I stumbled upon (and I mean that literally, not in the social bookmarking sense!) this New York Times article on statistics, and it prompted me thinking about how important it is for social work students, and recent graduates (and even us not-so-recent ones) to understand, critically analyze, present, and use statistics effectively in our macro (and, I would argue, also our micro) practice.
Think about it. As the article points out, there is a literal abundance of data available today, and, in fact, there are often too many data points for people to really make sense of, which can (and, unfortunately is) sometimes result in a gut reaction that spurns all logic and makes decisions instead from an ideological, even anachronistically anti-factual basis. For social workers, what this sometimes means is that, because we don’t understand statistics as well as we should (or just don’t trust our own understandings), we either attempt to make our cases entirely based on emotional appeal or fall victim to others’ flawed or deliberately misleading analyses.
Both are real dangers to our credibility and efficacy and, more importantly, to the quality of advocacy work we can do on behalf of those we serve.
We do our best advocacy when we can collect good information on the social problems we aim to solve and the strengths that our constituencies bring to those endeavors; analyze those masses of data in ways that value human realities; and help decisionmakers to use the data to make good social policy decisions.
I don’t know if it will ultimately be as revolutionary as the legendary, ‘plastic’, but emerging social workers would certainly be well-served by turning some of their intellectual energies to statistical analysis. That means that we social work educators have to find creative, engaging, relevant, accessible ways to communicate statistical expertise to students. Given how many of my students say (only half-jokingly, I think) that their dislike of math was part of what drove them to social work, I recognize that this won’t be easy, but important things seldom are.
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Sorry, social workers: Statistics Matter
I stumbled upon (and I mean that literally, not in the social bookmarking sense!) this New York Times article on statistics, and it prompted me thinking about how important it is for social work students, and recent graduates (and even us not-so-recent ones) to understand, critically analyze, present, and use statistics effectively in our macro (and, I would argue, also our micro) practice.
Think about it. As the article points out, there is a literal abundance of data available today, and, in fact, there are often too many data points for people to really make sense of, which can (and, unfortunately is) sometimes result in a gut reaction that spurns all logic and makes decisions instead from an ideological, even anachronistically anti-factual basis. For social workers, what this sometimes means is that, because we don’t understand statistics as well as we should (or just don’t trust our own understandings), we either attempt to make our cases entirely based on emotional appeal or fall victim to others’ flawed or deliberately misleading analyses.
Both are real dangers to our credibility and efficacy and, more importantly, to the quality of advocacy work we can do on behalf of those we serve.
We do our best advocacy when we can collect good information on the social problems we aim to solve and the strengths that our constituencies bring to those endeavors; analyze those masses of data in ways that value human realities; and help decisionmakers to use the data to make good social policy decisions.
I don’t know if it will ultimately be as revolutionary as the legendary, ‘plastic’, but emerging social workers would certainly be well-served by turning some of their intellectual energies to statistical analysis. That means that we social work educators have to find creative, engaging, relevant, accessible ways to communicate statistical expertise to students. Given how many of my students say (only half-jokingly, I think) that their dislike of math was part of what drove them to social work, I recognize that this won’t be easy, but important things seldom are.
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