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Social Work Research: History, Organizational Roles, and the Influence of the National Institutes of Health

Ruth G. McRoy, Jerry P. Flanzer, and Joan Levy Zlotnik

in Building Research Culture and Infrastructure

Chapter Two provides an historical overview of national social work research capacity – building efforts, especially in the context of the roles of national social work organizations and the National ... More

Chapter Two provides an historical overview of national social work research capacity – building efforts, especially in the context of the roles of national social work organizations and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It provides a brief history of the development of social work research, the widening funding base for social work research and the impact of university research culture on the social work field, particularly as universities have turned their attention to community development and needs. The authors describe the significant impact of the Task Force on Social Work Research, the significant roles of social work professional organizations, and the development of doctoral education programs towards meeting the need for an increasing social work knowledge base to address the demand for evidence based practice.Less

The Progressive Roots of the Instrumental University: Public Administration, City Planning, and Industrial Relations

Ethan Schrum

in The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II

Chapter 1 introduces the godfather of the instrumental university, Charles Merriam, and traces the remarkably parallel rise of public administration, city planning, and industrial relations as ... More

Chapter 1 introduces the godfather of the instrumental university, Charles Merriam, and traces the remarkably parallel rise of public administration, city planning, and industrial relations as inherently instrumental academic fields. It delineates contributions to that rise from several sources: progressivism and the New Deal milieu in general, early twentieth century associational movements for planning and government reform, and the nexus of Rockefeller philanthropy and the Social Science Research Council.Less

Funding for Social Science Research: Government Sources

K. Gayithri and Indrajit Bairagya

in Social Science Research in India: Status, Issues, and Policies

This chapter aims at ascertaining the flows and priorities in accessing funds by various institutions involved in SSR in India from government sources. The analysis is mainly based on the data ... More

This chapter aims at ascertaining the flows and priorities in accessing funds by various institutions involved in SSR in India from government sources. The analysis is mainly based on the data collected from the various ministries, Councils, etc. The study found that the share of expenditure on social science research (SSR) as percentage of total union budget of the central government was 0.025 per cent whereas it was 0.86 percent for pure science research. The share of SSR budget to GDP at market price for the year 2010–11 was 0.0062 per cent whereas it was 0.21 per cent in pure sciences. While estimating the demand supply gap, the study found that supply of funds to SSR is much less than requirement.Less

Facing the Future: Social Science in the First Wilson Government, 1964–1970

Lise Butler

in Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

This chapter examines Young’s work as founding chair of the Social Science Research Council between 1965 and 1968 in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson. It describes how Young responded to ... More

This chapter examines Young’s work as founding chair of the Social Science Research Council between 1965 and 1968 in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson. It describes how Young responded to increasing anxieties about the nature of planning and expertise in the British civil service by arguing that the social sciences should play a more prominent role in government policy making. The chapter focuses mainly on Young’s Committee on the Next Thirty Years, and his proposals for an Institute of Forecasting Studies, which he unsuccessfully sought to develop as part of a transnational forecasting movement with the support of foreign intellectuals such as the American sociologist Daniel Bell and the French futurologist Bertrand de Jouvenel. The chapter also discusses the intellectual networks associated with the popular social science journal New Society, showing that this group promoted libertarian and state-critical perspectives on urban planning, and radical economic ideas like negative income tax. While the Next Thirty Years Committee was short-lived, it reflected Young’s career-long conviction that public policy should be guided by interdisciplinary social science.Less

Research Risk and Regulationist Stereotypes

Carl E. Schneider

in The Censor's Hand: The Misregulation of Human-Subject Research

How much good IRB regulation can do depends on how much risk research subjects run. Biomedical research can harm subjects, but much of it needs no physical contact with patients, and most contact ... More

How much good IRB regulation can do depends on how much risk research subjects run. Biomedical research can harm subjects, but much of it needs no physical contact with patients, and most contact cannot cause serious injury. Even truly ill patients are, if anything, safer in than out of research. Social-science research cannot injure people physically, and its risks are trivial compared with the chances free people take daily In short, research harm “has been far less than the harm arising from many entirely ordinary activities” like walking. So the IRB system has less scope to do good than its severity suggests because research is safer than its rhetoric implies.Less

A Student's Reflections on Engaging in Social Science

Stella Maile and David Griffiths

in Public engagement and social science

The chapter outlines a student’s experience of participating in study around the recording of older people’s thoughts. The chapter represents one student’s reflections on the methodology and feelings.

‘Bigness is the Enemy of Humanity’: Political and Economic Planning, Social Science, and Public Policy, 1945–1950

Lise Butler

in Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

This chapter examines Michael Young’s work as Head of the Labour Party Research Department between 1945 and 1951 in the Labour government led by Clement Attlee. It outlines Young’s early life, ... More

This chapter examines Michael Young’s work as Head of the Labour Party Research Department between 1945 and 1951 in the Labour government led by Clement Attlee. It outlines Young’s early life, discussing his close relationship with the philanthropists Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, his education at the progressive Dartington Hall School, and his work for the think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP) in the 1930s and 1940s. The chapter discusses Young’s central role in PEP’s ‘Active Democracy’ project, which sought to examine citizens’ experience of local government, the social services, and the workplace from a psychological and sociological perspective. It also describes how Young actively sought to promote the social sciences in government, submitting a series of memoranda that called on the Labour Party to incorporate child psychology, industrial psychology, and psychologically informed understandings of urban planning into policy making, and recommended the creation of a Social Science Research Council. The chapter concludes by arguing that while many of Young’s ideas were overlooked by the Attlee government, the networks which he cultivated through the Labour Party and Political and Economic Planning were important to the development of British social science.Less

International Collaborations as Research Infrastructure

P.K. Viswanathan, R. Parthasarathy, and Madhusudan Bandi

in Social Science Research in India: Status, Issues, and Policies

This chapter examined the availability of the facilities for international collaboration for research, with a focus on two prime organisations, the University Grant Commission (UGC) and the Indian ... More

This chapter examined the availability of the facilities for international collaboration for research, with a focus on two prime organisations, the University Grant Commission (UGC) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), which are engaged in promoting international collaboration. Beside this data also collected from various central and state universities. The study found that UGC has cultural exchange program with 48 countries, which include joint research project, exchanges of faculty, fellowship such as post-doctoral project-based exchange, and exchange of scholar programmes with several countries.Less

Introduction: The Many Crises of Middle East Studies

Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

in Middle East Studies for the New Milleniu: Infrastructures of Knowledge

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of Middle East studies (MES) in their academic and national ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of Middle East studies (MES) in their academic and national contexts. The book presents some of the findings of a decade-long (2000–2010) research project organized by the Social Science Research Council in New York, which began with examining Middle East studies and expanded to investigate other area studies fields as well as the thrust toward the global in US universities. It is concerned with three main themes: the relationship between MES and various disciplines (political science, sociology, economics, and geography), current reformulations and new emphases in MES (in terms of university restructuring, language training, and scholarly trends), the politics of knowledge, and the impact on the field of MES of the many crises in the region.Less

Governing for happiness: Mark Abrams, subjective social indicators and the post-war explosion of ‘middle-opinion’

Scott Anthony

in Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914-79

In the 1970s Mark Abrams led a pioneering attempt to develop ‘subjective social indicators’. His research team at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Survey Unit aimed to map perceptions of ... More

In the 1970s Mark Abrams led a pioneering attempt to develop ‘subjective social indicators’. His research team at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Survey Unit aimed to map perceptions of social conditions (such as housing, education, poverty) against an ‘objective’ measurement of the same. As well as attempting to develop tools to improve the implementation of governmental policy, the Survey Unit’s work was influenced by a number of ideological, methodological and institutional trends that stretched from anti-Empiricism to the influence of Europeanisation. While rival social scientists used data collected from this research to posit the coming of a progressive post-war ‘silent revolution’, Abrams instead speculated that Britain’s ‘radical’ white collar middle-class were becoming ever more impatient and materially acquisitive in their attitudes. The SSRC’s experiments represented a triumph of public sector efforts to utilise sophisticated insights from the social sciences to govern ‘democratically’. At the same time they also highlighted (as it was felt at the time) the practical, intellectual and political difficulties that made it increasingly precarious to do so.Less

Conclusion

Lise Butler

in Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

The conclusion describes how the Social Science Research Council, and in particular the discipline of sociology, came under increasing attack by Conservative policy makers in the 1970s and 1980s. It ... More

The conclusion describes how the Social Science Research Council, and in particular the discipline of sociology, came under increasing attack by Conservative policy makers in the 1970s and 1980s. It briefly outlines Young’s biography and career after 1970, and summarizes the key arguments of the book as a whole. The conclusion cautions against populist and communitarian arguments which idealize nostalgic visions of community, pointing out that Young’s portrayals of the East London working class were ideologically and politically motivated, and did not fully account for changing gender norms or the impact of immigration. The book concludes by re-emphasizing the importance of the social sciences in twentieth-century politics and political thought, and argues that historians should continue to take their role in modern British history seriously.Less

Conclusion

Peter Murray and Maria Feeney

in Church, State and Social Science in Ireland: Knowledge Institutions and the Rebalancing of Power, 1937-73

Chapter 7 concludes the study by first noting how ambivalently clerical sociologists responded to the changes wrought by state planning practice in the 1960s. Demands from champions of such planning ... More

Chapter 7 concludes the study by first noting how ambivalently clerical sociologists responded to the changes wrought by state planning practice in the 1960s. Demands from champions of such planning that the discipline should begin to play a different societal role are next examined. During the 1970s the Hierarchy combined failure to plan for a continuation of a significant clerical presence among practitioners of sociology with the casting of itself as the conscience of Irish society. The warding off of abortion, contraception and divorce was thereby entrusted to a highly selective but this-worldly `sociological’ empiricism rather than to theological dogmatism. Initially successful, this strategy has become progressively less effective as popular confidence in church leaders has declined dramatically. Detached from the institution the framed the working lives of their disciplinary predecessors, today’s sociologists debate the respective contributions that factors such as higher education levels, economic marginalisation of the poorly educated and the uncovering of hidden histories of the abuse of clerical power have made to this decline.Less