Research into Social Work: a review article

Abstract

Social workers have for some time been encouraged to use, facilitate, generally support and conduct 'research'. The much quoted comment in the Seebohm Report on research in the social services is only the most recent exhortation. The case for research in social work seems hardly to require stating, but research activity is slow to develop and finds its way into the digestive tract of practice perhaps more slowly but certainly in a very piecemeal way. (The present clutch of books for review1 may look like a sudden spring, but dates of publication range between 1965 and 1970. In fact even this span of time, as we shall see, enables certain trends in social work research to become evident.) We have, then, in social work research the two problems of the source and the use of research projects. Problems of origin arise because the case for research is based on a complex amalgam of the drive towards professionalism (a body of social work knowledge is a requirement for professional status), a desire to improve service (based on conviction that it is improvement that is appropriate), and a project (developing out of the growth in the study of social policy) to substitute reality for myth. Problems of the use of research findings arise for similarly complex reasons. Researchers and social workers often work from different theoretical perspectives and different organizational bases. There is often a failure to appreciate the constraints bearing upon the practitioner. We fail to understand the pressures on the social worker to attain sufficient cer tainty of knowledge to justify some kind of activity, and are then surprised that a particular research finding has been wrenched out of context and used unselectively or a theory has been vulgarized to cover every eventual ity. Alternatively we fail to grasp the value constraints upheld by social workers themselves. Nokes,2 for example, has suggested that at least some social workers would refrain from using certain techniques even if research had shown them to be effective. The researcher in social work has, then, to understand the faiths of the counsellors, but he has also to believe himself that the problems he explores are significant and that they can be grasped, at least to some extent, by the