Abstract
Rather than the scientific practice of philanthropy, charity or caring, social work has institutionalized an obedience to policy minimalism by the choice of talk therapy of one sort or another as its base of practice knowledge. The very strongest evaluations of clinical social work published during the past twenty years in the most highly regarded research journals within social work are trivial both as practice and as theory. They are deficient as science. Despite a near-constant claim to credible knowledge, social work has never done so.
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Notes
- 1.
The review articles and the primary research in this section were located by searching two prominent journals that cover clinical social work: the Clinical Social Work Journal and Research on Social Work Practice. The former is dedicated to Clinical Social Work and the latter has the highest impact score among research journals listed in the Web of Science’s social work category that is edited under social work auspices. Undoubtedly, there is superior outcome research concerning the social clinic that is authored by social workers but published in psychology journals and others. However, Thyer’s (2015) bibliography does not distinguish between authorship and provision nor does it identify the social worker’s position among the authors (i.e., primary author, secondary author, or simply one of many). Thus, the field produced only about twelve studies per year that incorporated an experimental design; many of these were inadequate as Thyer acknowledges while the importance of the social worker in conducting the research (their position among the authors), if in fact they were authors, is not clear. As discussed in earlier chapters, the clinical research that this body of work represents is poor and fails to sustain the value of the social clinic. The current work in this chapter probably represents the best of social work’s research that is published within the field itself and often by social workers.
- 2.
Only six randomized evaluations of social work interventions emerged from a twenty-year search of Research on Social Work Practice. All six dealt with clinical interventions. One was authored and situated in Hong Kong (Lo et al. 2015). One did not incorporate a nontreatment control (Meezan and O’Keefe 1998). Another seemed trivial (Gellis et al. 2008). A fourth, Wolf and Abell (2003), was the only randomized study identified in this chapter that employed a placebo control ; it will be addressed in Chapter 8 along with other research that evaluates mindfulness as a clinical technique.
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Epstein, W.M. (2019). Contemporary Social Work and the Social Clinic. In: Psychotherapy and the Social Clinic in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32750-7_7
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