Social Work Research Methods

Building Knowledge for Practice

Stuart A. Kirk

Every profession needs scholars and researchers who can organize, test, and develop the knowledge that practitioners need and can use. Every profession also needs practitioners who can participate—as intelligent consumers, as coparticipants, as innovators—in the knowledge development enterprise. This book is one attempt to help educate social work students to become those critically minded consumers of research and for a few, perhaps, to become the next generation of social work researchers. Practitioners and researchers alike need to know how to identify useful information that could help them and their clients and what constitutes a good study and reasonable evidence. The ability to identify good information requires that one also be able to spot invalid assertions, illogical conclusions, and generalizations that stem from studies that are neither objective nor scientific.

This is a book of recent research articles that are used as illustrations of the many ways that current social work researchers are contributing to the profession’s knowledge. The book is not designed to stand alone as a research textbook but to be used as a supplement to standard textbooks in courses on research methods, evaluation research, program evaluation, and practice evaluation. The intent of this volume is to make it easier for students and their instructors to connect the worlds of practice and research.

Knowledge Development in Social Work

Every professional journal article is a bid by its authors to participate in a conversation. The conversation is not only with the reader but also with others who have written on the topic. The conversation can be as old as Plato or as recent as debates about welfare reform. The conversations are peculiar ones in that the participants often never meet face-to-face and know virtually nothing about each other as individuals, and their dialogue may occur intermittently over many years. In long-lasting conversations, new discussants pick up the discourse and carry on with their own contributions as older discussants fade out, join other conversations, or retire.

These conversations are more than cocktail chatter with a written record. Participants want to make a lasting contribution. To gain entrance, authors try to convey that they have something of significance to say, possess the authority to say it because of how they have developed their contribution, have been thorough in their preparation, are balanced and honest in their deliberation, and are insightful in identifying the practical meaning of their offering. Authors’ motivations to contribute may vary. Some write to inform, others to challenge, some to explore and speculate, others to persuade and convince. But all authors want to share what they know or have learned. Their articles are one vehicle for finding an audience who might want to listen.

Articles reporting research are a special type of bid, a special form of discourse (Kirk, 1992). Webster’s Dictionary (19??) defines research as "careful, systematic, patient study and investigation in some field of knowledge, undertaken to discover or establish facts or principles." Information is gathered and assembled in an orderly fashion for a specific purpose and organized and interpreted logically. Discovery does not come inexpensively or easily; it requires personal perseverance, faith in one’s methods, and trust that one’s efforts will contribute in some way to the developing knowledge base of the profession. Even with its limits, no methods of inquiry are as consistently effective in overcoming ignorance as is systematic investigation carefully reported.

Joining the Conversation

Developing professional knowledge is not a private matter held closely to the vest. The potential of research for advancing social work comes from being publicly shared with a knowledgeable and interested audience. Publishing the results of research in scientific and professional journals is the established way to share discoveries, to make small offerings to the common good. Journals are one of the most important places for scholars to make claims about the value of their work, to make bids for legitimacy, and to argue that their scholarship adds to our developing knowledge. Journals are also the medium in which those in search of new knowledge look first. In a world in which most popular media compete to disseminate the latest hollow political or commercial slogan or describe in numbing detail some human calamity, research journals strive to take the long view.

Authors alone do not determine whether their work should be disseminated. The editorial boards of journals make choices about what they will publish, and these choices are not supposed to be based on whimsy or personal bias. The importance of professional journals comes from their use of recognized norms of science that require that scientific claims be judged by other experts, using pre-established impersonal criteria in an open intellectual arena. The establishment of scientific journals in the 17th century was an important innovation in the history of science. Journals provided a method for scientists to establish priority (that is, ownership) and property rights over discoveries and a way of preserving scientific contributions. But also, by using experts (peers) to select manuscripts for publication, published reports gained the authority that comes from having work recognized by other members of the scientific community (Zuckerman & Merton, 1971). Authors began to seek such recognition, and readers came to expect a scientific imprimatur on what was published.

Journals play a fundamental role in the development of all disciplines and professions (Lindsey & Kirk, 1992). They create a record of how well professions meet one of the requirements of professions: possession of a body of knowledge. Journals serve to disseminate information from contemporary scholars, preserve and document the past, and aid the development of the profession’s knowledge base by identifying appropriate contributions and preserving them in an archival source. Journals serve as gatekeepers to the profession’s ongoing conversations and, therefore, as guardians of its knowledge base.

What journals choose to publish has consequences not only for the profession in general, but also for the careers of individual authors (Lindsey & Kirk, 1992). Authors, particularly those from universities, are judged in part on the basis of the quality of their intellectual contributions to the field. Committees that review faculty for promotion and tenure pay special attention to the significance of a person’s writing. By publishing an article, journals join the author in claiming that the article deserves to be seen and used. If the article is not subsequently incorporated into the ongoing professional conversation, both the author and the journal may have failed.

Unfortunately, the process of communicating research to a professional audience is often fraught with problems (Kirk & Berger, 1993). Researchers are quick to blame practitioners, accusing them of not spending enough time or effort reading research, not understanding research methodology, not interpreting findings objectively, and clinging tenaciously to outmoded theories and practices. Researchers lay the problems in research consumption at the feet of the frontline professionals.

Researchers, however, are not blameless. Sometimes researchers work on trivial problems or apply weak methods to difficult issues, exaggerate or misinterpret results, or bury their findings in obtuse technicalities. Their failings do not enhance researchers’ ability to disseminate knowledge to practitioners. Even when these pitfalls are avoided, investigators often cannot communicate clearly about their study. The much-lamented gap between researchers and practitioners—whatever its extent and causes—is not bridged by poorly written research reports. Furthermore, badly written reports impede communication among researchers themselves who possess no special gifts for deciphering jargon or understanding awkward prose. Reports that are difficult to read and understand fail in their primary mission to share knowledge efficiently (Kirk & Berger, 1993).

Articles as Artifacts

Social work research articles are the final products of the scientific enterprise, the unchanging artifacts that authors deposit in libraries as their contributions to knowledge at a particular moment in time. They represent their authors’ best efforts to convey the substance and significance of what they have learned. These artifacts have been given the imprimatur of the editor and anonymous manuscript reviewers, and much can be discovered by the careful examination of them.

First, one can learn about the customs for scientific presentations. Articles are not as easy to read as good fiction, and they definitely are not supposed to read like mystery novels, keeping you in suspense until the very last page. In fact, the title often gives the story away, and if it doesn’t, the abstract provides the entire story line and conclusion. This is deliberate and helpful because often the abstract is all that is read by harried scholars and practitioners who have limited time.

Scientific articles have a standard structure that can be seen in most of the articles contained in this book. Their writers begin by defining a problem, outlining its significance, recapping what is known from past research, and posing what questions are still unanswered. They then describe what methods and procedures the authors followed to obtain information to answer some of those questions, report what they found, draw some general conclusions, and finally discuss their implications. Formally, the structure consists of some variation on problem statement, literature review, hypotheses, methods, findings, and conclusion.

Beyond a similar formal structure to the articles, the second observation is that there is a great variety of methods and techniques used to pursue their topics. There is not one scientific method of inquiry; there are many. Different methods are chosen to carry out different purposes of inquiry, to capitalize on the availability of resources and information, and to express the methodological preferences of the researchers.

Third, each article conveys what the state of knowledge is on that topic. In a single article, the reader gets a glimpse if there is a massive body of research on that topic or whether it is unexplored, whether it has been pursued for decades by scholars or is a recent arrival on the scientific agenda, and whether there is general scientific consensus on the meaning of the emerging findings or raging disputes among scholars. Each article, in addition to conveying some new information, tries to recap what we already know, where we now stand. Authors transmit this information both by what they say and by whom they acknowledge. The authors and works cited in the footnotes and references provide a trail into the existing literature, revealing the identities of those who have participated in the conversation and where the curious reader can go to find their contributions.

Other seemingly minor tidbits also can be revealing. The number of authors of an article conveys something about the extent of collaboration and collective effort represented by the research. The number of authors varies widely across disciplines and topics, reflecting important disciplinary customs as well as the nature of the activity required to produce the article. Some scholarly work is best accomplished alone and most of the work is singly authored (for example, history, philosophy), whereas medical research articles may have more authors than references. In addition, such information as the institutional affiliations of authors conveys something about their job responsibilities and social status in their profession. An acknowledgment of a funding source may offer a clue about how expensive the study was or about the interests and politics behind the study.

All research articles, however, are misleading in one important respect: They don’t tell the whole story; they are much more tidy than the actual activities that produced them. Articles make it appear that the authors knew exactly how the study would unfold; had a firm grasp of the literature before they began; had well-articulated hypotheses from the start; and had little trouble deciding what information they wanted, how they were going to get it, and with whom they had to negotiate. Articles make it appear as if there were no struggles among the team of researchers, no staff difficulties, no false starts or mistakes, no external pressures, no preliminary biases, no wasted time, and no distracting emotions. Readers need to recognize when they read articles that probably none of this is true. They need to be able to read between the lines, to imagine the hassles that may have occurred, and to understand that the research article is a sanitized synopsis of the scientific process, an ex post facto attempt to make more coherent a process that was emergent, uncertain, and messy.

Purpose and Organization of This Book

This book contains a collection of research articles that has a special purpose. It is designed to be used in conjunction with any one of a number of social work textbooks on research methods (see Selected Readings). This book is a supplement to those standard textbooks, to be used to provide social work students with current examples of the application of research methods to social work issues.

Undergraduate and MSW students are primarily interested in preparing for practice, not research, careers. Almost all social work students will spend their careers

being consumers rather than producers of research. Nevertheless, it is a challenge for students to become critical consumers because they must master a considerable amount of knowledge about social scientific methods. Students, however, are often perplexed by the structure and jargon of the research enterprise. This presents instructors with their own challenge. Instructors take many approaches to teaching research methods to social work students. In addition to using a general textbook that explains the research process and the variety of techniques that can be used for different purposes, instructors sometimes involve students in small research projects, illustrate points using the instructors’ own research, or provide a variety of exercises to help students understand the scientific process.

Whatever the pedagogic approach, almost all instructors also want to help their students understand how to "read" actual research articles. There are two main purposes for this. One, of course, is that research articles are the major medium that the profession uses to disseminate new information, and students need to be prepared to read them comfortably and critically. The second is that instructors want to expose students to illustrations of research studies that are more diverse in topic, methodology, or population than is possible in a small class project or exemplified by the instructors’ own current research. To do this, they need easy access to material that goes beyond the often contrived examples used in textbooks, draws on many fields of practice, and uses many methodological approaches. This book provides such material.

To find this diverse material, instructors traditionally turn to the scientific and professional journals. They confront several problems in searching for good illustrations of research methods. First, very often a single field of practice does not contain contemporary studies that use diverse methodologies. Second, although instructors could read the specialty journals outside their own fields, this task is enormously time consuming. Third, using articles from their own research areas often results in using many articles from outside the social work literature. This could unintentionally convey to students that there is a limited amount of social work research available. Finally, once articles are located and used, there is a natural tendency to continue to use the same illustrative article semester after semester, resulting in a course bibliography that becomes increasingly out of date.

This book will make the instructor’s task easier and the student’s experience richer. Using research articles recently published in major social work journals, this book draws on the latest research from across the broad spectrum of the profession. It provides articles that cut across fields of practice, levels of intervention, and research methodologies. The articles also display the breadth of social work research across populations and the level of research sophistication. For students in research methods courses, it provides a diversity of topics, a diversity of methodologies, and currency. Moreover, the book is realistic in terms of what methods social work researchers have actually been able to use. It does students little good to learn methods that are largely inapplicable in the real world of social work.

I selected the articles in this book after reviewing all research articles published by the major social work journals since 1996. Each article illustrates a particular method or technique of social work research. The articles are not necessarily "exemplary" in the sense of being the very best, although many of them are, in fact, fine examples of research craftsmanship. Rather, they are all illustrative and can be used to provide a real example of the use of a particular method. Illustrations have different purposes. They also can be used to show the appropriate uses as well as the inevitable limits of a particular approach. For example, self-report—asking people to provide information about themselves—is a common and useful strategy to gather data in many circumstances, but its use should always prompt us to ask whether the respondents could have any problems with accurate recall or whether there are reasons for them to shade the full truth, intentionally or unintentionally. Illustrations were selected, then, not because they were flawless, but because they could serve many teaching purposes.

Admittedly, the selections were constrained by what has appeared recently in social work journals. The journals publish many studies that use survey designs and self-administered questionnaires and quite a few using experimental or quasi-experimental methods. By contrast, it was difficult to find good case studies, single-subject designs, or a rich variety of studies systematically using qualitative methods. If the selections chosen tilt toward conventional methods and quantitative data, it is because that, in fact, is the nature of much current social work research.

This book is organized into four major divisions:

• Part One contains articles that represent methods of systematically summarizing research literature.
• Part Two contains illustrations of the major structures of inquiry that are used in social work research.
• Part Three concerns the methods of gathering information.
• Part Four concerns the analysis of information and draws on the articles throughout the book.

These divisions parallel the sections of most research method textbooks.

Each article, however, is an integrated report that contains multiple research techniques and therefore will have multiple pedagogical uses, depending on the instructors’ purposes. For example, an article illustrating a cross-sectional survey may be used to discuss survey design, sampling, interviewing, measurement, or statistical inference—or how those topics are intricately related. Thus, the organization of this book is imposed on these articles, most of which could be used to illustrate other topics as well. This is actually a bonus and an economy of using published articles. They are versatile. An instructor can use one article to teach about many related topics.

To facilitate these multiple uses, following the introductory text for every part is a description of what each article may be used to illustrate. An overview of those uses is provided in the introductory text.

References

Kirk, S. A. (1992). What’s the use? [Editorial]. Social Work Research & Abstracts, 28(4), 2–3.

Kirk, S. A. (1993). Puzzles of peer perusal [Editorial]. Social Work Research & Abstracts, 29, 3–4.

Kirk, S. A., & Berger. R. (1993). Improving research writing [Editorial]. Social Work Research & Abstracts, 29(2), 3–4.

Lindsey, D., & Kirk, S. A. (1992). The role of social work journals in the development of a knowledge base for the profession. Social Service Review, 66, 295–310.

Zuckerman, H., & Merton, R. (1971). Patterns of evaluation in science: Institutionalization, structure and functions of the referee system. Minerva, 1, 66–100.

Selected Readings in Social Work Research Methods

Anastas, J., & MacDonald, M. (1994). Research design for social work and the human services. New York: Lexington Books.

Babbie, E. (1998). The practice of social research (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Blythe, B., Tripodi, T., & Briar, S. (1994). Direct practice research in human service agencies. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dawson, B. (1991). Understanding social work research. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Fortune, A. E., & Reid, W. J. (1998). Research in social work (3rd ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Frankfort-Nachimias, C., & Nachimias, D. (1996). Research methods in the social sciences (5th ed.). New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Gibbs, L. (1991). Scientific reasoning for social workers: Bridging the gap between research and practice. New York: Macmillan.

Grinnell, R. (Ed.). (1997). Social work research and evaluation (5th ed.). Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock.

Grinnell, R., & Williams, M. (1990). Research in social work: A primer. Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock.

Hudson, W., & Nurius, P. (Eds.). (1994). Controversial issues in social work research. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Judd, C. M., Smith, E. R., & Kidder, L. H. (1991). Research methods in social relations (6th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Leedy, P. D. (1997). Practical research (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Mark, R. (1996). Research made simple. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Marlow, C. (1998). Research methods for generalist social work (2nd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Monette, D., Sullivan, T., & DeJong, C. (1998). Applied social research: Tool for the human services (4th ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Neuman, W. L. (1997). Social research methods (3rd ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Royse, D. (1995). Research methods in social work (2nd ed.). Chicago: Nelson-Hall.

Rubin, A., & Babbie, E. (1997). Research methods for social work (3rd ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Singleton, R. A., Jr., Straits, B. C., & Miller Straits, M. (1993). Approaches to social research (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Tripodi, T. (1994). A primer on single-subject design for clinical social workers. Washington, DC: NASW Press.

Tripodi, T., Fellin, P., & Meyer, H. (1983). The assessment of social research: Guidelines for use of research in social work and social science (2nd ed.). Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock.

Tyson, K. (Ed.). (1995). New foundations for scientific social and behavioral research: The heuristic paradigm. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Yegidis, B., Weinbach, R., & Morrison-Rodriguez, B. (in press). Research methods for social workers (3rd ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

York, R. (1997). Building basic competencies in social work research: An experiential approach. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

York, R. O. (1998). Conducting social work research. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.