Research Methods for Social Work (Empowerment Series)

by Allen Rubin

be less susceptible to it in your social work practice and your life in general.

Common Warning Signs for Detecting the Possibility of Pseudoscience Pseudoscientific proponents of an intervention will: • Make extreme claims about its wonders • Overgeneralize regarding whom it benefits • Concoct unusual, speculative explanations for its effectiveness • Concoct pretentious jargon for aspects of their intervention that sounds scientific but really is not • Base their claims on • Testimonials and anecdotes • Authorities or gurus • Tradition • Sloppy or biased research • The popularity of their intervention • Selective observation of a few cases • Portrayals of their intervention in the popular media (such as movies or TV shows) • React to disconfirming evidence by • Ignoring it, citing only those sources that support their intervention • Explaining it away through ex post facto hypothesizing • Engaging in an ad hominem attack on those who cite the disconfirming evidence • Exaggerating the importance of minor flaws in the source of the disconfirming evidence • Exaggerating the rigor and superiority of the studies that support their intervention • Engaging in a straw person argument in which they distort the arguments of those who question them so as to make those arguments easier to attack • Citing a historical scientist (such as Galileo or Freud) whose contemporaries were wrong in questioning them (and thus implicitly comparing themselves to the historical luminary) • Attributing it to the vested interests of those who are threatened by their intervention ...

some pseudoscience involves interventions that have value and that are based on some solid scientific research but have their effects exaggerated by purveyors of pseudoscience who have vested interests in them.

Some things that are now seen as scientifically acceptable were portrayed as pseudoscientific when first introduced.

With no initial inkling that someday they would become researchers, they discovered during their practice experience that their good intentions were not enough. They realized that our field needs more evidence to guide practitioners about what interventions and policies really help or hinder the attainment of their noble goals.

their compassion and commitment to change that spurred them to redirect their efforts to research because it is through research that they could develop the evidence base for practice.

they could do more to help disadvantaged people and pursue social justice by conducting research that builds our profession’s knowledge base and that consequently results in the delivery of more effective services to clients and...

They aim not to produce knowledge for knowledge’s sake but to provide the practical knowledge that social workers need to solve e...

aim to give the field the information it needs to alleviate human suffering and ...

social work research seeks to accomplish the same humanistic goals as social work practice; like practice, social work research is a compassionate,...

you may supervise a clinical program whose continued funding requires you to conduct a scientific evaluat...

You may provide direct services and want to use single-case design methodology to evaluate scientifically your own effectiveness or the effects certain ...

may be involved in community organizing or planning and want to conduct a scient...

community’s greatest needs. You may be administering a program and be required, in order to be accountable to the public, to document scientifically that your program truly is delivering its intended amounts and types of service.

You may be engaged in social reform efforts and need scientific data to expose the harmful effects of current welfare policies and thus persuade legislators to enact more humanitarian welfare legislation.

Some agencies provide interventions that research has found to be ineffective. Some day you may even work in such an agency and be expected to provide such interventions. By understanding research and then reading studies that provide new evidence on what is an...

It was not until the last few decades of the 20th century, however, that a realization of the acute need to improve the evidence base of social work practice began to spread throughout the ...

During the 1970s, several authors jolted the social work profession with reviews of research indicating that direct socia...

Many of the studies covered in those reviews did not evaluate specific, clearly d...

they evaluated the effectiveness of social workers in general, instead of evaluating specific interventions for specific problems, they concluded that social workers in general were not being effective but were unable to identif...

early studies, therefore, provided little guidance to practitioners seeking ways to make thei...

early reviews implied that it is unsafe to assume that whatever a trained social worke...

If you approach your practice with that attitude, then much of what you do...

An important difference between the studies covered in the earlier reviews and those covered in the later reviews is whether the focus was on the effectiveness of specific, well-explicated interventions applied to specific prob...

later studies evaluated interventions that were well explicated and highly specific about the problems they sought to resolve, the goals they sought to accomplish, a...

the particular interventions and procedures you employ to achieve particular objectives with specific types of c...

many social workers today continue to use some interventions and procedures that have not yet received adequate testing.

Thyer (2002), for example, noted that some problems and fields of practice—such as child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and political action—have a smaller evidence base than others, particularly when compared to interventions for mental disorders.

some interventions that have been evaluated and have had positive outcomes need more testing before the evidence is sufficient to resolve any lin...

new interventions continually emerge and are promoted without adequate scientific evidence ...

Some will have received no scientific testi...

Others will have been “tested” in a scientifically unsound manner in which the research design or measurement procedures were...

Some will have been tested with certain ethnic groups but...

Professional social workers commonly are bombarded with fliers promoting expensive continuing education workshops for new intervention...

understanding scientific inquiry and research methods becomes prac...

learning how to critically appraise whether adequate scientific evidence supports particular interventions in certain practice situations becomes at least as important as learning popular general practic...

CONTRASTING INTERVENTIONS: HELPFUL OR HARMFUL? Column A Once Popular but Not Supported by Research • Critical incident stress debriefing for trauma victims • In-depth, psychodynamic insight-oriented therapy for people suffering from severe and persistent schizophrenia • Treating dysfunctional family dynamics as the cause of schizophrenia in a family therapy context Column B Supported by Research • Prolonged exposure therapy for trauma victims • Assertive case management/assertive community treatment for people suffering from severe and per...

SOME OF THE INTERVENTIONS WITH STRONG RESEARCH SUPPORT • Assertive community treatment (ACT), family psychoeducation, social skills training, and supported employment for schizophrenia • Cognitive behavioral therapy for various disorders • Dialectical behavior therapy for borderline personality disorder • Prolonged exposure therapy, cognitive processing therapy, and EMDR for posttraumatic stress disorder • Interpersonal therapy and problem-solving th...

why can’t we just let the researchers produce the needed studies and then tell us practitioners the results? Practitioners would have to focus only on the practice aspects of those interventions that receive adequate scientific support.

vast range in the quality of social work research—and of applied research in disciplines that are relevant to social work—that gets produced and published.

Some of it is excellent, and some of it probably should never h...

not hard to find studies that violate some of the fundamental principles that you ...

example, you may encounter a study in which authors are evaluating a new intervention they have developed by rating client progress. Unfortunately, these ratings are frequently based on their own subjective judgments, which are highly vulner...

perhaps you will read an advocacy study that improperly defines things so as to exaggerate the need for...

unevenness in the quality of the studies in social work and allied fields ha...

Biases or varying degrees of competence among researchers are only p...

Many weak studies are produced not because their authors were biased or did not know better but because agency constraints kept th...

learn the value of assigning clients to experimental and control conditions when the researcher is assessing the ...

During control conditions, the interventions being tested are wit...

Many agencies will not permit the use of control conditions in...