Guides: Child Welfare: Home

Background Information: Overviews of Research

Oxford Bibliographies Online in Childhood Studies, Social Work, and Psychology include overviews of research, with annotated bibliographies including scholarly books, journals, and research. Example bibliographies include:

Historic Cases in Youth Justice
A timeline developed by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which is situated within the U.S. Department of Justice. The timeline highlights landmark legislation and court cases on the topic of juvenile justice reform from 1899 to the present.

Reference Works

Encyclopedia of Social Work
Updated monthly. A collaboration between the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and Oxford University Press. Over 800 overview articles, on key topics ranging from international issues to ethical standards.
Handbook of Life-Span Development by Fingerman, Berg, Smith, Antonucci (Eds)
Publication Date: 2011
Addresses, through a multidisciplinary perspective, the biological, cognitive, and psychological development that occurs from infancy through old age, and how the sociocultural and institutional factors interface with these changes. --adapted from resource description.
Social Workers' Desk Reference, 4th ed.
Publication Date: 2022
Online. Oxford University Press, 2022. Short chapters that make up this comprehensive guide to social work practice, covering social worker roles, functions, and fields, on values, ethics, and licensing standards, theoretical foundations and treatment approaches, assessment, and working with specific populations.
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed, by Wright
Publication Date: 2015
Discusses history, current trends and future directions in the social and behavior sciences. Over 9,000 entries.

Databases

APA PsycInfo
The American Psychological Association's comprehensive indexing and abstracting service for the professional and scholarly literature in psychology and related fields. Coverage is worldwide. Sources are in English and over thirty languages.
Sociological Abstracts + Social Services Abstracts
Combined file of Sociological Abstracts + Social Services Abstracts. Covers sociology, case work, demographics, policy studies, political science, family studies, feminist studies, social work, human services, social welfare, social policy, and community development.
Family & Society Studies Worldwide
the most comprehensive coverage of research, policy, and practice literature in the fields of Family Science, Human Ecology, Human Development, and Social Welfare. FSSW covers popular issues and meets the requirements of professionals in all fields of social work, social science and family practice. FSSW is an anthology of four database files providing access to more than 1,182,000 records.
PubMed
NLM's public access version to Medline, the premier database for biomedical literature.
Education Source
Indexing and abstracts for 3,500+ journals in education and related fields, full-text for 1,90+0 journals, and full-text for 550+ monographs. See Journal Coverage List. Education Source includes the content in EBSCO's Professional Development Collection, Education Index Retrospective: 1929-1983, and Education Index Full-text (H.W. Wilson). (PennKey required)
ERIC (Education Information Resource Center) - EBSCO
Indexes education-related journal articles and other publications. Cross-file search with PDC & other EBSCO databases.
Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text Comprehensive indexing with abstracts of the scholarly literature and applied literature on criminology and related disciplines, also with extensive full text. Subject areas covered include: causes and correlates of crime, criminological theory, offender characteristics and careers, and victimology; causes and prevention of delinquency, juvenile justice systems, courts and correctional agencies, diversion and deinstitutionalization; community policing, police investigations and management issues, police community relations and use of force, private security; sentencing patterns and reforms, court case processing systems, prosecution and defense functions, issues in criminal law and procedure; incarceration trends and alternatives, probation and parole, jails and prisons, treatment programs and community corrections; situational and community prevention programs, deterrence, criminal justice systems, drug control policies, and violence control measures.

Subject Guide

Sam Kirk

they/them

Email Me

Contact:

Van Pelt Library
Room 211

Subjects: Psychology, Social Policy & Practice

Locating Books and Journals in Child Welfare

Search Franklin, the library catalog, for books and journals related to child welfare. Books and entire journals (e.g. the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines) are tagged with Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) for easier discovery. For example, the journal Children, Youth and Environments contains these tags:

Amusements
Children
Children and the environment
Teenagers
Teenagers and the environment

A search in Franklin for Teenagers AND Environment, limited to Journal/Periodical, would include Children, Youth and Environments in the results because of these tags.

Here's another example. Interested in newly added books on child development? Try a Franklin Advanced search. Enter subject heading keyword search for "child development" OR "Adolescent psychology" OR "Child psychology" OR "Infant psychology", limited to publication date 2020-2023. Use the Franklin limiters to limit the format to Book. Sort the results from newest to oldest. Your results will look something like this.

Sometimes subject headings will include terms that are no longer used regularly in popular discourse, like the phrase "Problem children." The Library of Congress does regularly update subject headings, but sometimes this can take awhile. For now, using a deprecated term like this may increase the number of relevant results for older works when searching for related content (e.g. content related to at-risk youth).

Curious about other potential subject headings in child welfare? See the attached document for ideas.

Examples of Library of Congress Subject Headings in Child Welfare