Public policy evaluation grew as an economic discipline in the 60’s and 70’s when economics had more influence and interest in governmental politics. Growing inter-disciplinarity of modern social science has brought public policy evaluation under spotlight, as an overlap between economics, sociology, political science, education and health science. At the same time, innovative evaluation techniques have been introduced with the goal of offering better scientific base to estimate the effects of social and economic programs.
The evaluation research is of importance for social science in general and the research on inequalities in particular because public policies (labor market, social, educational, family and household policies just to mention those policies sociologists are more familiar) shape individual chances in EU societies therefore becoming at all effects “stratification” policies, institutionally defining (and re-designing) social inequality. Still, despite the link between the two, society and policy, public policy evaluation is only recently being accepted as an area of interest for Academic sociology.
The aim of the EQUALSOC SUMMER SCHOOL 2010 is to bring academics from different disciplines whose research interest lies in the area of public policies, their consequences and their evaluation with the goal of promoting a broader knowledge of both the importance of the topic within nowadays social science and the evaluation issue (and methods) in sociology and social research. The summer school will enable students to understand the relevance of analyzing public policies side by the principles of evaluation analysis, comparing various institutional contexts. The focus will also be on current debates and how to contribute to the existing work. The 6 days programme will address several areas of current evaluation research, notably education and labour market, social policy, welfare, health and family.