Ian Frank Shaw

Ethics and the Practice of Qualitative Research

This article stems from a concern that relying only on codes of research ethics risks compartmentalizing ethical aspects of research, and shutting them off into a preamble to research. I explore ways in which the practice of qualitative research ethics is presented afresh — and contextualized in distinct forms — at every stage of research. I develop three linked arguments. First, the ethics of qualitative research design pose distinctive demands on principles of informed consent, confidentiality and privacy, social justice, and practitioner research. I focus on consent — for its topicality, not because it is more important or difficult — and social justice. Second, fieldwork ethics raise special considerations regarding power, reciprocity and contextual relevance. Third, ethical issues raised by the analysis and uses of qualitative inquiry evoke illustrative questions regarding the ethics of narrative research and the utilization of research.

Evaluating in Practice

Contents: Preface to the second edition Keeping social work honest Walking the borders: practice and research Practitioners talk A frame for evaluating in practice Interlude New agenda, new methods: evaluating assessments and plans Social work in action: evaluating the process of practice The end game: evaluating outcomes Developing evaluating in practice Bibliography Index.

The Positive Contributions of Quantitative Methodology to Social Work Research A View From the Sidelines

>> With the editor of this journal, Professor Bruce Thyer, the suggestion was made that he and I prepare editorials outlining our views on the merits of the research approach that is largely seen as contrasting with the one we professionally use most often and is reflected in the journals we, respectively, edit. He has prepared his essay on the merits of qualitative research, and it will appear in the journal I coedit, Qualitative Social Work, and mine appears within the pages of Research on Social Work Practice (RSWP). Like the qualitative health researchers, Miller and Crabtree, I am prepared to ‘‘hold quantitative objectivisms in one hand and qualitative revelations in the other’’ (2005, p. 613)— ‘‘‘hold’’ not as something I possess but as better enabling a close examination and understanding. Critical understanding of the merits of this or that research methodology requires being insider and outsider, member and stranger, white coat thinker and purple coat doer. 1 It demands the cultivation of ‘‘anthropological strangeness’’ (Lofland, Snow, Andersen, & Lofland, 2006), and the avoidance of sentimentality, which we are guilty of

Case work: re-forming the relationship between sociology and social work

Answers to the question just what is the ‘case’ partly defined the fields of sociology and social work in early 20th century Chicago. Drawing on the archives of the University of Chicago, I describe and appraise the way the ‘case’ figured in social work at Chicago and elsewhere. I ask the corresponding question of sociology. Finally, I briefly consider why not much came of social work and sociology ploughing similar territory in ways that served for a time to hallmark their identities. This analysis opens up ways of rethinking how social work and sociological research are distinctive to their fields, and allows a less ‘pre-tuned’ discussion of how practitioners of either might reciprocally pursue their profession.

Good Practice in the Conduct and Reporting of Practitioner Research: Reflections from Social Work And Social Care

This paper examines two distinct forms of practitioner research and makes tentative suggestions around what may constitute good practice in their conduct and reporting, and for the genre of practitioner research as a whole. We also explore their potential benefits and limitations within the wider set of research approaches. Discussion is informed primarily by an earlier review of practitioner research in adult social care and supplemented by knowledge and experience of wider activities related to practitioner research. Discussion is organised in three parts. First, we explore what are generic good practices around all forms of practitioner research. Second, we move to identify particular forms of good practice within what we call Type 1 and Type 2 practitioner research, situating them alongside a practitioner research matrix of stakeholder benefits. Third, we consider the implications of such discussion for how we best stimulate these types of practitioner research.

Science and social work: a sketch

While recognizing that understanding of ‘science’ varies across time and countries, there are strands of a shared albeit diverse inheritance. Failures to see where we are located within this inheritance make the social work community vulnerable to simplistic claims regarding what, for example, ‘doing science’ is like. This in turn makes it difficult to deal adequately with questions such as in what ways can or should we distinguish social work science from other kinds of knowledge? Is science in some recognizable way a unified form of knowledge? How ought we to deal with disputes and disagreements in social work science? What kinds of consequences might we envisage from social work science? I deal in turn with each of these questions.

Sociological social workers: a history of the present?

I argue that there is a submerged cluster of people who, at one or other stage of their careers, took positions in relation to social problems, social work practice, modes of understanding, and research practice that reflected and anticipated – knowingly or not – something we might call a Chicago-enriched sociological social work. They are Harriett Bartlett, Stuart Queen, Ada Sheffield, Erle Fisk Young and Pauline Young. Several of the themes that emerge from a review of their work are today, as then, as much sociology as social work. In closing, I consider three questions. How can we generally explain the presence of this distinctive strand of thinking and practice? Why did it drift into subterranean obscurity? Why should it matter to us? I communicate my sense that the work of these people was premised on a fruitful but never fully realised relationship between ‘sociology’ and ‘social work’. Conjunctions between the largely forgotten heritage of Chicago social work and sociology would allow a less ‘pre-tuned’ discussion of how the respective fields are constituted, and how practitioners of either might pursue their profession.

One-eyed mules and social work: An essay on serendipity

I once read a silly fairy-tale, called the Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule, blind of the right eye, had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right – now do you understand Serendipity? Horace Walpole, January 28, 1754