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Abstract

This paper serves to introduce readers to the application of ideal-type analysis to social work policy evaluation. Ideal-type analysis considers participant data holistically and analyzes across cases to develop a typology of distinct categories of participant experience. By keeping participant experience intact, ideal-type analysis offers one way to align the interpretive phase of evaluation research with social work’s ethical commitment to human dignity, and is simultaneously well-suited to exploring the perennial evaluation question: what works, for whom? In this article, we describe how our research team came—somewhat by accident—to ideal-type analysis as a useful analytic method for completing an evaluation of an innovative housing policy. The paper first differentiates ideal-type analysis from thematic analysis, and overviews the analytic approach as outlined by Stapley et al. (2022). We then illustrate each step of the ideal-type analysis through the example of a housing policy evaluation. Throughout, we explore the contributions of the approach, and close with discussion of broader applications of idealtype analysis to social work policy evaluations.

Keywords

housing thematic analysis evaluation ideal-type analysis typology policy evaluation

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Ideal-type analysis: An innovative tool for housing policy evaluation

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