Overrating or Dismissing the Value of Evidence-Based Practice: Consequences for Clinical Practice

Current implementation of the evidence based practice (EBP) model in social work has focused on empirical evidence from efficacy studies, with far less attention to practitioner judgment and client values. Among many clinical social workers the opposite is often true: clinical judgment supersedes the use of scientifically tested techniques. Clinicians may reject EBP as coming out of narrowly focused, possibly irrelevant research, and adherents of EBP run the risk of discounting psychotherapy techniques derived from practice experience or the vast diversity of client situations—both positions threaten our effectiveness. Reasserting clinical judgment and the centrality of clients’ experience into EBP, while enhancing traditional psychotherapy with strong treatment-effectiveness evidence, will improve clinical social work practice, especially in addressing the wide array of human problems and suffering that clients present, especially in the context of globalization and cultural diversity.     

A Practitioner’s Guide to Sampling in the Age of Evidence-Based Practice: Translation of Research into Practice

Evidence-based practice must include the translation of research into practice, and the social work practitioner is the essential link in that translation. As part of the EBP process, researchers must present findings in a way that is accessible to practitioners and practitioners must view the study as relevant and representative of their clients’ needs. This article provides practitioners with tools to interpret research, specifically the sampling process. Our goal is to support practitioners in bridging the gap between research and practice. We discuss how sampling fits with the translation of research and describe sampling procedures. We conclude with a unique three-step approach for reviewing research that is designed to assist practitioners to translate research into practice.     

Child abuse, early maladaptive schemas, and risky sexual behavior in college women

Previous research suggests that individuals abused as children are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior during adulthood. The present study examined early maladaptive schemas as mediators of the child abuse-risky sexual behavior relationship among 653 college women. Self-report surveys assessed three forms of child abuse: Sexual, physical, and emotional, and assessed early maladaptive schemas within two domains: Disconnection/rejection and Other-Directedness. Disconnection/rejection schemas fully mediated the relation between child emotional abuse and number of sexual partners and partially mediated the relationship for sexual and physical abuse. However, when frequency of specific risky sexual acts (e.g., sex without contraception) was examined in the previous six months, only abandonment was a partial mediator. Implications for intervention and future research are discussed.     

Advance Care Planning by Unmarried Women of Different Sexual Orientations: The Importance of Social Support

We examined social support as a facilitator of advance care planning in unmarried women of different sexual orientations. Survey participants consisted of 215 women, 90 who reported a preference for partnering with women (WPW) and 125 for partnering with men (WPM). Our findings indicate that the association between social support and advance care planning was mixed. Specifically, social support had no significant impact on executing a will for either WPW or WPM. Among WPW, naming a health-care proxy was associated with reporting a partner who provided social support. For WPM, having a partner for social support was not associated with naming a health-care proxy. These insights help in the understanding of women's advance care planning.     

A framework of operating models for interdisciplinary research programs in clinical service organizations

A framework of operating models for interdisciplinary research programs in clinical service organizations is presented, consisting of a "clinician-researcher" skill development model, a program evaluation model, a researcher-led knowledge generation model, and a knowledge conduit model. Together, these models comprise a tailored, collaborative approach to enhancing research-informed practice in community-based clinical service organizations. The models place different degrees of emphasis on the development of research-related skills in practitioners, the generation of knowledge tailored to clinical practice, and knowledge sharing. The nature, philosophical basis, roles of research staff members, outputs and impacts, and strengths and limitations of each model are described, in the context of a long-standing, interdisciplinary research program in a children's rehabilitation service organization. The use of the model framework as a tool for the design of interdisciplinary, community-based research programs is discussed.     

The Meaning and Measurement of Productive Engagement in Later Life

This study draws from the work engagement literature to define engagement as an indicator of role quality and to develop a measure—The Productive Engagement Portfolio (PEP)—that can be used to assess engagement in work, volunteering, caregiving, and informal helping among older adults. A Rasch measurement approach was used to develop both Likert-based and semantic-differential-based measures of engagement across 4 roles. Items for both scales were developed through an iterative process that included focus groups, 4 pilot tests, and one full-scale administration. Results suggest that the psychological state of engagement can be conceptualized and measured on a meaningful continuum defining a unidimensional and hierarchical construct ranging from lower to higher levels of engagement. The technical characteristics of the items were found to be invariant across each productive role type for both measurement approaches and the meaning of person scores within a role were found to be independent of the response format for both approaches. Using score conversion charts designed to translate the scale scores into a form that is readily transparent and usable for practitioners, our scales can easily and meaningfully chart a person’s level of engagement pre- and post-intervention. The PEP instrument can also be used in survey research or by practitioners in community or medical settings to assess the extent to which older adults are involved in roles that enhance their overall quality of life.     

POWER AND ADDICTION: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN ADDICT

This article provides a genealogical analysis of the ‘discovery’ of the modern phenomenon of addiction. It considers how the emergence of a bio-politics of the population in the industrialising West facilitated the invention of addiction and supported an argument for the regulation of opiate use. As a result of regulation, particular patterns of opiate use became increasingly visible. In response the medical profession, in the late nineteenth century, through the use of power-knowledge strategies transformed opiate use from a diverse set of social valuations to a unified pathology associated with madness, or unreason. This constitution of addiction as a negative category has been developed and appropriated by other discourses to provide the foundation for disciplinary interventions directed towards the regulation of undesirable patterns of consumption.