The question was how to pursue this interest. The summer after I graduated from college, I took a job as a caseworker at a family support agency serving child-welfare involved families. What can I say? The short version of the story is that I fell in love with direct practice and decided to pursue a career in social work. Social welfare offers a very applied perspective on how to look at these individual-contextual interactions.

What new perspective can you bring to the School of Social Welfare?

I hope I can make the case for why the fields of education and social welfare, both academically and professionally, should attempt more cross-fertilization. There are wonderful educational resilience theorists, for example, who, in my opinion, could provide the social work field with terrific strength-based frameworks. On the other side, I think there is still unlimited potential for social work to collaborate with educators at multiple levels to best serve the academic and psycho-social needs of children.

What are your current research interests? Are you collaborating with anyone here at Berkeley?

I have four main interests: the transition to high school. student response to high stakes testing policies, parent involvement in schooling, and the structure and organization of social service provision in schools.

I am currently collaborating with Richard Scheffler, Rick Mayes and Farasat Bokhari in the School of Public Health on a study investigating the economics of psychostimulants (e.g., drugs typically prescribed for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

How do you try to bridge your research interests with social work practice?

Virtually all of my research interests emerged out of direct experience with families and schools. I, therefore, conduct and design research with quite practical applications. For instance, my interest in parent-school interaction emerged from a conversation with a mother I saw in family therapy. She told me a very poignant story of how school staff labeled her son as a gang member (he wasn't) and how these false perceptions eroded his attachment to school. She felt "pushed away" and betrayed by school personnel. My research elucidates how the structure of high schools contribute to these negative and counterproductive interactions.

Over the past 15 years social work research has made more use of quantitative tools. How do you make use of these tools in your research.

I was fortunate to have been able to learn from two great statistical innovators: Ben Wright (perhaps the leading expert in Rasch analysis) and Tony Bryk (one of the developers of hierarchical linear models (HLM)). Students, their families, and teachers, are "nested" in schools. This means, for example, that students attending the same school share common characteristics. This technique allows researchers to capitalize on and account for this shared variation. For instance, I use this technique to look at the ways in which school characteristics shape parents' involvement in schooling.

Quantitative researchers are often accused of ignoring the individual in their research. How do you respond to this? How does one integrate quantitative and qualitative methods?

I think this accusation reflects a very outdated way of thinking and a misunderstanding of what "quantitative" research means. "Quantitative" and "qualitative" refer to different data collection processes and techniques. I personally mix these data collection methods in my own work, depending on the nature of the research question I am trying to address.

What is the most challenging aspect of teaching in the School of Social Welfare? What is the most gratifying?

As a new faculty member at the school, I can say that the students I teach are phenomenal. Berkeley is unique in that students complete three semesters of research training in this program. It is an absolutely wonderful aspect of this program. This year I taught the Research Methods sequence for second year students. I must say that the students really blew me away with the projects they produced. I think some social work students sometimes enter the program with the belief that they (1) are completely uninterested in research or (2) lack the skills to conduct research. I try to demonstrate that we all have a little bit of researcher embedded within us and try to draw that out. I think many, if not most, students are pleased to find that they actually enjoy research and realize how central it is in our profession.

Information on Professor Stone can be found at the following link:
http://socialwelfare.berkeley.edu/faculty/stone.htm