Social Policy and Social Policy Research in Italy. Teaching, Data infrastructure and Policy Advice

Social policy teaching occurs predominantly in the academic fields of social work, political science and sociology. Learning outcomes of academic programs dealing with social policy include theoretical and methodological knowledge, organizational and management skills, as well as the ability to design social policies and social welfare programs. Social policy graduates have high chances in the current labour market, at least partly due to a recent increase in the public demand for social workers. Originally constituted by the main actor in social policy making the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, the National Institute for Public Policy Analysis (INAPP) remains a crucial consultant besides civil society organisations, universities and think tanks. While the National Institute of Statistics (Istat) is the main aggregator of socio-politically relevant data, the data remains highly dispersed across various repositories and applies to different territorial levels, while the tailoring of the latter has often been subject to change in Italy.