Professional Writing for the Human Services

Ann Hartman

The development and dissemination of knowledge and the provision of opportunities for the exchange of ideas and information are major roles of a professional organization. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) fulfills this mission by sponsoring professional meetings and conferences and stimulating a number of other efforts in the building, storage, and exchange of information. NASW develops knowledge through its publications program, which includes an extensive book list, audiovisual materials, a newspaper and pamphlets, and four professional journals.

This volume was written to help authors who want to disseminate their ideas and knowledge in the professional social work literature—in NASW Press books and journals, in materials produced by other publishers, and in less formal publications. But first, it is important to establish a framework, to explore some questions that underlie all knowledge development and dissemination, to look more carefully at the role of professional publication, and to establish the broad parameters that define social work knowledge and research.

For the past 15 years, the profession has been involved in a vigorous debate on the nature of truth, the development of knowledge, and the utility and appropriateness of different research methods for the profession. At times reasoned, often passionate, and sometimes even abusive, this ongoing discussion has raised much more than methodological issues. It has surfaced the major epistemological, ontological, and value questions that are a continuous challenge in any human enterprise, in any practice, and certainly in any search for knowledge. The following questions have been explicitly or implicitly asked: What is truth? How may we know it? Or, even, is there such a thing as truth, and may we ever know it?

Social workers are not alone in asking these questions. Intellectual leaders in the sciences and the social sciences, as well as in the other helping professions, are challenging each other over similar issues. The discussions have spawned a new set of "isms." Constructivism, deconstructionism, modernism, postmodernism, and even feminist postmodernism have joined the more familiar "isms"—pragmatism, utilitarianism, relativism, positivism, and empiricism—which have often been rediscussed and evaluated.

Why should authors, journal editors, and members of editorial boards be concerned with these demanding, abstract, and highly theoretical discussions? Some years ago, Znaniecki (1968), in his classic sociological study The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge, explored the social processes involved in the definitions of knowledge and in the boundary-maintenance and gatekeeping functions of those "men," and now, it is hoped, women too, who select materials for publication and presentation. More recently, in social work, Karger (1983), in a provocative analysis, reminded us that at the heart of the debate about research and the nature of knowledge is a struggle for "the political control of the direction, leadership, and the future of the profession" (p. 202). He wrote: "Those who define the questions to be asked define the parameters of the answers, and it is the parameters of the questions and the ensuing answers that function as the lens by which people view reality" (p 203).

In the tradition of Znaniecki, Karger ( 1983) pointed out that "Dialogue and debate are allowed within certain parameters, with the ultimate referee being the means of communication—the social work journals. It is precisely the boundaries determined by the journals—which if not totally controlled, are at least seriously influenced by the academicians—which also limit the boundaries of the debate" (p. 204).

Thus, every time an article is accepted or rejected, the editor makes a decision that not only is part of the process of defining the profession and its truth, but also has political implications in the distribution of intellectual leadership, power, and status and, in these days of publish or perish, implications for the careers and even the incomes of academicians (Kirk & Corcoran, 1989). Furthermore, the norms of the journals can even shape the direction of inquiry in that the articles and books they have published suggest to aspiring authors the kinds of explorations that will be most likely to appear in print.

It is important for authors to know that the members of editorial boards and consulting editors of most professional journals (as well as of professional organizations that publish books) assume this responsibility with seriousness. They are aware that they have individual epistemological positions, either implicit or explicit, that guide their selection, shape the journal or other type of publication, and thus contribute to the definition of the particular profession and its truths and to the distribution of status and power. It is important for these convictions to be made as explicitly as possible. It is also important that those who shape the journals, and thus the information disseminated to the profession, represent a wide spectrum of interests, world views, and areas of expertise.

There are many truths and many ways of knowing. Each discovery contributes to a profession's knowledge base, and each way of knowing deepens professionals' understanding and adds another dimension to their view of the world.

The social work profession needs large-scale studies in which variables can be reduced to measurable units and the results translated into the language of statistical significance. It needs in depth "thick" descriptions, grounded in context, of a single case, a single instance, or even a brief exchange. For example, large-scale studies of trends in marriage furnish helpful information about a rapidly changing social institution. But getting inside one marriage, as in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, richly displays the complexities of one relationship, leading to new insights about the pain, joys, expectations, disappointments, intimacy, and ultimate aloneness in relationships. Both the scientific and the artistic illuminate ways of knowing. In fact, as Geertz (1983) pointed out, innovative thinkers in many fields are blurring the genres, finding art in science and science in art and social theory in all human creation and activity.

There are indeed many ways of knowing and many kinds of knowers: researchers, practitioners, clients. Some seekers of truth may take a path that demands distance and objectivity, whereas others rely on deeply personal and empathic knowing. Some will find the validation of their findings through statistical analysis and probability tests, whereas others will find it through the intensity and authenticity of "being there" (Geertz, 1988) or through public and shared consensus on what has been called practice wisdom (Siporin, 1989). Some truth seekers will strive to predict, whereas others will turn to the past for an enhanced understanding of the present. We social workers must not turn our backs on any opportunities to enhance our knowledge—through the examination of correlations or the explication of myths that, according to Rein and White ( 1981), align "rational action with normative ideals and historical commitments" (p. 16). We must attend to the theoretical advances presented by our scholars and academicians, but also gather and listen to the "stories that rise up out of practice [that] confront, challenge, confirm, or deny the stories that 'come down' from the distal citadels of the profession" (Rein & White, 1981, p. 19).

We must listen to our clients and bring forth their wisdom, their lived experience, their visions of the world. Because many of our clients are powerless and oppressed, their knowledge has been subjugated, and their insights have been excluded from the discourse by those who are empowered to define the "truth"— experts, professionals, and editorial boards. All these sources are essential to our profession and should enrich the pages of our professional literature.

Our profession needs survey research—large-scale studies that discover trends and identify needs. It needs program evaluations, so we may know more about what seems to work. It needs outcome studies that may call upon a range of ways of knowing through a single case study, experimental designs, or longitudinal reviews that reflect on the consequences of events or conditions or interventions. It needs phenomenological studies that may lead the explorer on uncharted paths, naturalistic and ethnographic studies that are familiar but more disciplined extensions of the practitioner's case study (Rodwell, 1987). And it needs heuristic approaches whose goal is utility, rather than certainty, as well as hermeneutical and interpretive investigations that lead us to decipher the meaning of events to clients, to significant others, and to ourselves (Scott, 1989).

We can enhance our understanding by listening to and reporting the narratives, the stories that make order and sense of human experience and "organize [them] into temporarily meaningful episodes" (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 7). We can attend to the myths that link values and action, and we must respect the tacit knowledge and practice wisdom that is "inductively derived from experience and shapes the practitioners' cognitive schema" (Scott, 1989, p. 40).

Now that authors, editorial boards, and the profession are more open to exploring and receiving many ways of knowing, we must be ever aware that each way is grounded in and an expression of certain ontological, epistemological, and value assumptions. These assumptions must be made explicit because knowledge and truths can be understood and evaluated only in the context of the framing assumptions. Theories can both illuminate and obscure our vision (Scott, 1989, p. 48). They also "constitute moral intervention in the social life whose conditions of existence they seek to clarify" (Giddens, 1976, p. 8). We must be clear about the nature of these interventions.

The boundaries of our profession are wide and deep, and our literature must reflect this extensive territory. We are concerned about the nature of our society, about social policy, about social justice, and about social programs. We are concerned about human associations—about communities, neighborhoods, organizations, and families. We are concerned about the life stories and the inner experiences of the people we serve and about the meaning of their experiences to them. No one way of knowing can explore this vast and varied territory. In the chapters that follow, several ways of knowing, several paths to knowledge are presented. We hope that this volume will be helpful to those wishing to contribute to the profession's literature and that as more social workers engage in knowledge development and dissemination, these contributions will enrich our understanding of our clients, ourselves, and our world.

References

Geertz, C. (1983). Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Giddens, A. (1976). New rules of sociological method. London: Hutchinson.

Karger, H. J. (1983). Science, research and social work: Who controls the profession? Social Work, 28, 200-205.

Kirk, S. A., & Corcoran, K. J. (1989). The $12,000 question: Does it pay to publish? Social Work, 34, 379-381.

Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Rein, M., & White, S. H. (1981) Knowledge for practice. Social Service Review, 55, 1-41.

Rodwell, M. K. (1987). Naturalistic inquiry: An alternative model for social work assessment. Social Service Review, 61, 231-246.

Scott, D. ( 1989). Meaning construction and social work practice.Social Service Review, 63, 39-51.

Siporin, M. ( 1989). Metamodels, models, and basics: An essay review. Social Service Review, 63, 474-480.

Znaniecki, F. ( 1968). The social role of the man of knowledge. New York: Harper & Row.