Building Research Infrastructure in Schools of Social Work: A University Perspective

Abstract

This article addresses strategies for research infrastructure development in social work by building on the profession's work of the past two decades and by drawing on the experiences of the larger university environment. The article provides a set of recommendations for the next generation of social work research, which is likely to be highly interdisciplinary, focused on implementation of scientifically based programs, and called on to articulate its societal and economic contributions. KEY WORDS: future of social work research; history of research development; intellectual property; research infrastructure; research universities ********** Over the past three decades, social work has been concerned with building its research infrastructure. Research infrastructure is defined as the physical and human resources for research within the business, research, and academic environment of the university program. In this article, we identify strategies that universities have used over the past 60 years to increase research capacity across science disciplines. We use these as a springboard to consider the enhancement of social work research infrastructure in today's university environment. Since the birth of the modern university following World War II, research has become an increasingly prominent part of American universities' missions (Geiger, 1990). From the 1940s through the turn of the century, dramatic investments in science were made in American universities. Federal agencies dramatically increased funds for university-based research to support the attainment of national goals such as national defense; efficiency in food production; the race to the moon; vibrant cities; and reducing the effects of disease, especially those of cardiac disease and cancer (Friedman, 2005; Geiger, 2004). The investment in research reflected American values, including optimism that industrial and scientific goals could be reached with national, state, and private investments; competitiveness with the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War; and confidence in rational empiricism as the route to solving human problems. In this article, we identify the strategies and rationale used by other disciplines to develop research infrastructure, consider what motivates institutional investments in research infrastructure, and discuss the challenges for social work to build research infrastructure at a point in time after major university research infrastructures have been established. We make recommendations for improving research infrastructure within program missions, and we point toward future research trends that will affect social work, with the aim of positioning our profession to move forward quickly. PHYSICAL AND LIFE SCIENCE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT Facilities In the physical and life sciences, the basic research infrastructure is the laboratory. In the second half of the 20th century, American universities poured huge amounts of funds into science laboratory construction. Over the past several decades, the cost of instruments in these laboratories has escalated to the point at which it often costs millions of dollars to purchase, maintain, and run a laboratory that includes sophisticated equipment. One approach that universities have taken to balance cost with quality of facilities is to set up shared core facilities (Angeletti et al., 1999). These are constellations of equipment, technical staff to operate sophisticated equipment, and operating costs associated with the equipment, which are shared among a group of investigators. This can be a cost-efficient strategy for providing access to expensive instrumentation when there are many investigators who use the equipment. Human Capital Without a pool of scientists who are trained in the latest technologies and scientific inquiry, science cannot advance. In the physical and life sciences, the human capital development path for scientists entails undergraduate and graduate training in science, with increasing specialization and original research in graduate programs. …