Putting Census data to work: Educating social workers and community practitioners to use community data sources to inform practice

Although social work education provides future practitioners with a grounding in systems theory, emphasizing a “person-in-environment” perspective, it gives few opportunities for students to apply their knowledge beyond the “micro” and “mezzo” systems the field typically encounters (individuals, families, schools, and agency settings). Even those students who choose a public health or macro concentration have limited opportunity to examine how community-level factors influence residents' and neighborhoods' outcomes and thus promote or hinder social justice. The proposed presentation will use an example of a diverse urban city to demonstrate how readily available information drawn from public data sources such as the U.S. Census and online interfaces such as healthycity.org can be utilized to educate public health social workers in generating innovative solutions to even the most entrenched social problems. By learning to employ such methods, future practitioners will be able to better understand the communities they serve, initiate more appropriate locality-based community actions, and enhance capacity to demonstrate potential needs and community assets that can be drawn upon to leverage other needed resources in service, programming, and policy contexts. While fields such as epidemiology and public health have long examined the effects of social and physical environments on individuals' health outcomes, work of this kind has been relatively absent from social work literature. However, much can be gained by putting community-level data in the hands of those whose primary mission is to eradicate disparities and work towards social justice, as this presentation intends to do.