Ideal-type analysis: An innovative tool for housing policy evaluation

This paper serves to introduce readers to the application of ideal-type analysis to social work policy evaluation. Ideal-type analysis considers participant data holistically and analyzes across cases to develop a typology of distinct categories of participant experience. By keeping participant experience intact, ideal-type analysis offers one way to align the interpretive phase of evaluation research with social work’s ethical commitment to human dignity, and is simultaneously well-suited to exploring the perennial evaluation question: what works, for whom? In this article, we describe how our research team came—somewhat by accident—to ideal-type analysis as a useful analytic method for completing an evaluation of an innovative housing policy. The paper first differentiates ideal-type analysis from thematic analysis, and overviews the analytic approach as outlined by Stapley et al. (2022). We then illustrate each step of the ideal-type analysis through the example of a housing policy evaluation. Throughout, we explore the contributions of the approach, and close with discussion of broader applications of idealtype analysis to social work policy evaluations.