provisionally approved 6/6/02
SOCIAL DIFFERENCE AND PUBLIC AND COMMUNITY SERVICE POLICIES
Level III
Rationale: Policies set guidelines for practice and provide strategies for dealing with problems or issues. In public and community service, policies often come in the form of laws or regulations that establish, enlarge, or curtail programs; determine eligibility for services; or control funding. Within agencies, policies often take the form of guidelines delineating the way work is done—defining a client population and its needs; the frequency, duration, and character of client contact; and the requirements for reporting.
Policies are not created in a vacuum. They stem from a history of practices and decisions. They also reflect the spirit of the time—the ideas, assumptions, and biases that currently prevail. They further serve to institutionalize and influence the time in which they develop.
Policies may affect populations differently. Yet social differences—among them race, socioeconomic class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, age, immigration status, language, and ethnicity—are socially constructed, the result of laws, institutional practices, and prevailing attitudes. These attitudes fundamentally influence the ways in which public and community services are organized and delivered. The experience of social difference thus reflects a legacy of differentiation on the basis of defined social categories, with policies having a differential impact on different classes of people. Such differences may be a result of biases sympathetic or unsympathetic to particular populations or a result of ignorance about the needs of a particular group, assumptions about a policy’s implementation, or an inability to see or acknowledge the impact of a policy on the people it directly affects. This competency requires students to look critically at policies and practices in public and community service; to analyze how they may differentially affect individuals marked by such social categories of race, class, and gender; and to understand why a differential impact is maintained.
Competency: Can identify and describe how policies and general practices
in public and community service differentially affect individuals and groups
because of socially defined differences and can analyze the development and
impact of a particular policy or general practice.
CRITERIA:
1. Identify and describe a policy or general practice in public or community service that may differentially affect individuals and groups because of race (consider Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, etc.) and describe the results of that differential impact.
2. Identify and describe a policy or general practice in public or community service that may differentially affect individuals and groups because of socioeconomic class and describe the results of that differential impact.
3. Identify and describe a policy or general practice in public or community service that may differentially affect individuals and groups because of gender and describe the results of that differential impact.
4. Identify and describe a policy or general practice in public or community service that may differentially affect individuals and groups because of a social category—for example, disability, sexual orientation, age, immigration status, language, or ethnicity—and describe what the result of that differential impact.
5. Analyze one policy or general practice and one social category, identified in one of the first four criteria and discuss the significant implications of the social construction including how the policy you selected negatively affects the organization or delivery of services for the selected group and how you would change this policy.
PORTFOLIO LINK: You are expected to use the Writing Portfolio criteria
and standards as guidelines for the written products required by this competency.
Papers written for this competency may be considered for submission to the
Writing Portfolio.
STANDARDS:
1. The first four criteria should each be described with supporting information from at least two sources of relevant literature.
2. For Criteria 1, 2, 3, and 4, you may select policies or general practices from any areas of public and community service (e.g., public housing eligibility rules, mandatory prison sentences, high school graduation requirements, union organizing procedures, hospital discharge practices, transitional assistance regulations, affirmative action laws, invisible glass ceilings). Where appropriate, you may discuss the same policy or general practice as it differentially affects more than one social category.
3. In your responses to Criteria 1, 2, 3, and 4, characterize as precisely as possible the specific social categories you are discussing. (For example: Whom are you including in the social category “Asian”? What are the social determinants of “class”? If you refer to women as a biological class, are you taking into account the social construction of biology? What is the age range for “youth”?)
4. In your responses to Criteria 1, 2, 3, and 4, note when the differential impact on a particular social category intersects with other social categories—deliberately or coincidentally, advantageously and/or disadvantageously (for instance, elderly mentally ill Chinese immigrants, or gay Puerto Rican youth).
5. For Criterion 5, include in your analysis:
a. a policy or general practice and a particular group that it affects
b. the historical development of that current policy or general practice
c. the dominant society’s characterization of the particular social group; the characterization’s stereotypes, emphases, and expectations; and the functions that characterization has served and serves for those who employ it
d. the way the social construction of the group is perpetuated by public policies and practices, social institutions (stratified schools, segregated neighborhoods, media stereotypes, divisive political practices, etc.), and self-perpetuating attitudes, expectations, and behaviors
e. significant social, political, legal, and economic ramifications of the dominant society’s characterization of the group
f. how the selected policy determines the ways in which services are organized and delivered with a negative differential affect on the group under consideration, and explain how you would change that policy to limit or eliminate this impact
EXAMPLES OF DEMONSTRATION:
1. Prior Learning: A student who filed a civil rights complaint in response to being several times passed over for promotion in her town’s police department chooses to demonstrate the competency partially through prior learning. She negotiates with an evaluator the reading she needs to do to gain a better understanding of the impact of the Mass. Commission Against Discrimination’s probable-cause standard on African-Americans, the upper middle class, women, and homosexuals. She then focuses on its impact on lesbians, where discrimination is often homophobic as well as sexist.
2. Independent Learning: A student who is involved in services to the blind elderly chooses to do directed study of the impact of Medicaid policy on Asians, the working class, widows, and people with disabilities. She consults with a faculty evaluator to obtain readings and works with the faculty evaluator to address each of the criteria and standards. She focuses her responses to Criteria 5 and 6 on the policy’s impact on people with disabilities that limit mobility.
3. Course: A student takes a course that demonstrates this competency
4. Field Project: In conjunction with the Center for Social Policy, a student works with team of researchers collecting data for a study of hunger and the accessibility of low-cost food. Working both with the Center and with a faculty evaluator, she analyzes the differential access to food subsidies for low-income families. She then extends that analysis to consider differences based on race, family composition, and disability and applies readings approved by the evaluator to a consideration of hunger.