Evaluation and Policy Analysis: A Communicative Framework

A major challenge for the next generation of students of human development is to help shape the paradigms by which we analyze and evaluate public policies for children and families. Advocates of building research and policy connections point to health care and stress experiences across home, school, and community as critical policy issues that expand the scope of contexts and outcomes studied. At a minimum, development researchers and practitioners will need to be well versed in available methods of inquiry; they will need to be "methodologically multilingual" when conducting evaluation and policy analysis, producing reports, and reporting their interpretations to consumer and policy audiences. This article suggests how traditional approaches to policy inquiry can be reconsidered in light of these research inquiry and communicative skills needed by all policy researchers. A fifteen year review of both policy and discourse processes research is presented to suggest ways to conduct policy studies within a communicative framework

Limitations of How We Categorize People

Social policy researchers and policy rules and regulation writers have not taken advantage of advances in assessing ways in which social representations of ideas about people can convey alternative explanations of social life. During the past decade a growing number of scholars have considered how representational practices and the representations that are outcomes of such practices have value. Neglecting to consider representational practices has consequences including failure to mobilize and sustain alternative ideologies that reject narrow perspectives on families and communities. As evidenced by recent OMB rulings on census categories, the dominant sense of meaning of population—and hence family and community—is quite similar to the 17th century sense of people as objects of a particular category in a place from which samples can be taken for statistical measurement. However, the contrastive analysis presented in this paper points out how sustained attention to consequences of use of sets of information categories collected to enumerate population to inform social policy can still materialize. In the wake of federal welfare reform, policy makers are particularly interested in questions of benefit relative to social service delivery and community revitalization. The presentation includes lessons learned from several dozen family, youth, school and community research projects

Welfare Reform: The Positioning of Academic Work

Current welfare reform legislation raises a number of questions about how the field of human services will broaden its analytical and educational functions in a context of uncertainty about what welfare will look like in the years to come. How can information and insights about the distribution of welfare dollars and the process of leaving welfare by a heterogeneous population of clients become the basis of contrastive analysis? We describe information sources which can provide a framework for positioning academic work to use longitudinal quantitative tracking sources to lay out qualitative inquiry suggestions for collecting process data that will emerge over time. We suggest that such data will be valuable to practitioners working with persons composing their own histories in the face of the admonishing welfare construct get off welfare

Critical Examinations of the Known and the Unknown in Social Science: Where Do We Go from Here?

If the use of social science assumptions and beliefs is what helped set fields of professional practice on the quest for recognition in the academy, what does the recent outpouring of publications on the limits of science reveal about sociocultural research prospects at the dawn of the 21st century? The last few years alone have witnessed the publication of special journal issues on the scientific wars of the nineties, year long professional association debates on the known and unknown, and new books and online data sources proclaiming the end of social science. Cumulatively, research and commentary on the limits of science offer pessimistic and optimistic arguments about advances in understanding intractable sociocultural problems that center on understanding extraordinary complexity. We come down on the optimistic side, encouraged by possibilities for using heuristic tools to identify propositions and ideologies presented across a variety of interpretive texts written to accomplish the function of expressing interpretations on the known and unknown in sociocultural research

Elaborating the Grounding of the Knowledge Base on Language and Learning for Preservice Literacy Teachers

This purpose of this article is to present a qualitative inquiry into the genesis of sociolinguistic s and the contributions of eight sociolinguistic pioneers. This inquiry, based on an historical interpretation of events, reformulates the concept of validation as the social construction of a scientific knowledge base, and explicates three themes that offer a set of sociolinguistic constructs, questions, and propositions that can provide aspiring teachers with a frame of reference and set of guidelines for teaching language and literacy. An implication section, at the end of the article, illustrates sociolinguistic components that can be added to course syllabi in the preservice language and literacy curriculum

Limitations of How We Categorize People

Social policy researchers and policy rules and regulation writers have not taken advantage of advances in assessing ways in which social representations of ideas about people can convey alternative explanations of social life. During the past decade a growing number of scholars have considered how representational practices and the representations that are outcomes of such practices have value. Neglecting to consider representational practices has consequences including failure to mobilize and sustain alternative ideologies that reject narrow perspectives on families and communities. As evidenced by recent OMB rulings on census categories, the dominant sense of meaning of population—and hence family and community—is quite similar to the 17th century sense of people as objects of a particular category in a place from which samples can be taken for statistical measurement. However, the contrastive analysis presented in this paper points out how sustained attention to consequences of use of sets of information categories collected to enumerate population to inform social policy can still materialize. In the wake of federal welfare reform, policy makers are particularly interested in questions of benefit relative to social service delivery and community revitalization. The presentation includes lessons learned from several dozen family, youth, school and community research projects

Evaluation and Policy Analysis: A Communicative Framework

A major challenge for the next generation of students of human development is to help shape the paradigms by which we analyze and evaluate public policies for children and families. Advocates of building research and policy connections point to health care and stress experiences across home, school, and community as critical policy issues that expand the scope of contexts and outcomes studied. At a minimum, development researchers and practitioners will need to be well versed in available methods of inquiry; they will need to be "methodologically multilingual" when conducting evaluation and policy analysis, producing reports, and reporting their interpretations to consumer and policy audiences. This article suggests how traditional approaches to policy inquiry can be reconsidered in light of these research inquiry and communicative skills needed by all policy researchers. A fifteen year review of both policy and discourse processes research is presented to suggest ways to conduct policy studies within a communicative framework