The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City

so nebulous as to be objectively meaningless; but subjectively, it was helping these men reshape their lives. At the end of the book, Randles reveals that DADS lost its funding and shut down shortly after she finished her work there. On reading this, I felt for the clients and staffers who couldn’t believe that this one lifeline was being taken away from them. Above all else, Essential Dads is an example of the importance of qualitative work in policy research. The most important outcomes of the DADS program weren’t in concrete outcomes, the cost-benefit analysis that dominates discussions of whether to cut or renew a program; they were in the dignity and hope and reframing that it provided the men involved in it. A survey might be able to measure some of that; but in the absence of the sort of qualitative work Randles carries out, a researcher wouldn’t even know to ask about it.