An introduction to Social Policy

About the website

This set of web pages offers a brief outline of key topics and issues in Social Policy. The material is of the kind which would be tackled in a university course in the subject.

Who the pages are for

This website is one of the most widely used sites in the field of social policy internationally, When I started it up, I had originally intended the pages to be for people who are beginning studies in social policy, and those who are thinking about it. Many more people than the original target audience have found the site helpful, and I have received notes from teachers and students across the world. As the range of content, reading and references has increased, the scope of the site has broadened. The level of detail is necessarily less than a textbook would include, however, and students should be complementing what they read here with a range of other sources.

How many people use the site?

The site first came on line in May 2000, at the University of Dundee, and was transferred to the Robert Gordon University in September 2001. There have been some interruptions in the collection of statistics, but its first million page views were recorded in the four years to May 2004, and the second million by October 2006. There had been three million page views by the end of April 2008. (The number of "hits" is much larger, but that means less, because 'hits' include references to frames and image files.) Currently the site is receiving nearly 750 individual visitors, and over 1600 page views, per day. The most popular page is the one on comparative social policy, accounting for over 10% of views and taking readers 4 minutes on average. Most users are from the UK or US; of the remainder, the principal users are in Canada, Australia, the European Union and South East Asia. In 2008-09, people visited the site from 161 countries around the world; there were at least 365 sessions (or one a day on average) from 23 countries.

These statistics are taken from the Universirty server.

Statistics for usage, 1st April 2008 - 31st March 2009 :

Total Sessions 273,505.00
Total Pageviews 555,735.00
Total Hits 1,941,773.00
Total Bytes Transferred 14.74 GB

Average Sessions Per Day 749.33
Average Pageviews Per Day 1,522.56
Average Hits Per Day 5,319.93
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day 41.34 MB

Average Pageviews Per Session 2.03
Average Hits Per Session 7.10
Average Bytes Per Session 56.50 KB
Average Length of Session 00:05:19

Intellectual property

The author of these pages is Paul Spicker. The site is intended as an educational resource, and the pages are meant to be freely accessible, but the author retains copyright. No material in whole or in part from these pages may be modified, copied, reproduced, re-published, uploaded, posted, or distributed in any way. Subject to that, you are granted limited personal non-exclusive use of the materials within these pages, provided appropriate recognition of the origin of the materials is made.

Teachers are granted permission to make paper copies of text for use by their students, provided that (a) no charge is made to students for the material, (b) the material is taken from the page currently on display and that (c) the source of the material is clearly acknowledged, with precise attribution of the beginning and ending of all quoted material and full attribution of any summarised or paraphrased material. Teachers who wish to use material from the site for their students on their own websites are asked to link to the material on this site rather than copying text from it on their own web - the files are updated as and when appropriate and it is not possible to keep material on other people's sites up to date.

Please consult with the author about other uses.

Some "cheat sites" have duplicated text from this website and are offering it for sale. It is unlikely that anyone who has found their way to this website would consider paying anyone for the material they can get here for free. Neither the author nor The Robert Gordon University has any connection with these sites, and they have not endorsed or granted permission for any of the work contained on these pages to appear on such sites. Submission of information contained within these pages to such sites will be treated as an infringement of copyright.

Graphics and copyright

Many relevant graphics are unavailable because of copyright restrictions. Copyright resides in the person who makes the image, not the person represented. This means, for example, that a public domain image is available of Winston Churchill, who died in 1965, but not of John Maynard Keynes, who died in 1946. The rights to use different images are consequently complex. Copyright acknowledgements are given next to the images; images that are out of copyright are generally noted as such in the ALT text, which is visible when the mouse pointer hovers over the picture.

• Graphic images fall into the public domain when they were published before 1st January 1923 and the author or creator has been dead for 70 years. This applies to several images on this site. They include Bentham's Panopticon, photos of the workhouse, and some pictures of historical figures.
• Most of the photographs were originally reproduced thanks to the Higher Educational Library Image Exchange at De Montfort University. With the expiry of Helix's licence, thanks are due to Getty Images for continued permission to use copyright material from the Hulton Getty collection.
• Cartoons were located in the archives of the Centre for the Study of Cartoon and Caricature at the University of Kent. Thanks are due to Bill McArthur and Chris Priestley for permission to reproduce their cartoons on the site. Although the copyright holders for cartoons by Low and Illingworth did not grant permission for use, their representative had no objection to external links where images are not copied onto the site here. These images remain in copyright; users wishing to obtain rights should contact the Centre at Kent.
• Some of the photographs were taken by the author. All the charts were prepared by the author, using Harvard Graphics.

References and plagiarism

People who want to refer to the pages should cite them in the usual way. Common conventions for internet citations have not been established, but an appropriate reference might be something like this:

P Spicker, 2008, An introduction to social policy, Aberdeen, Scotland: The Robert Gordon University, http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/publicpolicy/introduction .

The references to relevant literature are now given as endnotes on each page. Students who are using this site have to be aware that it is not acceptable to duplicate the material including the references, because that would give the impression that you had read, selected and ordered the material yourself. This is a form of plagiarism, which means more than "copying". Plagiarism is passing off other people's work as one's own. This happens

• if people quote material without identifying clearly what the words are that they are quoting, and what the source is;
• if they paraphrase someone else's work without acknowledging their source; or
• even if they do acknowledge the source, when they present material collated and attributed by another person as if they had collected it themselves.

Technical details

The format of the site has been revised more than once, mainly to meet the demands of different browsers and the search engines. The site was prepared with Dreamweaver, but as time has gone on more and more has been done by direct editing. In earlier versions, there were some Java-based functions, including a tree-based menu. These took too long to load and run, and have been stripped out.

Method

The Internet is an international medium, and although there are several examples given from the UK the material has mainly been selected because of its international interest. The sections have been kept brief, so that they can comfortably be read on a computer screen, and the files are small and mainly text-based to allow rapid access. The main reason for putting several screens together in each file is speed: material can continue to load while people are reading.

The needs of users have been central to the design. A series of marginal changes in the appearance of the site conceal some fairly drastic editing of the source code. Some elements of the layout have been compromised in order to meet accessibility standards, which have also led to a significant reduction in file sizes; the increase in speed should be noticeable. There are minor differences in appearance between browsers, but the style in each should be clear and consistent. The site has been checked in Internet Explorer 4 and 6, Netscape 4 and 7, Mozilla, Amaya and Telnet (for text-only browsers).

Accessibility

Accessibility for people with disabilities has been checked with Bobby; thanks are due to Paul Brown for further checks. Recent changes have made it compatible with the new AAA rating. Given the range of different users, though, it is difficult to be confident that there are no hidden traps; please report any you find.

Awards

The site has received several highly-rated awards, including one in 2001 which was rated in the world's top awards, the Médaille d'Or for Web Site Excellence. The awards used to be listed with the other information on this page, but as the number of awards has increased, so has the download time. They have been moved to a page of their own; select this link to see them.

Comments and problems

Problems

Updating and review

The main aim of revision at this stage is to make the site as useful as possible to people studying and working in the field. The coverage is being gradually expanded and refined. Suggestions for alterations are always welcome.

Comments

Any other comments would be appreciated. Please send suggestions or queries to p.spicker@rgu.ac.uk.