Practice of Research in Social Work

Rafael J. Engel (PhD, University of Wisconsin; MSW, University of Michigan; BA, University of Pennsylvania) is associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He coordinates the graduate certificate program in aging and is the principal investigator for the Hartford Partnership Program for Aging Education. Dr. Engel has written Practice of Social Work Research (with Russell Schutt) and Measuring Race and Ethnicity (with Larry E. Davis). He is a member of the editorial board of Race and Social Problems. As an active member of the research community, he has authored journal articles on such topics as poverty in later life, welfare benefits, and depressive symptomatology, and has written…  More a variety of monographs reporting agency-based evaluations. His funded research includes studies on gambling, faith-based organizations, and employment in later life as well as funded evaluation research studies on welfare-to-work programs and drug and alcohol prevention programs. His most recent research involves older adults and gambling prevention.  Less

Russell K. Schutt (PhD, MA, BA, University of Illinois at Chicago; postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University) is professor and chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and lecturer on sociology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. In addition to Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research, now in its Eighth Edition , and its co-authored adaptations for the disciplines of social work, criminal justice, psychology, and education, his books include Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness, Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (co-edited), and Organization in a…  More Changing Environment . His scholarship focuses on the bidirectional relationship between individuals and their social environment, its consequences for organizational change, cognitive functioning, and individual behavior, and its predictors in individual orientations and community contexts. His related articles have been published in journals ranging from the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Law and Society Review, and the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation to the Journal of Community Health, Journal of Community Psychology, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Women and Health, Evaluation & Program Planning, and the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare . His major research projects have been funded by the Veterans Health Administration, the National Cancer Institute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the John E. Fetzer Institute, and state and local sources. In addition to research methods and statistics, he teaches the sociology of complex organizations and the sociology of law.  Less