Document Title: Describing policy analysis as a social worker

Paper code: 13005

Describe policy analysis in your own words.

Generally, policy analysis is a technique used in public administration to enable civil servants, activists, and social workers to examine and evaluate the available options to implement the goals of laws and elected officials.

Policy analysis involves evaluating issues of public importance with the objective of providing facts and statistics about the extent and impact of the various policies of the government. The basic objective of public policy analysis is to assess the degree to which the policies are meeting their goals.

To a social work like I am,  It can be been understood as the process of determining which of various policies will achieve a given set of goals in light of the relations between the policies and the goals.

My understanding of policy analysis is that it is concerned primarily with policy alternatives that are expected to produce solutions. Therefore, it can be described as the process of identifying potential policy options that could address a problem and then comparing those options to choose the most effective, efficient, and feasible one.