Our social work Code of Ethics calls on us to be evidence-based in our practice, so that we can demonstrate our familiarity with a practice area and its scholarly references, but there’s a lot of confusion out in the field about how to do this. I also see a lot of resistance to the task of reviewing the literature. Let’s face it—it sounds boring. This article is here to help and recognizes that practitioners exist in a productivity-driven, time-starved, and resource-strapped environment. So let’s strip this task down to the basics.

 

    To have this conversation, we need to start with two definitions. We need to know what an empirical study is (because that’s the literature we want to focus on) and we need to know what a social work intervention is (because that’s the type of article we want to find vs. opinion essays or sociological studies).

 

    Empirical study: A study that is either based on primary or secondary data collected from direct observations that are analyzed by study authors. It has a methods section that includes a sampling approach and a data analysis section. It is not an opinion article/essay that includes statistical data.

 

    Social work intervention: According to Sundell and Olsson, “In social work, interventions are intentionally implemented change strategies which aim to impede or eradicate risk factors, activate and/or mobilize protective factors, reduce or eradicate harm, or introduce betterment beyond harm eradication; thus social work intervention encompasses a range of psychotherapies, treatments, and programs.”

 

    It’s important to sift through all the commentary literature to find the empirical intervention study gems. It is true that reading through this stuff strikes fear into the hearts of many social workers who are phobic about reading statistics-heavy articles and reports. Schools of social work should support students and alumni in learning to demystify and translate the language of research and evaluation so that clinicians can make good on their commitment to be evidence-based.

 

    To start to consider the empirical literature base on any set of interventions that might be appropriate for a client, social workers should amass the relevant articles. As a student, you will have access to your university library database. You can watch my short screencast with a hack on how to search quickly and effectively. Lack of access to literature post-graduation is a common complaint that many raise, although this is less of an issue now that we have freely-accessible information from the Cochrane Library, the Society of Clinical Psychology’s list of empirically supported interventions, my own evidence-based practice page, and so on. Nowadays, many cities’ public libraries also have access to academic databases, so access to clinical journals is much more of an option for community-based clinicians.

 

 

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Jonathan Singer of the Social Work Podcast wrote the foreword to this book, and he said, "Danna pays attention to life’s details with a psychotherapist’s insight and writes about them with the passion of a slam poet. She speaks to the soul of social work and inspires us to think about more than just social work."