Social research practitioners and others working in the public and voluntary sectors, in academia and consultancy are increasingly under pressure to provide policy-related evidence with limited resources and rising expectations. Demystifying evaluation is an accessible introductory guide setting the foundations for tackling those challenges, explaining the options open to evaluators, their merits and uses, and how to make appropriate choices of research methods.
Drawing on his experience of policy and programme evaluations for the public sector and outside, David Parsons provides a practical roadmap cutting across different evaluation theories. He covers issues such as managing expectations of evaluation, using and mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, engaging stakeholders and providing action-orientated approaches to help end-users.
Research doesn’t exist in a bubble but co-exists with a multitude of other tasks and commitments, yet there is more need for people to save time than ever before. Brilliantly attuned to the demands placed on researchers, this book considers how students, academics and professionals alike can save time and stress without compromising the quality of their research or its outcomes.
How is your institution enabling Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff and students to thrive? Is your institution effectively tackling racism?
Following the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the higher education sector has started making bold commitments to dismantling structural racism. However, big questions remain about how higher education can combat institutional racism and achieve real change.
This book disrupts the higher education sector through ambitious actions and collective, participatory and evidence-informed responses to racism. It offers a roadmap for senior leaders, staff and students to build strategies, programmes and interventions that effectively tackle racism.
Arising from current staff and recent student experiences, this book supports institutions driving equality, diversity, inclusion and intersectional programmes in higher education.
Following a decade of radical change in policy and funding in children’s early intervention services and with the role of the third sector under increased scrutiny, this timely book assesses the shifting interplay between state provision and voluntary organisations delivering intervention for children, young people and their families.
Using 100 voices from the frontline, it provides vivid accounts of the lived experiences of charitable groups and offers crucial insights into the impact of recent social policy decisions on their work.
Telling the story of how the landscape of children’s early intervention services has changed over the last decade, the author highlights important lessons for future policy while demonstrating the immeasurable value of voluntary organisations working in this challenging terrain.
In the global emergencies our world faces, the strengths approach is needed now more than ever. Commonly misunderstood, its true power as a whole systems approach to release the potential of individuals, communities and their environments has been neglected. For those brave enough to embrace it, this book offers theoretical and practical encouragement.
The authors use a case study of their work with a unique non-governmental organisation in the United Kingdom that combines student placements with support for refugees. They illustrate what it really means to adopt a strengths approach in practice. Chapters include the strengths approach to funding, organisational development, management and governance as well as immigration law, student learning and research.
This book will give readers grounds for optimism as well as transferable practices for challenging social injustice.
This book is a call for confident, skilled and knowledgeable practice in social work.
The current managerialist agenda has restricted judgement and the exercise of discretion in the profession, and, more damagingly, has played down the social justice components of social work, as well as the responsibilities for therapeutic and change-orientated interventions. This book explores how, through strong self-leadership, social workers can both explain and demonstrate how social work can achieve positive change.
Offering a fresh and innovative view on leadership for social workers, managers of social services and social work students at all levels, the book identifies tactics and strategies to provide leadership both within a team and in senior positions.
This book provides essential guidance for professionals and pre-qualifying students on how to gather and generate evidence of the impact of projects in the community.
Including case studies from diverse community settings, it provides easy to implement, practical ideas and examples of methods to demonstrate the impact of community work.
Considering not only evaluation, but also the complex processes of evidence gathering, it will help all those involved with work in the community to demonstrate the impact and value of their work. The book provides:
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guidance for how to present different findings to different audiences;
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methods for effectively demonstrating the value of your work;
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how to demonstrate the scale, quality and significance of impact.
This book introduces the concept of ‘knowledge alchemy’ to capture the generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards. Using examples from North America, Europe and Asia, it explores how knowledge alchemy increasingly informs national and institutional policies and practices on economic performance, higher education, research and innovation.
The book examines how governments around the world have embraced global models of world-class university, human capital and talent competition as essential in ensuring national competitiveness. Through its analysis, the book shows how this strongly future-oriented and anticipatory knowledge governance is steered by a surge of global classifications, rankings and indicators, resulting in numerous comparisons of various domains that today form more constraining global policy scripts.
Research doesn’t exist in a bubble but co-exists with a multitude of other tasks and commitments, yet there is more need for people to save time than ever before.
Brilliantly attuned to the demands placed on researchers, this book considers how students, academics and professionals alike can save time and stress without compromising the quality of their research or its outcomes. This third edition:
- is fully revised with new chapters on research and evaluation ethics, creative methods of collecting data and how research can make a positive difference;
-includes illustrative case studies throughout the book and each chapter concludes with exercises, discussion questions and a debate topic;
- is accompanied by a fully updated companion website.
This supportive book is designed for any student or practitioner who wants to know how to do research on top of their main job and still have a life.
This original edited collection explores the value of public engagement in a wider social science context. Its main themes range from the dialogic character of social science to the pragmatic responses to the managerial policies underpinning the restructuring of Higher Education. The book is organised in three parts: the first encourages the reader to reflect upon the different social and political inflections of public engagement and offers one university example of a social science café in Bristol. The following sections are based upon talks given in the café and are linked by a concern with public engagement and the contribution of social science to a reflexive understanding of the dilemmas and practices of daily life. This highly topical book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and students interested in critical social issues as they impact on their everyday lives.
