Healy Chapter 5-Approaches to Knowledge Development and Use

• Healy characterizes the relationship between service discourses and theories for practice

  Hierarchical, for although these discourses influence the social work theories for practice, the practices of social work do not, in turn, substantially shape the service discourses from which they are drawn
• None of the service discourses on which social work theory relies is primarily developed in or intended for social work practices
• It is necessary for social workers to approach these discourses critically and cautiously, rather than to look to them for the 'truth' of practice
• Problem solving approaches


  Originally developed for interpersonal practice with service users experiencing problems of adjustment in daily living
• The commonly encountered criticisms of formalized theories of professional practice in social work can be attributed to the processes of theory development
• Traditional forms of theory building have separated theory development from its application
• The separation of researcher and researcher roles, as well as those of theorist and practitioner, had created barriers to social workers' use of theory in practice
• Reflexive approach to theory use and development

  Asserts that a conflict between theory and practice does not exist when it is recognized that as social workers use theory, we are also creating theory in practice. We do not simply apply formal theory, but we use them as a basis of knowledge making
• Reasons why social workers should develop our capacity to identify, use, and develop formal social work theory in practice

  • Accountability to service users, employers, and funding agencies
  • Emphasis on focus, efficiency, and effectiveness of service provision
  • Service users and managers expect social workers to be able to explain the assumptions underpinning their practice, and theory can assist us with this task
  • Theory allows us to critically examine common-sense ways of seeing and doing things
  • Theory can enable us to critically review assumptions and accepted ways of doing things that work to the disadvantage of service users
  • The strengths perspective helps us to see clients' strengths and capacities that might otherwise be invisible to us, to other service providers, or to others in the service users' personal network
  • Theory allows us to expand our capacities for creative responses to the problems and issues we face in practice
  • Theory allows us to assert indispensable knowledge
  • While informal knowledge remains inside our heads, we fail to subject it to the external scrutiny required to further our understanding of its strengths and limits both within our practice contexts and across other sites of service provision
• Two prominent schools of thought about theory development

  • The empirical practice movement (evidence based)
  • The reflective tradition
• Empirical practice movement


  Growing interest over the past three decades among some social work researchers and practitioners in evidence based approaches to practice
• Advocates of empirical practice

  Argue that social work should be grounded in rational knowledge validated through scientific methods
• Examples of the empirical practice movement


  • William Reid and Laura Epstein's task-centered practice approach
• The leaders of the charity organization society in 1869 were keen to develop a scientific basis for practice
• Mary Richmond, a social work pioneer, described social diagnosis as "a product of scientific process. Facts are gathered to serve as the basis for hypotheses, which are then tested by using relevant evidence."
• Richmond's research was limited to single case studies
• Members of the empirical practice movement seek to use more robust scientific methods, preferably experimental designs
• Kirk and Reid argue that the knowledge base of social work is ill defined and difficult to identify, delimit, or organize. Moreover, most of it is not the product of rigorous scientific testing
• Key strength of the empirical practice movement

  It provides a framework for social workers to critically review the sources and forms of the information they use in decision making
• Empirical practice movement approach to theory development

  The social work researcher develops and tests social work theory that the practitioner then applies in practice. The knowledge development and user are separated on the grounds that practitioners do not have the time or scientific tools to develop robust theories of practice
• The evidence-based tradition does not provide us with strategies for sorting through the large volume of research evidence that may exist about specific practice situations
• Reflective tradition


  Social workers argue for recognition of practitioners' lived experience of practice as a basis for making and using knowledge in practice
• Donald Schon's critique of the 'technical rationalist' approach

  By defining rigor in terms of technical rationality alone, we exclude much of what competent practitioners actually do in the indeterminate zones of practice where they confront problematic situations, unique cases, and conflicts of values
• Knowing in action


  The process of developing knowledge in practice, rather than applying pre-existing theories to it
• Reflection in action


  The process of refining knowledge in action so as to promote new ways of responding to the problems we encounter in practice
• Reflective approach


  Places the practitioner, rather than the researcher, at center stage in knowledge development and use
• Key strength of the reflective approach

  It recognizes and values social work practitioners as active creators and users of theory and other forms of knowledge
• Taylor and White contend that by introducing subjectivity, reflective writing brings us much closer to practice than objectivist accounts
• Reflective approach promotes open-ended approaches to practice that allow for the local complexities of defining issues and responding to them
• Parton argues that uncertainty, confusion, and doubt should form an essential part of any theoretical approaches which are serious about being usable in practice
• The emphasis on intuitive and tacit knowledge means that the basis of our knowledge claims remain inaccessible to other stakeholders, such as service users
• By holding the practitioners' reflections to be a true account of social work practice, this leaves no room to critically interrogate the knowledge claims made
• If our knowledge is developed through action, our capacity to transfer this knowledge outside specific practice contexts is limited
• For more severe contexts of practice such as making a legally binding decision, intuitive and tacit knowledge may elevate the risk of incorrect decisions
• By focusing primarily on inductive knowledge building, we may fail to fully utilize formalized theories for practice as a basis for creating theory and knowledge in practice
• We are in danger of expending energy on constantly reinventing the wheel rather than developing and extending both existing theory and our own knowledge base
• Reflexive approach to knowledge use

  Recognizes that social workers are always making knowledge in practice. Knowledge and theory are constantly being constructed in part through practitioners' experiences, and also through sources such as our practice context and formal theoretical base
• Five theories of social work practice

  • Problem solving
  • Systems perspectives
  • The strengths perspective
  • Anti-oppression
  • Postmodern, postructural, and post-colonial
• These theories are selected based on relevance to the contemporary institutional contexts of health and welfare services, relevance to the purpose of social work as it is constructed through our values base and within contemporary practice contexts, relevance of the theories to the formal knowledge base of social work, relevance to the extension of boundaries of the social work theory base
• The new emphasis on partnership in policy and legislation in a range of health and welfare fields can be ascribed to the convergence of influences from both the political right, which has tended to emphasize service user self-responsibility, and from the political left, which has supported a rights-based approach to service provision