Jude Irwin

Social Work Supervision An Exploration of the Current Challenges in a Rapidly Changing Social, Economic and Political Environment

• Summary: This article identifies important challenges facing social work supervision as a result of the social, political and economic changes that have characterized the last two decades in most Western countries. In response a re-positioning of the critical tradition in the scholarship and practice of social work has been proffered by several authors (for example, Allan et al., 2003; Dominelli, 2002) as a means of addressing and counteracting the more negative challenges facing social work emanating from these changes. We argue that this critical re-positioning can also be applied to similar challenges facing practice supervision. • Findings: As the social work landscape has to contend with a more conservative and fiscally restrictive environment, so too has practice supervision become more focused on efficiency, accountability and worker performance often at the expense of professional and practice development. In addition, current research has identified a crisis in the probity of practice supervision where many practitioners cite disillusionment and despair, as well as lack of opportunity to stop and critically reflect on practice situations as another challenge in this changed climate. • Application: As a significant site of practice, a critically informed supervision praxis has the potential to emerge as a site for modelling social change strategies associated with the critical social work tradition.

Across the Divide: Using Research to Enhance Collaboration Between Mental Health and Domestic Violence Services

Abstract Recognition of the deleterious effects of domestic violence on womens mental health has highlighted the potential benefits for women of collaboration between mental health and domestic violence services. Yet the different histories, knowledge bases, and organisational cultures of the mental health and domestic violence sectors present formidable challenges to the development of effective collaborative work. This article draws on a large research enquiry, involving four separate but related studies, which explored aspects of collaboration between these two service sectors. It focuses particularly on data collected in interviews with practitioners from mental health and domestic violence services who were participants in an action research study (one of the four studies), which was aimed at discovering the factors that contributed to enhanced collaboration and the benefits of this for women who experience both domestic violence and mental health issues.

Action Research in Education and Social Work

This chapter discusses action research as it is practised and understood in education and social work. It argues that the major purpose of action research is practical, leading to the development and improvement of practice. It is participative and inclusive of practitioners and consequential stakeholders. The authors address the use of evidence forensically, that is that it informs the understanding of particular phenomena, rather than adversarially, where the pressure is to prove one treatment may be better than another. The authors argue that action research can make a powerful contribution to professional knowledge building. They claim that, while formal knowledge may be seen at one end of the continuum, action research is concerned with practical knowledge underwriting the moral disposition to act wisely, truly and justly at the other. A task for the academy is to assist in the building and understanding of that continuum.

Grappling with Realities: Policy and Practice in HIV Social Work

ABSTRACT In 2012 the NSW HIV Strategy 2012–2015: A New Era was released, with a goal of eradicating Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) by 2020. This new policy, prioritising biomedical treatment, has raised challenges for social work practitioners working in the HIV field. We undertook a research project exploring the implications of the Strategy on social work clients and practice. A questionnaire was sent to 57 HIV social workers and 32 (56.1%) responses were received. Thematic analysis identified five main themes affecting social workers and their clients. These were a new stigma, treatment benefits, the complexity of peoples lives, the psychosocial voice, and ethical and professional tensions. We propose that a more holistic HIV strategy including the psychosocial realities that inform HIV transmission, testing and treatment options, and adherence be adopted.

Bridging and Blending Disciplines of Inquiry: Doing Science and Changing Practice and Policy

Beginning and well-seasoned researchers alike face significant challenges in understanding the complexities of research designs arising from both within and across methodological paradigms, and in applying them in ways that maximise impact on knowledge, practice, and policy. This volume aims to contribute to scholarship, policy and practice, by engaging readers in scholarly debate on re-interpretations of established research methodologies in light of contemporary conditions, and by examining some research approaches yet to gain general recognition. This chapter outlines some key challenges for contemporary research and provides an overview of the contributions in this volume that chart and analyse the conceptual and practical complexities of a variety of research designs for social and educational change. This collection, taken overall, aims to provide readers with the knowledge and understanding needed not only to design technically sound and coherent research studies, but also to develop methodologically innovative research projects that cross the boundaries between different methodological traditions to the benefit of scholarship, policy, and practice.

Knowledge and Epistemology in Scholarship, Practice and Policy: Research-as-Science and Research-as-Project

This chapter continues to set the scene for this volume by returning to the fundamental question of epistemology. How can we informatively categorise the forms of research that currently seek to build knowledge and inform education and social work ? What vocabulary do we have that enables us to describe the different kinds of knowledge built and made available by different kinds of research ? Drawing on Heap’s (1992, Multidisciplinary perspectives on literacy research) distinction between ‘research-as-science’ and ‘research-as-project’ it discusses some fundamental features of different configurations of the ‘epistemology of science in practice’. The core argument put forward is that choices of research methodology and design both reflect and reinforce anew scientific and project choices. The chapter concludes by showing that choices of methodology and design shape the emerging knowledge, shape the relationships between the researchers, the participants, the knowledge and the users of that knowledge.