Talking about social work practice research

Following the launch of the Routledge Handbook of Social Work Practice Research, I caught up with my co-editor Lynette Joubert to discuss the book. Here’s a little of what she said.

Why were you attracted to the idea of an international handbook of social work practice research?

I feel that an international Handbook is timely and very relevant because social work started with the notion of practice research in response to the complexity of issues that we deal with as social work researchers. Practice research has opened a door for us to be inclusive and to rise to the challenge of applying rigorous research to complex situations.

Why was it needed?

Social work practice is complex. This book brings together people who are focused on research methodologies that help to understand and evaluate that complexity. We have included people who are all responding to complexity in their own way. This book brings together a host of different approaches. No one is right or wrong. Each one is excellent.

Can you say a little about your background in social work research?

I had a very qualitative research experience in my training as a social worker. Then when I studied clinical psychology I had a very quantitative one. I liked both. I could never understand why in the Department where I was studying one half of the corridor only would look at qualitative research and the other half would only look at quantitative research. It seemed to me that the two responded in different ways to different issues. If you think of practice and you start with questions from practice and their relevance to practice you have to consider methodological pluralism. You can’t just say I’m one or the other because both could work, and sometimes they work together or in different stages.

What do you think this book adds to the social work practice research literature?

This book is a celebration of what social work has contributed to practice research. It embraces methodology, application, data collection and different perspectives on practice research. Not every chapter is written by a social worker, but all of them are focused on social work practice.

As you know, impact is very important. You can’t have impact unless your question comes from practice and is going to impact back into it. It’s very rare that a purely academic esoteric question is going to have real impact back in practice. If it doesn’t come from practice and engage with practice, it will not have impact on practice. So that’s the other very important element of this Handbook.

We’ve brought together a long list of authors for the book. How difficult would you say it was to source so many authors to contribute to the book?

I never had a single refusal. Some people wanted to write a chapter but had a lot of work pressures and just couldn’t meet the deadline. I started off thinking we should give people a format but as I started considering individual authors, and the diversity and the relevance of their experience, I realised that we actually had to thematically group chapters. We realised that we couldn’t put a format onto people. What we wanted to have in the book was their unique experience in relation to one of the broader themes of the book. So we invited people where we knew they had a field of expertise to contribute to one of those topic areas.

How would you say practice research is different from other forms of social work research?

I think with practice research we go to practice first and then we go to the theory. We are focused on what practitioners, service providers and service users are experiencing. We listen to their lived experience of their context so we are very context driven. We are not just issue-driven. An issue only has relevance if it is within a social context and a context of practice.

For myself as an academic, you engage in collaboration and partnership with practitioners. I wouldn’t actually dream of imposing a research question on practitioners. I might contribute or engage with them to clarify, but it’s always collaborative. That’s where practice research is different because we do the literature review after the research question has been clarified. So we’re very interested in research that’s topical, ethical, relevant, socially contextualised and that’s actually going to be able to feed back and strengthen practice and social work knowledge. A lot of new knowledge and new theoretical knowledge has also emerged from practice research and that’s another very important aspect to consider as well.

Can you give an example of practice research that you have undertaken?

An idea came out of practice that seemed very simple: What does social work do? We started with a small study in one health service around the role of social work. It’s complex in a health setting because we’re not a primary provider, we’re working alongside very confident disciplines. In that study we developed an audit tool which was then used with 14 health service managers to conduct an audit of 542 health social workers across Victoria. That led to a stakeholder report which went to Government and was disseminated internationally. We know, for example, that there were 10,000 items of health social work conducted in one day across Victoria.

It was adapted and used in Finland and New Zealand, which illustrates how global issues for social work research are influenced by the local. As my colleague Mirja Satka says, we need to consider the notion of ‘glocal’. We’ve got the global issues that social work practice research is managing, and then we’ve got uniquely local, and then we’ve got that shared space of ‘glocal’, where we’ve got the global influenced by the local.

What do you think is the future for social work practice research?

I see social work practice research in the future going wherever social work practice is happening. I think we have got to embrace new situations and think of different methodologies that would relate to working in this space and that will have impact back on this space. The Handbook directs thinking into that space. It says there are multiple ways in which you can engage with complexity.

What I am also hoping from the Handbook is that it will inspire practitioners to engage with practice research. There are a lot of practitioners involved in this Handbook who’ve contributed to chapters. Some of them have decided to do a further degree and then gone back to practice. Others are in the process of doing that and I’m hoping that together we can grow this body of knowledge. We need as a social work profession to own it and to be confident about that and to develop it further.

The Routledge Handbook of Social Work Practice Research is available now. Full details about the book can be found on the Routledge website.