Unit EVALUATION OF SOCIAL POLICIES
- Course
- Social policies and social work
- Study-unit Code
- A001409
- Curriculum
- Progettazione delle politiche sociali
- Teacher
- Giulio D'epifanio
- Teachers
-
- Giulio D'epifanio
- Hours
- 42 ore - Giulio D'epifanio
- CFU
- 6
- Course Regulation
- Coorte 2021
- Offered
- 2021/22
- Learning activities
- Caratterizzante
- Area
- Discipline politiche, economiche e statistiche
- Academic discipline
- SECS-S/05
- Type of study-unit
- Obbligatorio (Required)
- Type of learning activities
- Attività formativa monodisciplinare
- Language of instruction
- Italian
- Contents
- About social processes. [From Systems Theory and its extensions] Social organism, quasi-living system, evolution and adaptation, environment, morphogenesis, etc .; structural equilibrium and instability. Sketchs on concepts such as "structural complexity" ("dynamic networks" between agents, processes and context conditions, etc.) and "evolutionary chaoticity", in relation to the "predictability" of ongoing developments. Causal feedback. Evolutions, free or controlled by an observer / decision maker. Learning, information and rational choices, intrinsic limits of rationality in decision-making / evaluation processes.
About policy-making, evaluation and learning systems. Cybernetic paradigm. Decision-making processes for the government (addressing, guide, regulation and control) of the evolution of social processes. The policy-maker as a (partially-) autonomous social agent within a multi-level organizational-decision-making network (eg National Univ. System, NHS, etc.). Recursive hierarchy (super-agent, agent, sub-agent). From a typical scheme (decision maker, objectives, constraints; alternatives; process, environment, space of states, etc .; space of effects / results, space of consequences; sensors / indicators, etc.), applied recursively, abstract objects / concepts will be re-interpreted in specific concrete cases of interest. Regulation strategies ("open loop", "feedback", "feed-forward", etc). Role of learning and evaluation devices, information, value of information. With respect to the decision-making stage, ex-ante evaluation systems (VIA type, Cost-Benefit analysis, project evaluation, etc.), ex-post (evaluation of results, social impact, etc.), adaptive evaluation based on learning in itinere (e.g. iterated assessment on management cycles, progress check on planning, etc.).
Services, as part of the implementation of a social policy. Services to Persons SPPU, normative references. On criteria for classifying social services and references to concrete assessment areas.
Evaluation designs. Service evaluation systems, classification by purpose (comparative vs diagnostic vs certification, etc.).
Comparative evaluation of social agents. Methodological development: from the service mission, to conceptual design, to logical schematization, to the selection of indicators, to the specification of the "evaluandi parameters", to the synthesis of "scores" using data. The construction of evaluation reports. Applications to healthcare facilities and typical phenomena of typical distortions (ignorance of the underlying causal mechanisms and / or information asymmetries induced by typical phenomena such as self-selection of users "carriers of information", "adverse selection" operated by management, etc.).
Diagnostic evaluation and tools. For a quality improvement policy in social services. On the concept of "quality" and its values ¿¿(internal / external quality, regulatory / bureaucratic quality, technical quality, quality perceived by users, etc.); on the concept of "efficacy" and "efficiency" beyond a mere typical economic vision. Outline of quality systems as conceived by "quality engineering" (ISO 9000, EFQM). Typical tools (target tree, Iskikawa diagrams, structured questionnaire, sampling schemes, data collection and storage). Construction of synthetic indexes, from archived data, through aggregation operators. Use of formal tools (such as weighted averages, pertinent trees and typical information "formats" to extract "weights of importance", etc.) for the construction of evaluation reports. Visual objects (radar diagrams, positioning maps, etc.) for diagnostic evaluation, and to support the planning of interventions for the improvement of the service. Survey design and statistical structures. "Evaluand" parameters. Accuracy and reliability specifications. Cost evaluation. Typology of questions and typical "formats" (semantic differential, Likert, etc.). Guttman scaling, for the development of performance evaluation scales. Ordinal verbal scales: approaches for quantifying levels. Definition and elaboration of simple and complex satisfaction indexes. - Reference texts
- https://virtualclassroom2.wordpress.com/3-metodologia/3-metodologia-didattica/
https://virtualclassroom2.wordpress.com/6-informazioni/testi-consigliati/
1. [Introduzione alla valutazione] Bezzi Claudio, La valutazione dei servizi alla persona, Link
2. [Scale di valutazione] Mauro Niero, Metodi e tecniche di ricerca per il servizio sociale, Editore: Carocci (nota: una vecchia edizione è disponibile nella biblioteca di Studi Storici) a. Cap. 4, 6. La Ricerca per la valutazione. La misura degli atteggiamenti e della qualità della vita.
3. [Ambiti applicativi] La customer satisfaction nelle amministrazioni pubbliche, manuale edito dal Dipart. della funzione pubblica (link) - Educational objectives
- Developing aptitude
• to understand evaluation paradigms, concepts and keywords in the assessing of
institutional and human-oriented services
• to understand and correctly use terms related to the quality and service cards
• to identify demand and to organize the information in data structures for diagnostic and comparative evaluations - Prerequisites
- basic course in statistics or social statistics
- Teaching methods
- Problem solving
https://virtualclassroom2.wordpress.com/3-metodologia/3-metodologia-didattica/ - Other information
- For the full achievement of the proposed purposes the student participation is necessary.
- Learning verification modality
- The exam consists of a written text with open questions, possibly supplemented by oral examination.
- Extended program
- It is referred to hyper-text, to be adapted and refined in progress:
https://virtualclassroom2.wordpress.com/2-obiettivi-formativi/piano-didattico/mappe-concettuali/