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Item The Opioid Epidemic: Assessing Policy Prescriptions(Temple University. Public Policy Lab, 2025-03-27)Item Degrees of Success: Obstacles and Opportunity in Higher Education(Temple University. Public Policy Lab, 2024-03-28)Item How to Deal with Cheating in Online Surveys(Temple University. Public Policy Lab, 2025-01-16)A great deal of survey research has moved to unsupervised online formats, including major surveys like the American National Election Survey (ANES), General Social Survey (GSS), Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), and the Survey of Consumers. Relative to other methods, self-administered online surveys have a number of benefits from a cost and measurement error standpoint. However, online surveys also make it easier for respondents to look up the correct answers to questions that are designed to measure factual knowledge. For example, the ANES measures political awareness using factual questions about political officeholders and institutions, the GSS measures general science knowledge with a series of quiz questions, HINTS includes questions about the health effects of alcohol and tobacco, and economic surveys measure perceptions of quantitative indicators like inflation and unemployment. As these and many other surveys move online, having an explicit strategy for dealing with respondents who look up the answer will become an increasingly important part of survey design. In most settings researchers consider looking up answers to be a form of cheating. However, it is not always clear what to do about it. This brief offers a practical guide to navigating the issue. In short, researchers who are concerned about the possibility that respondents are looking up the answers to online survey questions should follow two basic steps: conduct a threat assessment, then choose solutions that match the nature of the threat. As shorthand the act of looking up the answers is referred to as “cheating” throughout the brief.Item Crisis in the Social Work Labor Force(Temple University. Public Policy Lab, 2024-07-25)Social workers constitute the largest occupational group within the education and human service workforce, providing "cradle to grave" services often to society's most vulnerable individuals, families, and communities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there are just over 700,000 social workers employed in the U.S. Nearly 50% of these social workers are in child, family, and school sites; 26% in healthcare organizations; 16% in mental health and substance abuse facilities; and the remainder in various other settings such as grassroots community agencies, public libraries, or creative arts programs.1 Despite increasing demand for their services, an alarming shortage of agency-based social workers is forecasted.2 Concerns about volatility in the social work labor force emerged as the COVID-19 pandemic waned.3 While social work had once been viewed as a growth profession, recent research underscores the pernicious impact of heightened stress and distress on work engagement and worker mental health. Low pay, precarity, and work-related stress are leading social workers to leave their jobs and the profession.5 In this policy brief, I look at a root cause of this pending crisis: neoliberalism and its impact on the human service agency-based social work labor force. Based on research in which I interviewed 60 professional human service workers, as well as other scholarship, I suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed and exacerbated, rather than caused, these deleterious working conditions for social workers.6 To understand these broader causes and consequences of social worker burnout, one needs to grasp the consequences that 40 years of neoliberal policies have had on the human service sector.Item The War on Drugs at the Mall: Anti-Drug Campaigns in Shopping Centers during the Reagan Administration(2025-03-15)While the Reagan Administration revived and expanded the United States' war on drugs with increased funding, harsher sentencing, and community-based preventative measures, shopping centers proliferated across the nation. As news outlets warned of nonwhite drug pushers and urban "blight," white middle-class populations flocked to shopping centers, protected as they were alleged to be from the supposed ills of modern society. Using collections housed in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library archives, I examine the efforts of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC), with Melvin Sembler as its president, to involve the shopping center industry in the ongoing drug crusade with an anti-drug campaign of their own called “Kids Say Know.” I argue that, in collaboration with the Reagan Administration and under the chief directive of Sembler, the ICSC endorsed shopping centers as a heroic enterprise against, and the activity of shopping as a moral alternative to, drug use. I argue further that the ICSC's Kids Say Know anti-drug campaign functioned to reinforce shopping centers as a white, segregated space. Lastly, I contend that the decision of Sembler and the ICSC to involve the shopping center industry in the ongoing anti-drug crusade was motivated at least in part by concerns over revenue loss.