A Beginner's Guide to Critical Thinking and Writing in Health and Social Care, 2nd edn

Abstract

I want to start with a paragraph of warning, especially to students. Although it has its merits, this book is written by and for nurses. You would have thought that, if the authors (or perhaps it was their publishers) were going to add ‘and social care’ to the title, they would have taken their own advice and, at least as a precaution against the kind of review this is going to be, carried out a simple computer-based literature search using the terms ‘critical’ and ‘social work’. They would then, perhaps, have felt the need to refer to critical social science, including work by Habermas and his predecessors in the Frankfurt School, and feminism. Informal, but according to this book uncritical, research techniques such as asking around or looking in a bookshop would have revealed to the authors the internet journal Critical Social Work and texts by writers such as Jan Fook, Mel Gay, Stephen Webb and many others interpreting that social science in social work and building the concept of critical reflection, since it is a major stream of writing in our profession. A social work student will fail an assignment on critical practice if they fail to deal adequately with this material, and this book will not help them.