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Social workers doing research on child welfare social policies often need to draw
upon materials more typically used in other academic fields:
political science, law, psychology and sociology,
to name a few.
Researchers need to be knowledgeable about how legislation becomes
law and how social movements can effect permanent societal change.
This short list, with examples and instructions, introduces a few of the many
research resources that aid the social policy researcher.
The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 (P.L. 105-89) is the policy
example used throughout.
The free
Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to view and print some of these items.
Databases (Indexes) --
Websites for Policy Research & Government Reports
The items within each section are listed in order of likely usefulness.
Databases (Indexes)
All of the items in this section are available to UT Arlington students and faculty
in computerized form.
The free
Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to view and print some of these items.
The instructions for each database are pretty clear,
but if you find you still have a problem with the search process, then email me at:
dillard@uta.edu or
call my cell phone at: (817) 675-8962.
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Academic Search Premier.
- Academic Search Premier contains over 3,600 full-text journals, comprising the
world's largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, covering many
academic topics. There are more than 4,000 citations to policy
related publications in this research resource.
Academic Search Premier is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students on the web.
For example, a search for the phrase "Adoption and Safe Families Act" produces several
likely titles.
The phrase "child welfare" produces more
than a 1,000 full-text scholarly (peer reviewed) journal articles
in the Academic Search Premier database.
There is also a UT Arlington Library's webpage that gives
information about accessing and searching Academic Search Premier on the web.
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LexisNexis Academic.
- LexisNexis Academic provides full-text access to
nearly 6,000 national and international titles.
Many full-text business magazines are available in
addition to medical journals, and reference information.
Coverage includes non-English language sources, international newspapers,
as well as national and some local newspapers.
For legal research, there is U.S. Federal and state case and statute law,
international legal materials, legal news and
law reviews, congressional reports, CIS Legislative Histories (1970-present),
the Code of Federal Regulations, the Federal Register, Congressional committee
rosters, schedules for committees and subcommittees, Shepard's Citations for
all U.S. Supreme Court cases back to 1789, and SEC filings.
Wire service information is updated hourly.
LexisNexis Academic is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students on the web.
For example, a search on the phrase "Adoption and Safe Families Act" produces more than
a 300 citations in the "Law Reviews" portion of LexisNexis Academic, and a
search on the phrase "child welfare" produces more than 700 legal citations.
There is also a UT Arlington Library's webpage that gives
information about accessing and searching LexisNexis Academic on the web.
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Social Services Abstracts.
- Social Services Abstracts provide citations, abstracts, and indexing
for over 1,600 research-oriented serial publications focused on social work,
human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy,
and community development, including dissertations, and citations to book reviews.
Social Services Abstracts does not include the full-text
of any item, however, sometimes there is a link to a web resource.
There are more than 10,000 citations to policy related publications in this
research resource.
Social Services Abstracts is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students
on the web.
For example, a search for the phrase "Adoption and Safe Families Act"
produces more than 30 likely looking citations, while a broader search
on "child welfare and (policy or policies)" produces more than 800 likely citations.
A broader example, using an OR rather than an AND and dropping
the word "ACT" like this: (adoption) OR (safe families)) more than 1000 citations to
articles or books that might be of interest to researchers.
There is also a UT Arlington Library's webpage that gives
information about accessing and searching Social Services Abstracts on the web.
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Social Work Abstracts.
- Social Work Abstracts is produced by the National Association of Social Workers
and contains more than 40,000 records from 1977 to the present.
Citations are from social work and related journals and some social work dissertations.
There are more than 6,000 citations to policy related publications in this
research resource. Although this resource is somewhat smaller that
Social Services Abstracts mentioned above it does cover some journals not
covered by Social Services Abstracts, and some students find the search
interface to be more user friendly.
Social Work Abstracts is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students on the web.
A search for "adoption and safe families" produces more than ten citations,
and a broader search: "(adoption OR safe families) AND (policy or policies)"
brings back more than 200 citations.
There is also a UT Arlington Library's webpage that gives
information about accessing and searching Social Work Abstracts on the web.
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ProQuest Digital Dissertations.
- ProQuest Digital Dissertations provides full text copies of over 600,000
doctoral dissertations and masters theses in digital format.
Most titles published from 1997 forward have 24 page previews and are available
as full-text PDF documents.
ProQuest Digital Dissertations selectively indexes 1.6 million masters theses
and doctoral dissertations accepted at thousands of colleges and universities
throughout the United States. Also, some doctoral dissertations and masters
theses from universities in Canada and Europe are indexed.
Here is a link to a guide designed to aid researchers in searching the ProQuest Digital
Dissertations Collection. The Digital Dissertations collection is for the use
of UT Arlington faculty and students.
ProQuest Digital Dissertations is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students on the web.
There are more than 500,000 social science dissertations and masters theses indexed here,
and of those there are almost 14,000 social work dissertations and masters theses that are
indexed.
More than 10 of these social work masters theses and dissertations deal with some aspect of
"safe families" AND "adoption" and all of these theses and dissertations are full-text online.
There is also a UT Arlington Library's webpage that gives
information about accessing and searching ProQuest Digital Dissertations on the web.
Websites for Policy Research & Government Reports
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Thomas: In the Spirit of Thomas Jefferson,
a Service of the Library of Congress.
- Thomas, is a product of the U.S. Library of Congress.
It was created by the Library of Congress, acting
under a "directive" from the "104th Congress to make Federal
legislative information freely available" via the Web.
Here is a list of the
databases in Thomas. The Library of Congress has been
improving Thomas since it began in 1995. The CONGRESSIONAL RECORD
(1989 - present) is one of the key databases. The other major
portions are the Legislation itself (1973 - present) and
Information about Congressional Committees including
committee reports (1995 - present). Here is a link to the
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) which may help researchers
with this fine research resource.
- The United States Code Congressional and Administrative
News
- is on the 2nd floor of the UT Arlington Central Library
in the Reference Collection at this call number:
KF 48 .U56.
This set of reference books
is important because it contains the legislative histories for many of the
child welfare policies. It also contains copies of the older laws that are not
yet digitized in Thomas.
- Key Child Welfare Organizations.
- Two key organizations that deal with child welfare issues are the
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Child Welfare League of America (CWLA)
and the
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Children's Defense Fund (CDF).
Researchers might wish to visit these sites for child welfare policy information.
There is also a UT Arlington Library's webpage called
Community and Organization Information, Current Events, & Policy News
that provides links to useful information on current events,
organizations, policies, and any ongoing public policy debates.
Many of these organizations on this list deal with child welfare issues,
see specifically the National Conference of State Legislatures.
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Guide to Law Online.
- The Guide to Law Online, prepared by the United States Law Library
of Congress, is an annotated guide to sources of information on
government and law available online. It includes selected links to useful
and reliable sites for legal information. There are links to United States
Federal Law, the law of each of the States, and the laws of other countries.
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The Orator.com.
- This commercial website puts bill information into categories that are often
quite useful of social policy researchers.
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Legal Information Institute (LII) Page for the US Code.
- The Legal Information Institute at Cornell offers the US Code
in a way the is clear and easy to use.
Here also is a link to the Homepage of the
LII website.
There is much of value at this site.
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GPO Access: A Service of the United States
Government Printing Office.
- The United States Government Printing Office provides
official information from all three branches of the Federal Government:
the Federal Courts, the Executive including the President, and
both Houses of Congress. Here is a link to the
Judicial Branch Resources on GPO Access.
This covers the United States Supreme Court as will as a
large portion of the lower Federal Courts.
Here is a link to the
Executive Branch Resources on GPO Access.
This covers Presidential documents, Executive Branch
publications, the CODE OF FEDERAL REGULATIONS, and the FEDERAL REGISTER.
Here is a link to the
Legislative Branch Resources on GPO Access.
This covers Congressional materials and other legislative resources
and publications including: the full-text of each bill, the
CONGRESSIONAL RECORD, the UNITED STATES CODE, and the
U.S. Congressional Serial Set.
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FirstGov.gov - The US Government's Official Web Portal.
- FirstGov.gov, this homepage for the nation, is primarily a service
oriented site, but it does provide access to some research material in the
Reference Center.
Google Advanced Search.
Besides the databases purchased for student and faculty research use listed in the
first section of this guide, and besides the government sites listed just above,
there are a number of free-on-the-web resources that need to be mentioned.
One of these is Google.
Google.com is the
current best search engine for web research, and the "Advanced Search" feature of Google allows
the researcher to focus the search results in a number of key ways.
One key focus factor that is often useful is to limit the search
to just government sites with the "gov" limit in the
"Domain" portion of the search engine.
Two other domains that are often useful are: "org" for nonprofit organizations,
and "edu" for educational organizations.
Another key focusing limitation is to restrict the search by format.
One popular publishing format is the Adobe Acrobat "pdf" format.
Google's Uncle Sam.
The Google.com web search engine folks have created a specialized search
interface that searches the .gov domains, the .mil domains, and the .us
domains. This should bring up only United States of America, State and Federal
webservers. This is handy if you are looking for government policy information.
While Uncle Sam is not as flexible as the Google Advanced Search interface,
many searchers have found it to be quick and useful.
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