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Social Work 238C: Social Policy/Health

Professor Julia Hastings
Spring 2009
Course site available in bSpace

Questions about your library research?
Contact Susan Edwards (sedwards@library.berkeley.edu or 510-643-6224)

Research questions:

1. What is the history of this legislation or topic? [What events occurred that led to the development of this law or issue?] Who sponsored it or supported it and why?
2. What are the objectives of this legislation as it is written and its key features? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the legislation as it was written?
3. Who were/are the supporters and detractors of the legislation? What are their respective stances? Who were the winners and losers in terms of effects of this legislation?
4. How has this legislation been implemented by local programs? What impact does it have on social workers and the clients with whom they work?
5. What do you think is the future direction of policy in this area?

Finding and Analyzing Legislation

There are two core databases for social work, Social Services Abstracts and Social Work Abstracts. Each of them contain some articles about the effectiveness (or not) of legislation to address social problems. There are also public policy oriented resources that can be very helpful, such as PAIS; and medical and health oriented databases such as PubMed. Interdisciplinary databases such as Academic Search Complete can also be helpful with this kind of complex topic.

Although there are several different "flavors" of databases, you can make your searching more effective by using these features:

Power search features for most article databases:

• Use synonyms -- there are many ways to express a concept, for example African American or Black
• Use "controlled vocabulary" (descriptors or subjects) if the database has them ... they bring related terms together.
• Use truncation to get different forms of the word, for example homeless* also searches on homelessness
• Use quotation marks when you want an "exact phrase"

Specialized Databases

There are also some specialized fulltext databases that complement the article/abstract databases above. These include Policy File and CQ Researcher Plus Archive. In addition, LexisNexis Congressional contains congressional documents (including legislative histories, hearings and committee reports). Another very useful tool is Lexis Nexis Academic. It is an extremely powerful database, but it is different from most of the others in that it searches each and every word in the fulltext of law reviews, newspapers, and legislation. It is not searching abstracts, but the fulltext. In fact, if you just search on two concepts, it can find the first one on page one and the second on page 200. The following quick tips can help you target your search:

3 Quick Tips for Using Lexis Nexis:

1.) Use connectors and special search features

• Use synonyms and truncation (wildcard) as above, but in addition
• Use 'proximity connectors' -- w/[number], for example (youth or adolescent or teen*) w/25 homeless*. (You can also use w/s for within sentence, or w/p for within paragraph but you can't also combine these with numbers.)

2.) Change the display to Expanded List -- shows you your search terms, plus a few words on either side.

3.) Change display to Relevance if it is on Chronological (if date is really important to you, restrict to the date range you want in the search box).

California Legislative History If the bill you are interested in was introduced from 1993-1994 onwards, http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/bilinfo.html lets you see the legislative history of a California bill including its amendments, analysis, reports, debate, roll vote, etc. (You do have to know the session and the bill number first, however.)

The Greenbook Another specialized resource is the Green Book (in progress). It provides updated data and information on programs such as Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, Foster Care and welfare. Additionally, it includes a discussion of related issues, such as the well-being of the elderly and of children and families. (If the program you're interested in hasn't been updated yet, you can also try the 2004 Green Book.)

Citation Indexes

Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science is a very specialized and powerful tool. If you find the perfect article -- but perhaps it's a bit dated -- the Social Sciences Citation Index will tell you the articles that subsequently cited your article. It can be a great way to update your article.

Citation Linker Sometimes you find an article in a bibliography, a book or a footnote -- and you want to see if we have it. We have a very cool tool called the Citation Linker that searches through our online databases to see if it is available fulltext. If not, it sets up a search for the paper journal in Melvyl, and then allows you to request it through Interlibrary Loan if not at UCB.

Finding Books:

There are several library catalogs that search for books in all the libraries of Berkeley, in all the UCs, at Stanford, in the world. When we don't have enough here at UCB, Interlibrary Loan will get the material you need from other libraries. This is a fantastic service, and is free to you -- but it does take a bit of time. The Library Catalogs tab at the top of this page will take you to all of the catalog choices. We are going to start with Melvyl. If you don't know a specific title or author, or the exact Library of Congress Subject Heading (and who does?) use the dropdown arrow and select KEYWORDS. You can start with one or two keywords, and if you find a book that looks relevant, look at the bottom of the record to see the Subject Headings. Subject headings are powerful terms ("controlled vocabulary" in library speak) that bring together various ways to say the same thing. For example, Homeless persons -- Services for -- Law and legislation -- United States is a "subject heading".

Finding Statistics:

LexisNexis Statistical contains some statistics, and also is an index to help you find them in other sources. Statistical Resources on the Web: Health from the University of Michigan provides a great compilation of federal (and some state) statistical sources. Health, United States and CDC Vital Statistics are good for quick lookups.

Citing Your Sources:

Citation and Paper Writing provides an overview of using RefWorks (freely available to UC Berkeley students) to format your citations. In addition, Jill Woolums (jwollums@library.berkeley.edu), librarian in Ed-Psych and Social Welfare, has offered to meet individually with any of you who have questions about using RefWorks to "cite while you write".

Off-Campus Access:

The Library pays for access to thousands of electronic journals, databases, etc. You can access these from off-campus, by following these directions.