Ask us!

Social Policy and Politics - HMNS207 - Gutshall-Seidman

Evaluating a Policy

You will probably need to look at several different sources to evaluate the policy you selected. As you read, watch for clues about where else to go for more information. From one source, follow links to additional sources in order to go beyond the top results in a Google search. Watch for clues about who opposes the policy and search for more information about that group/organization and their statements on the policy.

Places to search for information to help you evaluate a policy:

(Hein Online also contains evaluative documents)

Pew Research Center
A nonpartisan organization that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, and other data-driven studies to inform the American public about issues, attitudes and trends shaping our society.
CQ Roll Call
Source for analysis of the politics of legislation, this site focuses on articles related to Congress's opinions and actions.

Global Issues in Context
A Gale database that broadly covers the important issues of the modern world integrating news, global viewpoints, reference, country information, primary source documents, videos, and statistics in a single search.
The database focuses on broad issues as well as targeted issues including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Syrian civil war, genetically modified foods, internet control and security, and privacy rights. Updated daily with more than 660 geographically diverse full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals for a global view.
LEGALTRAC
A Gale database collection of major legal publications, law reviews, and legal newspapers.
This database indexes more than 1,500 major law reviews, legal newspapers, specialty publications, Bar Association journals and international legal journals, including more than 250 titles in full text. This resource is endorsed by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and its content is updated, reviewed and enhanced by the AALL special advisory committee.
Military and Government Collection
Military & Government Collection is a database of full-text journals and periodicals pertaining to all branches of the military and government. It is designed to offer current news to military members, analysts, policy makers, students and researchers.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context
This Gale database provides information covering today's hottest social issues. It contains pro/con viewpoints, magazine & newspaper articles, scholarly journal articles, reference articles, and more.
This Gale resource provides more than 20,100 pro/con viewpoints covering today’s hottest social issues and more than 19,200 reference articles, including topic overviews, charts and graphs, and statistical information. It contains over 300 profiles of federal agencies and special-interest groups and offers a dedicated portal focused on the annual debate topic determined by the National Speech and Debate Association. It provides access to full-text newspapers and periodicals from multiple perspectives, including National Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Commentary, and CNN Wire. This is a great resource for background research on topics to gain different perspectives.
Proquest Newsstand (US Newsstream)
Use this database to find news articles from key national and regional sources, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Newsday, and Chicago Tribune.
This is a ProQuest database entitled U.S. Newsstream that enables users to search current U.S. news content, as well as archives that stretch back into the 1980s. It features top newspapers, wires, broadcast transcripts, blogs, and news sites in full-text format. It provides key national and regional news sources from the U.S. and includes exclusive and preferred access to top titles, All titles are cross searchable on the ProQuest platform.
Social Science Database
A ProQuest database that offers indexing and full-text for hundreds of academic scholarly journals covering a wide range of social science disciplines including anthropology, criminology, economics, education, political science, psychology, social work, and sociology.
Helpful to students studying nursing, criminal justice and the social sciences.
SocIndex
This EBSCO database provides comprehensive coverage of sociology, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study.
It features millions of records with subject headings from a sociological thesaurus. It provides mostly full-text access to scholarly journals, as well as indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical materials. It also provides over 25,000 author profiles on the most prolific, most cited and most frequently searched for authors in the database.
RVOneSearch
RVOneSearch provides access to most of the information contained in many of the library's databases plus the RVCC library catalog.
It is a great place to begin your research with select key words to obtain a list of articles available throughout multiple databases as well as books, ebooks and websites accessible through RVCC’s library. Many limiters are available to modify your search such as full-text only, peer reviewed (scholarly), specific date ranges, or a specific database or source type.