From micro-situational making of agency to multi-level reflection on social relation and structure: The case of Qing Hong Program after ‘5.12’ earthquake of Sichuan, China

Abstract

The tension between social workers’ commitment to values and the effectiveness of their interventions has been often observed and has affected the relationship between research and practice. The evidence-based practice model submits practice to strict positivist scrutiny. It suspends or neglects the value laden in the process of experimental intervention, and argues for seeking justified universal rules or causal-effect relations between variables as the guideline to social work intervention. This invokes strong rebuttals from critical reflective practice. Critical reflective practice within the epistemology of interpretivism highlights multi perspectives from different standpoints and tries to substitute universal rules with contextual consensus as the solution to social problems facing social work. This article borrows practice theory from Giddens and Bourdieu and extended case method from Burawoy to elaborate the debate between evidence-based practice and reflective practice. We reconstruct the reflective practice model, and suggest that social work research and practice should be not only mutually dialogued for the transformation of interaction situations, but also extended to macro structural and institutional factors.