I found my professional, scholarly voice, so to speak, several times throughout my career. The first time occurred while a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. Simply put, everything came together when completing my historically-oriented dissertation, which focused on the role of the federal government in social welfare provisioning in the early twentieth century. Early drafts of the dissertation were quite convoluted and extensive. I felt sorry for Lynn Vogel who as chair of my dissertation committee had to plough through all the excess material that I eventually jettisoned as I learned how to cut what was less than essential to know, as I clarified my thoughts in the process. This voice-finding carried me through time a spent at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work where I completed a book-length sequel to my dissertation, Welfare and Freedom II: The Role of the Federal Government, 1941-1980, and in journal articles about family poverty, and in another book-length manuscript, Advantage White and Male, Disadvantage Black and Female.

The second time I found my voice occurred while on the faculty of the Barry University School of Social Work. I had struggled with statistics in graduate school and thought I could get by as an academic without benefit of mastering quantitative analysis. I was wrong, less because increased emphasis was being placed on producing quantitative studies as evidence of productive scholarship, and more because the social problems about which I was concerned, especially economic well-being, poverty, and income dynamic were quite amenable to using statistical procedures of analysis and basing policy recommendations from related research findings. While at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, I co-authored many articles with the demographer Arthur Dolinsky who painstakingly taught me how to pose questions when working with large, national data files, and applying appropriate statistical procedures to analyze the data. After a year or two at Barry University, I became far more comfortable with my statistical proficiency, such that the proportion of single-authored articles that relied statistical analysis eventually eclipsed co-authored articles. In addition, statistical analysis was central to the book-length manuscript, Advantage White and Male, Disadvantage Black and Female.

As I note in Connecting the Dots, by the time I had returned to New York in 1999 to accept my current faculty position with the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, I thought I had exhausted my scholarly voice. I was a full professor, tenured within two years, and into my 50s. Little did I know that for all practical purposes a third phase of voice-finding was just getting started. This was the most productive scholarly period in my life, exemplified in part by Policy Analysis for Social Workers, many peer-reviewed articles, and culminating in Connecting the Dots.