Participation, Accountability, Non-discrimination, Equity) model for evaluating social policy, comparing it with the traditional needs-based charity model in terms of not only effectiveness and efficiency but also inclusion and justice. Recognized standards for human rights are used to identify values crucial to informing policy goals. Exercises, key documents, and an extended example illustrate both the processes of creating empowering social policy and its best and most meaningful outcomes. Included in the coverage: Rights-based and needs-based approaches to social policy analysis. Regional and international human rights instruments. Grounding social policies in legal and institutional frameworks. Conceptualizing social issues from a human rights frame. Measuring progress on the realization of human rights. Rights-based analysis of maternity, paternity, and parental leaves in the United States. For social workers and social work researchers, A Rights-Based Approach to Social Policy Analysis gives readers a modern platform for achieving the highest goals of the field. It also makes a worthwhile class text for social work programs. ​

Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices gives you a thorough introduction to social welfare policy analysis. The knowledge you’ll gain from its pages will enable you to understand and evaluate individual policy issues and choices by exploring the possible choices, the effects and implications of each alternative choice, and the factors that influence each choice. Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices provides frameworks for making basic social policy choices and applying them to specific instances. You’ll find its depth of insight into the larger framework in which social policy decisions are made--beliefs, values, and interests--and its historical perspective on current “new” issues unique and invaluable. The book’s approach is to develop a framework for looking at the underlying issues, ideologies, social and economic forces, culture, and institutionalized inequalities that are constant within this changing mass. Specifically, Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices provides frameworks for looking at beliefs about: human nature the nature of society ways of thinking values and the moral and ethical implications of those values roots of those values in religion, culture, historical traditions, myths, and rationalized self-interests The insight offered in Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Choices will allow you to determine your own positioning; understand for strategic purposes what direction opponents, potential allies, and others are coming from; and develop a priorities perspective to guide compromises when the optimum policy is not attainable.

This text offers a clear explanation of policy analysis. SOCIAL WELFARE: POLICY AND ANALYSIS, Third Edition, shows students how to apply the methods and processes of policy analysis to current American welfare programs. The description of welfare programs provides a basic introduction to the field and the explanations of how the programs have developed make them more understandable to social welfare students.

In a political climate that is ever more focused on austerity and efficiency, it is crucial that those who advocate for, support, and implement social policy know how to analyze it and understand its effects, successes, and failures. This volume offers a clear introduction to social policy analysis, starting from the question of why social policy analysis is worthwhile, then moving on to how it can be used to consider approaches to a wide range of social welfare issues.

Introduction to Policy Practice shows future social work practitioners how to actively influence policy-making through lobbying, coalition building and running campaigns. It helps them to master social problem analysis and policy analysis and uses theoretical and empirical knowledge for the application of policy practice techniques. Each chapter reflects and integrates the core competencies in the 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) set by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). End-of-chapter assessment reinforces this integration, and MySocialWorkLab.com activities support the mastery of CSWE's core competencies.