What would you do?

Case 1: Imagine you are a clinical social worker at a children’s mental health agency. One day, you receive a referral from your town’s middle school about a client who often skips school, gets into fights, and is disruptive in class. The school has suspended him and met with the parents on multiple occasions, who say they practice strict discipline at home. Yet the client’s behavior has worsened. When you arrive at the school to meet with your client, who is also a gifted artist, you notice he seems to have bruises on his legs, has difficulty maintaining eye contact, and appears distracted. Despite this, he spends the hour painting and drawing, during which time you are able to observe him.

• Given your observations of your client’s strengths and challenges, what intervention would you select, and how could you determine its effectiveness?

Case 2: Imagine you are a social worker working in the midst of an urban food desert (a geographic area in which there is no grocery store that sells fresh food). As a result, many of your low-income clients either eat takeout, or rely on food from the dollar store or a convenience store. You are becoming concerned about your clients’ health, as many of them are obese and say they are unable to buy fresh food. Your clients tell you that they have to rely on food pantries because convenience stores are expensive and often don’t have the right kinds of food for their families. You have spent the past month building a coalition of community members to lobby your city council. The coalition includes individuals from non-profit agencies, religious groups, and healthcare workers.

• How should this group address the impact of food deserts in your community? What intervention(s) do you suggest? How would you determine whether your intervention was effective?

Case 3: You are a social worker working at a public policy center whose work focuses on the issue of homelessness. Your city is seeking a large federal grant to address this growing problem and has hired you as a consultant to work on the grant proposal. After interviewing individuals who are experiencing homelessness and conducting a needs assessment in collaboration with local social service agencies, you meet with city council members to talk about potential opportunities for intervention. Local agencies want to spend the money to increase the capacity of existing shelters in the community. In addition, they want to create a transitional housing program at an unused apartment complex where people can reside upon leaving the shelter, and where they can gain independent living skills. On the other hand, homeless individuals you interview indicate that they would prefer to receive housing vouchers to rent an apartment in the community. They also fear the agencies running the shelter and transitional housing program would impose restrictions and unnecessary rules and regulations, thereby curbing their ability to freely live their lives. When you ask the agencies about these client concerns, they state that these clients need the structure and supervision provided by agency support workers.

• Which kind of program should your city choose to implement? Which is most likely to be effective and why?

Assuming you’ve taken a social work course before, you will notice that these case studies cover different levels of analysis in the social ecosystem—micro, meso, and macro.

These three domains interact with one another, and it is common for a research project to address more than one level of analysis. For example, you may have a study about individuals at a case management agency (a micro-level study) that impacts the organization as a whole (meso-level) and incorporates policies and cultural issues (macro-level). Moreover, research that occurs on one level is likely to have multiple implications across domains.

How do social workers know what to do?

Welcome to social work research. This chapter begins with three problems that social workers might face in practice, and three questions about what a social worker should do next. If you haven’t already, spend a minute or two thinking about the three aforementioned cases and jot down some notes. How might you respond to each of these cases?

We assume it is unlikely you are an expert in the areas of children’s mental health, community responses to food deserts, and homelessness policy. Don’t worry, we’re not either. In fact, for many of you, this textbook will likely come at an early point in your doctoral social work education, so it may seem unfair for us to ask you what the ‘right’ answers are. And to disappoint you further, this course will not teach you the ‘right’ answer to these questions. It will, however, teach you how to answer these questions for yourself, and to find the ‘right’ answer that works best in each unique situation.

Assuming you are not an experienced practitioner in the areas described above, you likely used intuition (Cheung, 2016).^[1] when thinking about what you would do in each of these scenarios. Intuition is a “gut feeling” about what to think about and do, often based on personal experience. What we experience influences how we perceive the world. For example, if you’ve witnessed representations of trauma in your practice, personal life, or in movies or television, you may have perceived that the child in case one was being physically abused and that his behavior was a sign of trauma. As you think about problems such as those described above, you find that certain details stay with you and influence your thinking to a greater degree than others. Using past experiences, you apply seemingly relevant knowledge and make predictions about what might be true.

Over a social worker’s career, intuition can be joined by practice wisdom. Practice wisdom is the “learning by doing” that develops as a result of practice experience. For example, a clinical social worker may have a “feel” for why certain clients would be a good fit to join a particular therapy group. This idea may be informed by direct experience with similar situations, reflections on previous experiences, and any consultation they receive from colleagues and/or supervisors. This “feel” that social workers get for their practice is a useful and valid source of knowledge and decision-making—do not discount it.

On the other hand, intuitive thinking can be prone to a number of errors. We are all limited in terms of what we know and experience. One’s economic, social, and cultural background will shape intuition, and acting on your intuition may not work in a different sociocultural context. Because you cannot learn everything there is to know before you start your career as a social worker, it is important to learn how to understand and use social science to help you make sense of the world and to help you make sound, reasoned, and well-thought out decisions.

Social workers must learn how to take their intuition and deepen or challenge it by engaging with scientific literature. Similarly, social work researchers engage in research to make certain their interventions are effective and efficient (see section 1.3 for more information). Both of these processes—consuming and producing research—inform the social justice mission of social work. That’s why the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), who accredits the PhD program you are in, requires that you engage in social science:

Social workers use ethical, culturally informed, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive approaches in conducting research and building knowledge. Social workers use research to inform their practice decision making and articulate how their practice experience informs research and evaluation decisions. Social workers critically evaluate and critique current, empirically sound research to inform decisions pertaining to practice, policy, and programs. Social workers understand the inherent bias in research and evaluate design, analysis, and interpretation using an anti-racist and anti-oppressive perspective. Social workers know how to access, critique, and synthesize the current literature to develop appropriate research questions and hypotheses. Social workers demonstrate knowledge and skills regarding qualitative and quantitative research methods and analysis, and they interpret data derived from these methods. Social workers demonstrate knowledge about methods to assess reliability and validity in social work research. Social workers can articulate and share research findings in ways that are usable to a variety of clients and constituencies. Social workers understand the value of evidence derived from interprofessional and diverse research methods, approaches, and sources. Social workers: a. apply research findings to inform and improve practice, policy, and programs; and b. identify ethical, culturally informed, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive strategies that address inherent biases for use in quantitative and qualitative research methods to advance the purposes of social work. (CSWE, 2022).For more on the CSWE accreditation standards see the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards.

The role of social work scholars in informing social work practice

As social work scholars we are expected to find ways to incorporate and disseminate knowledge, practice, research, or theories that are informed using a culturally informed or antiracist lens. Because social work draws on interdisciplinary knowledge (e.g., sociology, psychology, nursing), there are many professionals who contribute to social work knowledge. However, as a result of their practice experience, social work values, and professional training in social work, social workers are uniquely positioned to contribute to social work knowledge. In the next section, we will discuss social work research, including social workers as research consumers and producers.