Perspectives on production of written educational policy reports

Piazza

2000

TQR

Self Cite

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.

Section: Sociolinguistic Research: a Heuristic Scheme To Reconcile Thmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Sociolinguistic Research: a Heuristic Scheme To Reconcile Thmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Piazza

2000

TQR

Self Cite

“…Such projections are predicated without examination of just what it is about standards categories of human numbers that will impact social life (Kertzer, 1995). Consequently, policy researchers point to a need for exploring how different categories of people are linked to different communicative practices (Wallat & Piazza, 1991;. One argument is that a focus on "plurality of meanings" and "variable functions of communication" could bring attention to both internal and external influences on the "construction of the subjectivity that group membership and citizenship built upon" (Schlosberg, 1998, p.160).…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitations of How We Categorize People

Steele

1999

EPAA

Self Cite

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 2 of 15 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.

“…Just what that exchange needs to be is evident in recent critiques of the social sciences. In the face of critique of how their work contributes to the design, implementation or assessment of policy choices for welfare, health and education reform, the social sciences have been charged with reconsidering their comunicative functions (Wallat & Piazza, 1991;1997).…”

Section: Welfare Reform: Academic and Clinical "Progress"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Lawlor, 1996, p. 115) To grow and prosper as vital professions they must enact the means to construct new frames based upon locally generated knowledge. This includes attracting audiences that will listen to and respect its "products" (Wallat & Piazza, 1991). The combination of public media interest in telling its audiences "Who gets what," available information resources to allow comparative interpretations of "How the welfare system is organized and functions," and the challenges to attend to locally generated knowledge, sets forth an expanded agenda for qualitative inquiry.…”

Section: Welfare Reform: Academic and Clinical "Progress"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare Reform: The Positioning of Academic Work

Steele

1997

TQR

Self Cite

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."