Research Methods for Social Work (Empowerment Series)

by Allen Rubin

Administrators and other practitioners affiliated with programs undergoing evaluation often don’t want to be hassled with elegant evaluation research designs. They may prefer expediency to methodological rigor in the evaluations and would rather leave the w...

The same folks who initially express disinterest and lack of expertise in evaluation design or say that they don’t need a methodologically rigorous design, however, can become fanatical critics. They may challenge the methodology of any study whose findings question the...

Influenced by their ego involvement and vested interests in the unsupported program, administrators and practitioners are capable of grasping at any straw or magnifying any trivial methodologic...

study’s methodological credibility.

unlikely to notice even glaring methodological imperfections in studies whose results they like; they are apt to tout those studies as proving the value of their programs.

Program evaluators and other social work researchers a...

run the risk of becoming personally involved in and committed to the conclusions they rea...

firm commitment to the other norms of science we have examined works against to...

if you lack that commitment, you’ll find that your colleagues can evaluate the critical article mo...

Intelligent humans commonly engage in additional forms of illogical reasoning in ...

A consistent run of either good or bad luck is presumed to fores...

an extended period of good weather may lead you to worry that it is certain to rain on the weekend picnic. Even the best of us get a little funny in our reasoning from time to time. Worse yet, we can get d...

Social workers need to use critical thinking and be vigilant in looking for the flawed reasoning of individuals whose ego involvement or vested interests lead t...

common fallacy is the straw person argument, in which someone attacks a particular position by distorting it in a way...

ad hominem attack, which tries to discredit the person making an argument rather than addre...

Sometimes new interventions are promoted merely on the basis of their newness or promise....

When you encounter colleagues making this argument, you might want to remind them that lobotomy was once considered to be a new and pr...

bandwagon appeal, in which a relatively new intervention is touted on the basis of...

implicit assumption is that the sheer number of your professional colleagues jumping on the bandwagon must mean tha...

not implying that interventions or policies promoted with fallacious appeals are necessarily ineffective or undesirable. Some might eventually be supported or may have already been supported by sound scientific studies despite the u...

point is not to be swayed one way or the other by appeals based on ...

Overgeneralization, selective observation, and the defensive uses of illogical reasoning all conspire to close inquiry prematurely.

Sometimes this closure of inquiry is a social rather than an individual

government agency that refuses to support further research on an “already understood” topic effec...

denominational college that prohibits scholarship and research that might challenge tradi...

Social workers may effect closure by refusing to consider evidence that their favored interventions, programs, or policies ar...

danger of premature closure of inquiry is obvious. It halts attempts to understand things before...

history of human knowledge, however, you will reach a startling conclusion: We keep changing the things we know—even...

any closure of inquiry is ...

science is an open-ended enterprise in which conclusions are consta...

Experienced scientists accept it as a fact of life and expect established theories to ...

the reward structure of science supports ...

you may have to overcome a great deal of initial resistance and disparagement, imagine how famous you would be if you could demonstrate persuasively that something p...

rewards for astounding discoveries keep everything fair game for ...

you will probably learn about some practice methods or interventions that are based on the solid foundation of a replicated ...

you’ll also probably encounter many claims about the wonders of some interventions based on sloppy and biased research studies or o...

Some of these claims will be expressed in the form of fliers advertising expensive continuing education training w...

When these claims seem to contain some of the features of scientific inquiry and thus have the surface appearance of being scientific but on careful inspection can be seen to violate one or more principles of the scientific method or contain fallacies against which the...

pseudo- means “fake”; thus, pseudoscience is...

Some figureheads may espouse an intervention based on pseudoscience because they have a vested interes...

not hard to recognize some purveyors of pseudoscience, such as those peddling miracle cures for obesity or other woes on late-night television infomercials base...

other pseudoscientific claims can be harder to recognize, especially when they are based on weak studies that managed to slip by reviewers an...

common warning signs that should arouse your suspicions as to whether an intervention might be based more on ...

Most of the signs pertain to flawed ways of knowing that have bee...

presence of one or more of these signs does not necessarily mean that the intervention i...

Perhaps the flaws are in the inappropriate way the intervention is touted, not in the quality o...

example, perhaps solid scientific research has found an intervention to be moderately effective with certain problems under certain conditions, but the purveyors of the interventio...

if you recognize these signs, you should at least beware of the possibility that p...

the more warning signs you detect, the more skeptical y...

recognize pseudo...