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4500 Course Syllabus
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Social Welfare Policy Chapter Two - Course Notes Why Care About Policy •Policy determines the theoretical focus of services • Policy determines the goals, mission, and strategies of the agency and its services • Policy determines eligibility and defines what clients will receive services • Policies restrict and permit certain options for clients
Why care about policy •Policy directly determines the role and activity of the worker • Policy has real effects on real lives What is a policy? •A purposive course of action to deal with a problem or concern • A standing decision that necessitates behavioral consistency • Principles, guidelines and procedures that maximize uniformity in decision making • Based on values, history, philosophy, experiences and needs Social welfare •The institutions and formal systems in a society that deal with the problem of dependency • Dependency occurs when individuals are unable to fulfill critical and expected social roles or when social conditions and systems fail to enable individuals to perform these roles Social Welfare Policy •Is a subcategory of social policy which has a broader more general meaning • Societal responses to specific needs and problems such as poverty and dependence
Social Policy •More general and philosophical than social welfare policy • The collective struggle to find solutions to more general social problems like inequality • Includes things like parks and libraries because they address the quality of life in a society Multiple levels of Social Welfare Policy •Macro level - laws, regulations and guidelines that provide a basic framework for allocating benefits and services • Mezzo level - administrative policies that organizations generate to direct and regularize operations • Micro level - when individual social workers apply macro and mezzo level policies in a situation or to a case Working definition of Social Welfare Policy •Interrelated but not necessarily logically consistent principles, guidelines, procedures designed to deal with the problem of dependency in our society • Policies may be laws, public or private regulations, administrative rules, formal procedures or normally sanctioned patterns of behavior Working definition of Social Welfare Policy - con't •As an academic field of study more concerned with processes of enacting policies, the societal base, effects and relationship between policies • True for social work, but also concerned with implications of policy to practice and the role of the social worker and profession in influencing social welfare policy
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