ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Rick is a professor and holds the Clair and Clarice Platt Jones/Helen Frays Endowed Chair of Social Work Research within the School of Social Work at Western Michigan University. He received his Ph.D. in social work from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and for over the past 35 years has held academic and senior university administrative appointments in Australia, Canada, and the United States. In addition to having an international reputation of publishing well over 100 journal articles, book chapters, and conference presentations, Dr. Grinnell has published 31 books on social work research methods, statistics, and evaluation. His latest book (with Yvonne A. Unrau) is Social Work Research and Evaluation: Foundations of Evidence-Based Practice, 8th edition (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Margaret received her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in 1964 from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. She spent two years teaching in Ghana with the Voluntary Service Overseas organization and then worked for three years at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston before coming to Canada in 1969. In Canada, she sold Fuller Brush without success, married, had four children, and returned to university in 1983 to study Social Work. She received a BSW in 1985. Margaret has since authored or co-authored numerous books, book chapters and articles, mostly in the areas of research and evaluation but also in the field of comparative child welfare. Margaret received an MSW from the University of Calgary in 1990 and a Ph.D. from the University of Wales, in the United Kingdom, in 1995. Her research focuses on foster care, family reunification and child welfare practice in an international context. Dr. Williams is a Professor of Social Work at the University of Calgary.

Yvonne is a Professor of Social Work at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo Michigan. Since 2008, she has also directed the John Seita Scholars Program, which supports WMU students who have aged out of foster care. She has worked and studied in the area of foster care since 1989. Her interest in foster care began as a family preservation worker in a Canadian family service agency, where she worked with families with children at risk for out-of-home placement. She later worked as a treatment foster care coordinator and then went on to earn her doctorate in Social Work from the University of Utah. She has authored several books including Program Evaluation for Social Workers: Foundations of Evidence-Base Programs, 5th edition (with Richard M. Grinnell, Jr. and Peter Gabor, Oxford University Press, 2010) and has published numerous professional journal articles that have examined the services provided to vulnerable children and their families.

Click titles below to view related graduate textbooks • Grinnell, R.M., Jr., & Unrau, Y.A. (Eds.). (2008). Social work research and evaluation: Foundations of evidence-based practice (8th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. • Weinbach, R.W., & Grinnell, R.M., Jr. (2010). Statistics for social workers (8th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. • Grinnell, R.M., Jr., Gabor, P.A., & Unrau, Y.A. (2010). Program evaluation for social workers: Foundations of evidence-based programs (5th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.