As social workers and policy actors, your ability to communicate—or frame—complex social problems (the issue should be about the older adults: maybe about the elderly refugees, African older women, and so on) The topic has to be VERY specific about only one existing complex issue from the news.
Focus on a very specific issue in one state in the USA.and policy proposals to the broader public clearly and concisely is a fundamental skill. You will hone your communication skills by writing a position paper that addresses a particular social problem or policy issue.
Your paper may critically analyze a problem or policy, argue for a course of action, or both. You should obtain a collection of reasonably in-depth news or other primary source materials that provide you with enough substantive background on your topic to write a position paper of no more than 1500 words.
You will choose two sets of concepts covered in the course (described below) thatyou will employ to explore your problem or policy. The idea of the assignment is to engage in original analysis of the social problem or policy that you have selected.
Therefore, you should refrain from “borrowing” academic analyses of your particular topic and instead focus on using course concepts to forge your own argument. Whatever position or positions you take, your task here is to make a convincing and well-supported argument.
This is a position paper not a research paper. You only have to be specific on only one issue and write your position as a social policy claimer using two of the concepts, like how you are going to frame the issue, forward and backward mapping the issue, how you are going to socially construct the issue, or so on. USE ONLY TWO OF THESE CHOICES IN THE POSITION PAPER.
Social Policy Issue
The course concepts (choose only two): You do not have to cite these concepts. Please make sure you do not plagiarize any sentences from the other sources. I will write the descriptions of each concept here and you only use as an application in the paper. For more description and understanding the concepts well, please look at them online, and again do not cite or plagiarize any words from the internet for these concepts, only do an application to these two concepts in the paper.
- Framing: Establishing the definitional boundaries of a social problem and proposed solutions to it. Frames shape how people perceive and think about problems and issues. They highlight and center some aspects of an issue and obscure or erase others. Frames shape solutions as well as perceptions of problems. Frames are collectively built, maintained, and changed. They are dynamic. There are often multiple and sometimes directly competing framings of the same issue. Frames therefore highlight the inherent relationship between critical analysis and political action (ANALYSIS<>ACTION).
- Agenda setting:Controlling the focus of public attention and the direction of political discourse by establishing and reestablishing particular issues—by strategically framing those issues—and silencing, debating, debunking, or joining with others. FORWARD Mapping: Mandates, Intentions of TLB Policy Makers. BACKWARD Mapping: Actions, Processes of Implementation
- Dependency: is a keyword that, over history, has become loaded with a variety of negative connotations & assumptions. Dependency and REGISTERS OF MEANING Economic: One depends on another for subsistence. Sociolegal: Lack of separate legal status. Political: Subjection to an external ruling power. Moral/psychological: Individual neediness that is excessive or developmentally inappropriate.
Social Policy Issue Paper
- Icons:stereotypes that serve to locate and contain cultural anxieties (for instance, about race, gender and social contract) while distracting from their social, economic and political bases.Like keywords, icons help construct conditions as problems and define what kind of problem is at hand. They personalize/psychologize social problems by locating those problems with (stereo)types of people.
- Social Construction:THE HISTORICALLY AND CULTURALLY CONTINGENT PROCESS BY WHICH WE CREATE (OR CONSTRUCT) WHAT WE THEN COLLECTIVELY PERCEIVE TO BE SOCIAL FACT. Social problems are socially constructed. The policy process is central to how certain social phenomena are identified and constructed as social problems. Policies respond to social constructions of social problems rather than to social problems as empirical entities.
- Street-level bureaucrats: “Public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs and who have a substantial amount of discretion in the execution of their work.” DIRECT CONTACT: Immediacy and impact on people’s lives. Intermediation between the state and the citizen (Conveying and socializing clients to the expectations of the state; “Softening the effects of capitalism”). DISCRETION:Determining the nature, amount, and quality of benefits and resources not by following established rules, but rather through worker inclination and discretion. Evaluating of people and problems>>distributing resources based on those evaluations.