Practicum: Pillars of Public Safety

Undergraduate / Graduate

This practicum course introduces students to hands-on social policy research in the service of a client. In two respects, the course will be distinct from a typical undergraduate course: (1) in the independence expected of students formulating and pursuing a research question; and (2) in working in the service of a client. The research project will be a group project. For those of you preparing to write a BA thesis in Public Policy or a related discipline, it should also help to inform your approach to defining and refining a research question, identifying methods, and conducting exploratory analysis. The course will give you introductory, hands-on experience in interviewing and analyzing public data, two research techniques relevant to many fields of academic research and much work outside the academy as well. An introductory course on statistics or data science will be helpful background. The client for our research projects is the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. Understanding our client's interests and priorities will require us to have an initial grounding in the history of Chicago, public/private partnerships in the city, and current public policy debates around public safety, which we will cover in the first two weeks of the course.