Stephen A. Webb

Implementing Evidence-Based Practice A Review of the Empirical Research Literature

The article reports on the findings of a review of empirical studies examining the implementation of evidence-based practice (EBP) in the human services. Eleven studies were located that defined EBP as a research-informed, clinical decision-making process and identified barriers and facilitators to EBP implementation. A thematic analysis of the findings of the 11 studies produced a list of barriers to EBP implementation grouped in terms of inadequate agency resources dedicated to EBP; skills and knowledge of practitioners; organizational culture; the research environment; practitioner attitudes; and inadequate supervision. Given the limited and exploratory nature of available research on EBP implementation, tentative findings suggest that to facilitate the uptake of EBP in social work and human services practice, strategically driven, adequately resourced, multifaceted approaches to EBP capacity building in organizations are needed.

Evidence-based Practice and Decision Analysis in Social Work: An Implementation Model

• Summary: This article on evidence-based practice and decision analysis develops an implementation model for social work. Thus far no detailed attempt has been made to formulate a systematic implementation framework for evidence-based practice in social work. • Findings: The social and cultural, the professional and practice-based, and the educational and training contexts are highlighted. The emergence of evidence-based practice is placed within the context of risk society and the development of new expert systems that contribute to a radical re-shaping of social work practice. In the inevitable shift towards an actuarial practice, direct and therapeutic involvement with service users becomes less significant for social work. Following the work of Trinder (2000) two key approaches to evidence-based practice are discussed: the experimental and pragmatic perspectives. • Application: By drawing on the latter, a systems approach is developed via nine key related structures which constitute an implementation framework for evidence-based practice.

Local Orders and Global Chaos in Social Work

We live, supposedly, in a run away global world that is permeated with risk, disaster and uncertainty. Social work, at least at the level of policy and research, has been seen to be responding to the globalization discourse. Its tendency is to try and deepen its own institutional reflexivity with a growing awareness of its own place within the new information age and neo-liberal moral order. In this paper it is suggested that social work has at best a minimal role to play with any new global order, should such an order exist. There are developments within social work that could have global significance, for instance, the spread of actuarial technologies and risk management. However, information networks and the universalization of expert systems hardly support claims for a ‘global social work’.  This paper attempts to clear the logjam of the increasingly unproductive debates about globalization and social work. These debates both set an allegedly beneficial ethical welfarism against the impersonal forces of globalization and thereby wish to enlarge the ethical purchase of social work; or present globalization as an inevitable phenomenon that has deleterious effects on social work and therefore ought to be resisted. Social work is thereby reformulated and extended as a potential solution to some of the ills of an alienating and immoral global force. Against a prospect of social work movements being individually and structurally transformative on a global level, it is argued that local cultural orders of reflexivity are the ground from which to properly understand the purpose and remit of its practices. It is claimed that any notion of a global or transnational social work is little more than a vanity. Local culture orders of reflexivity—concentrating as they do on the raw stuff of interactions, plans, interventions and ethics—recognize the need for a shared culture of depth understanding that comes with being native to that culture as a language user and agent of the kinesics and proxemics of ‘being-here’. Neither the nation-state nor irredentism provide a basis for a perfect match between culture and successful practice, but without either of these within whose borders each of us lives, the idea of social work as culturally sensitive to the lives of others with whom we are working becomes increasingly distant and difficult. This position relies on a strong conception of the ‘encumbered self’ used in communitarian political theory. This paper argues that by ignoring the communitarian encumbered self the literature on globalization and social work is insufficiently sensitive to the importance of language and culture and ignores the role social work plays in maintaining local cultural diversity.  Some kinds of social or political practice do not need a high degree of cultural literacy as does social work and therefore can engage in promoting a neo-liberal fantasy of a ‘global this or that’. The realities of front-line practice let alone the actual economic constraints on social welfare spending rather insist that we set our sights at the level of the nation-state as the basic unit of administrative responsibility for social care. It also insists that the thick stuff of social interactions is only understandable in terms of a situated self. This paper is thus an argument for the situated and embodied knowledge of social work and against various forms of unlocatable global knowledge claims. Within certain literature on globalization and social work there is a premium on establishing the capacity to see the wider picture from the peripheries and the depths, with the occidental social worker looking in from the outside. But here lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of say the less powerful while claiming to see things from their position.

Avatarculture: Narrative, power and identity in virtual world environments

Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, this paper examines avatar culture through the interplay of emergent and residual forces. A dual process is at work in the formation of cultural identities in which the enabling conditions of virtual worlds are understood alongside and in relation to pre-existing off-line phenomenon. Avatar culture confirms structure for participants, especially in relation to gender and sexuality, whilst at the same time providing a reflexive space to break with pre-existing features of social identity. Virtual environments are thus microcosms of a grounded cultural materiality that is simultaneously improvised on and transformed. With regard to the distinctive aspects of avatar culture the paper focuses on issues of narrative, representation, censorship and power relations and their formation within virtual worlds. It discusses how virtual worlds incrementally acquire a peculiar power and meaning in the lives of participants. The paper discusses the flows of social interaction in virtual environments and how intermittence best describes how users participate and withdraw from different encounters. Avatar culture binds people together temporarily and loosely and then frees them up to relocate themselves elsewhere. In this context, virtual environments might be regarded as putting structure and power into movement. The ethnographic approach adopted helps peel back the residue of social structure to reveal a virtual agency with its emerging shells of avatar-derived affiliations, tensions and conflicts.

Opinions about evidence: A study of social workers’ attitudes towards evidence-based practice

Summary This article reports on a large survey of Australian social workers regarding their attitudes to evidence-based practice and thoughts on the factors affecting its implementation in human service organisations. Findings Findings from a national survey of Australian social workers found a degree of support for evidence-based practice with the majority of respondents reporting changes in practice due to the influence of research. A sample size of 364 social workers formed the basis of the final analysis. Both the support for evidence-based practice and the reported changes in practice due to new evidence was highest among social workers in management positions and those with between 10 and 30 years is needed post-qualifying practice experience. The survey also found, however, an unsophisticated understanding of evidence and evidence-based practice and ‘inadequate’ skills in the critical appraisal of research. Applications Despite the level of support for evidence-based practice, responses to open-ended questions reflected reservations about the formalisation, relevance, useability, and applicability of the EBP agenda among social workers. Given that the issues relating to the transfer of research to practice appear far more complex than EBP suggests, this study sought to understand the complex dynamics of the research transfer process in social work and the human services.

The comfort of strangers: social work, modernity and late Victorian England—Part II

In these two related articles the history of social work in late Victorian England is understood by aligning it not with self-consciously held ideologies of, say, bourgeois capitalism, patriarchy, evangelical Protestantism, or liberal humanism, but with the complex cultural system of modernity. It is hoped to problematize both the genealogy and the substance of early social work that now so decisively shapes our interpretations of the influences of late Victorian philanthropy. The history of social work has to be treated seriously if we are to properly understand the present day situation in terms of modernity and investigate its orientation more thoroughly. This first paper offers a history of social work which draws attention to the imbrications of a secular modernity and how its governing ideas, texts and discourses of the time influence philanthropy. It examines dominant modernist themes that had a significant impact on the emergence of social work and the important role of the Charity Organization Society. It is suggested that these themes form part of a shared European heritage. Whilst the influences of modernity on social work are likely to have been uneven, there were common conditions faced by people in Europe and shared developments that gave way to the rise of social work in the nineteenth century.

The Myth of Global Social Work: Double Standards and the Local-Global Divide

ABSTRACT The push towards “global standards” in social work is part of a movement to generate uniformity, quality control, and benchmarking for professional education programs. It acts as a powerful vestige of modern institutions and professional associations to prescribe through processes of standardization, formalization, and technical specificity. In social work “global standards” attempt to create a fixed set of minimal requirements to which all professional programs should adhere. Standards are viewed along two dimensions: (i) as a necessity due to the changes and scale of complexity in social work; and (ii) as a vehicle for importing dominant forms of knowledge, values, and skills. Those parties who enthusiastically underwrite attempts to construct “global standards” in fact create a powerful network of allies that undermine local or cultural differences and fail to reconcile them. Global standards in social work undercut indigenous skills and values and negate the expertise of professional judgement. They constitute an unnecessary and politically motivated intrusion in the world of social workers. Ultimately, standards such as these are an illegitimate, impersonal, and voluntary means of regulation. As such, global standards are inherently political because their construction and application formally regulates the local practices in which they become embedded. Over time, they modify the position of social work practitioners and alter relations of accountability to the standards themselves.

ON THE NATURE OF FUTURE WORLDS? - CONSIDERATIONS OF VIRTUALITY AND UTOPIAS

It has been a widespread belief that computers can create viable utopias, design the future and plan and co-ordinate things such that the world can be born anew. The exponential increase in computing power has allowed for interaction in imaginary places – utopian spaces – and the endless re-configuration of those places. There are then good reasons to make links between the realm of the virtual and the creation of utopian and future worlds. We explore some of these links in this article. Having offered a preliminary discussion of the nature of traditional utopian and future world thinking, we then draw a distinction between stable state and flexible utopias, the former characterized by structurally fixed blueprints, the latter by the possibilities of virtual technologies which allow us endlessly to re-configure virtual spaces. This distinction leads us on to a debate that is implicit in the writings of Sherry Turkle and Richard Coyne, namely the analysis of the virtual from a Husserlian, as opposed to the dominant Heideggerian view. We defend a Husserlian analysis which, it is shown, better satisfies the concept of ‘flexible utopias’. The totalizing existential experience by a Heideggerian analysis corresponds well to ‘immersion’ technologies e.g. games and VR, utopias as ready-mades but, a Husserlian approach allows us to account for the creative process of making utopian or future worlds using software such as interior design when one changes items ad infinitum as part of the normal practices of being a designer. In the conclusion we will pull together the strands of the article and, end by noting how the contemporary theorist, Robert Nozick complements our arguments when he offers a version of utopia as a meta-utopia of flexible utopias or future worlds!

The making of a civil society politics in social work: Myth and misrepresentation with the Global Agenda

This article addresses ‘the making’ of the Global Agenda in social work by situating the process of agenda-setting itself as an object of critical reflection. It discusses the way in which the agenda positions social work as part of a global civil society network somewhat removed from grassroots social work and raises concerns about its failure to address the causes of or possible solutions to social and economic inequality. The authors deploy recent empirical research relating to object-oriented politics, particularly the ‘no issue, no public’ debate on political mobilization as a more viable alternative in contributing to structural change.

Theorizing Social Wellbeing: Subjective Mental States, Preference Satisfaction or Mitsein?

This chapter addresses three interrelated elements in theorizing wellbeing. The first element is diagnostic, namely, how far have different formulations of wellbeing take us in providing an adequate theorization that is supported by reliable methods and empirical data. In developing this position, it is argued that the two central perspectives that attempt to explain subjective wellbeing as either (i) a construct of mental states or (ii) a case of preference satisfaction are one-sided and should be treated with caution. Against both the psychometric approach of social indicator research and the measurement-theoretic of economic science, a more grounded sociological approach is advanced that draws on phenomenology. It is for this reason that wellbeing is prefaced with the adjective “social” in the title of this chapter. The second element is analytical, namely, what does the cultural turn in wellbeing research and policy tell us about the changing nature of social values in advanced modern societies? In sketching out this analytical terrain, two very different variants of postmodernism are set against each other; these are those of Ronald Inglehart and Jean Baudrillard. If we take the significance of the cultural dimension as a given for such societies, this permits the juxtaposition of two potentially tense perspectives of wellbeing, namely, the postmaterialist cultural values of Inglehart against the postmodern cultural semiotic approach of Baudrillard. In setting up this tension, important insights can be gleaned about mutually reinforcing elements of academic research and popular culture. The third and final element is reconstructive; that is, in identifying theoretic and methodological weakness, especially those associated with the subjective wellbeing paradigm, an alternative mode of thinking is offered. This reconstructive exercise produces the argument for a “social turn” in wellbeing studies against the prevailing cultural preoccupations. Concomitant to this is a principled foregrounding of “we-relationships”, or Mitsein, for any adequate articulation of social wellbeing. From this vantage point, it is claimed that ontologically, social wellbeing is simultaneously both singular and plural. The chapter serves as a strong conceptual conclusion to the last section of this Handbook.