The Urban Institute is cited more than 1,500 times in the Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS) database and about 1,000 times in the Academic Search Premier database. Their research is respected and used by governmental agencies everywhere. Students who need to understand policy, whether it is related to poverty, housing, schools, the elderly or anything of interest to urban planners should visit this website. Some of the best minds are working at the Urban Institute to present evidence clearly and succinctly. July's offerings from 2013 included documents about community-wide interventions, foreclosure tracking, state economic monitoring, e-filing of taxes, healthcare insurance, use of credit by American families, and more. The research is timely and extensively documented with charts and graphs.
The website is easy to navigate. Search, starting from the publication tab, by date or search by focus (children, cities, crime, economy, education, employment, families, governing, housing, immigrants, international development, poverty and more). Under retirement and aging there are 266 documents, clearly labelled article or research report or discussion paper, including one fascinating research report that compares retirement over several generations. It predicts that many factors will lead to increased income inequality among future retirees. The report is replete with charts and graphs comparing depression era babies to generation Xers. The authors of the reports are scholars Dr Austin Nichols who holds an MPP from Harvard and a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan. All of the experts have impressive credentials.
That is just the publications section. Another tab, the Press Room, accesses news releases about their ongoing projects and testimony to Congressional bodies. The Press Room also gives the resident experts space for commentary, similar to newspaper editorials, so the researchers provide an opinion on policy issues that are separate from their research documents. In addition, it is easy to link to events, available as webcasts. One seminar on how state agencies can improve services included many speakers – a county social service provider, a state Secretary for Human Services, and several directors providing leadership in state welfare agencies. The seminar lasted one and half hours and could be readily viewed with documents below such as participant biographies and handouts. One of their webcasts had been viewed 40,000 times and been liked on Facebook 500 times! These offer more conversational means of understanding the issues than a paper full of graphs and bar charts.
Under the Resources tab, yet more valuable information resides. The most powerful resources are the data tools that allow the user to create their own charts. There are several of these tools. I used the one about immigrant children. The data is extracted from a host of items that can be selected by checking boxes. I was easily able to find that the percentage of young people who were native but born to immigrants described as Limited English Proficient is 16.94 percent in my state and that 12.19 percent have family incomes below poverty. Choose a state or a metropolitan area and easily, quickly, get results. This is only one of the data tools that also includes ways to calculate crime rates, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) data, and more. There are quick factsheets under this tab, for the Elevator Conversation about older workers, child poverty, TANF, low-income single mothers, and lots more.
This is a resource you need to demonstrate to your users. The quality of the research, the credentials of the experts, and the power of the data tools makes this one of the most valuable sources for political science, public administration and social work students, faculty, and practitioners.
