Harold & Wilma Good Library: SOWK 550 Social Policy: Finding Sources

Getting Started

Well, I have good news and bad news...

Let's address the bad news first:

Social work pulls from a variety of fields and disciplines, and government websites are notoriously convoluted and often dated. Trying to find a policy on a specific issue can involve a lot of slogging through databases, fiddling with keywords, and waiting on pages to load.

And the good news?

Social work pulls from a variety of fields and disciplines, which means there are a LOT of places to look for information about policies - and while government websites may be clunky to use, they contain plenty of good information. This means that you'll be able to find a policy on just about any topic and quality academic sources to provide analysis and context. This guide will give you several places to start looking for a policy that will help you write a great final paper.

Where to Find a Policy

Congress.gov
The official website of the US legislative branch, with the full text of legislation passed by current and past congresses.
List of United States Federal Legislation
OK, so you shouldn't cite Wikipedia, but it's still a great for locating the original texts of policies and getting a good overview of what a policy is about before you commit to writing about it.

General Research Spots

Library Articles
Get articles right away by selecting the "article" tab above the search bar and then searching with the "Held by Goshen College Good Library" filter checked.

EBSCO This link opens in a new window
35 EBSCO databases in a wide range of disciplines

Library Books and eBooks
Get books right away by selecting the "books" tab above the search bar and then searching with the "Held by Goshen College Good Library" filter checked.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Sometimes it catches things that the library catalog doesn't.

Other Places to Consider

Websites of government agencies connected to your topic (like the CDC, FDA, Department of Education)
Websites of advocacy groups connected to your topic (like Human Rights Campaign, the Center for Immigration Studies, the American Civil Liberties Union)
Think Tank websites (like the Century Foundation, the Brookings Institution - but take these with a grain of salt!)
State, tribal, and local government websites (like those for the Goshen City Schools School Board, the Potawatami Nation, or the city of Goshen)

What to Look For

You will need two types of information for this assignment:

1) The title and text of a policy that has been in place long enough that its results can be studied

A policy is any decision, law, or regulation put forth by a governing body (Segal, 83)
Examples include laws passed by governmental organizations (like Public Law 116-136, aka the CARES Act), executive orders (like DACA), judicial decisions (like the Brown v. Board of Education decision), and regulations (like the city of Goshen's regulations about using fireworks)

2) At least 10 quality sources, 6 of them scholarly and 4 of them from a social work source

Examples include books, scholarly articles, datasets, and research reports from respected organizations
Avoid general news articles, popular magazines, blog posts, etc.

Where to Find Sources About a Policy

Databases

PolicyMap This link opens in a new window
PolicyMap is a U.S. national data and mapping tool that combines a curated, comprehensive geographic data library with simple, robust mapping and analytics tools. University faculty, researchers, and students use it to create compelling maps of up to five layers, export trend charts with key benchmarks, download data for use in other tools, generate on-the-fly reports, and upload your own data to view it with ours. Learn more at our Policy Map guide.
Statista This link opens in a new window
Find statistics, consumer survey results and industry studies from over 22500 sources on over 60000 topics on the internet's leading statistics database.
SocINDEX This link opens in a new window
Full text for 860 journals dating to 1908, 830 books, and 16,000 conference papers

Useful Websites

Urban Data Catalog
The Urban Institute Data Catalog is a place to discover and download open data provided by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization that provides data and evidence to help advance upward mobility and equity.
US Census Data
Search by geography such as their state, county, or place, and see an overview of that area in a geographic profile with visualizations and infographics.
The Federal Register
The Federal Register is a daily publication of documents produced by national agencies, including proposed rules, final rules, public notices, and Presidential actions. You can browse by topic or department, as well as do keyword searches.
National Archives
NARA keeps Federal records that are judged to have continuing value -- approximately 13.28 billion pages of textual records; 10 million maps, charts, and architectural and engineering drawings; 44.4 million still photographs, digital images, filmstrips, and graphics; 40 million aerial photographs; 563,000 reels of motion picture film; 992,000 video and sound recordings; and 1,323 terabytes of electronic data. All of these materials are preserved because they are important to the workings of Government, have long-term research worth, or provide information of value to citizens.
GovInfo Collections
GovInfo provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.

SOWK 550 Social Policy: Finding Sources