Research Methods for Social Workers

Linda Bell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350313323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This handy book is a one-stop introduction to research and evaluation for social workers. Including unique project examples, exercises, discussion points and extensive signposting to further reading, and drawing on the author's many years of teaching experience, it is essential reading for students who may be unfamiliar with research methods.

1

FROM SOCIAL WORK SKILLS TO RESEARCH SKILLS: WHAT IS ‘BEING RESEARCH MINDED’?

Introduction

Are you a social worker? Are you ‘research minded’? What exactly do we mean by ‘research minded’?

Research always starts with questions (or so we are told). If you want to explore a topic you are interested in, you will perhaps ask yourself first what has already been written about the topic? Why, when, or where has something, or may something, happen/have happened? And how is this topic relevant to me? Equally important, however, is how am I going to investigate my chosen topic? This process of thinking will lead you to consider more broadly the concepts of knowledge, information and evidence. To quote the eighteenth-century author Samuel Johnson:

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. (my italics)

Johnson, as a learned man, realised that no one could know absolutely everything; even if you think you are an expert in one topic, there will be many others that are partly or perhaps completely outside of your experience and you will have to seek information about them. So knowing where (and how) to look for all that information is just as important as what you (think) you already know. And besides, how exactly did you come to know something in the first place? For social workers, finding and using information is one of the very first, basic skills you will need in your work.

When I have asked social workers or social work students what are some other job skills they think they need, communication skills always come very high on the list. But if we are taking a questioning approach, once again, we ought to ask, what exactly do we mean by communication?

There are many different media involved in communication (e.g. spoken/verbal, aural, written, visual) as well as different ways of doing the communicating: face-to-face, by telephone, using e-mail or various kinds of social media (Facebook, Twitter), written down (e.g. in a letter), or perhaps communication of ideas via literature or art works or photographs. We will address this issue of different media in more detail later in this chapter. At the time of writing this book, most people will be communicating face-to-face with individuals or groups, but sometimes we may find ourselves communicating with machines, with the intention of communicating with an individual person or group ‘somewhere’ (the age of robotics being not yet fully upon us).

For social workers, do you think the most important people to communicate with are users of social work services? You may answer yes, but think of all the other individuals and groups social workers need to communicate with effectively on a day-to-day basis – other professionals (including other social workers) both within your own workplace and elsewhere, members of third sector/voluntary groups, staff in various agencies (from housing to education to police or prison services). All of these people, including the users of services, are important to you as a social worker, or social work student, and so, as we will see, they have important parts to play in social work research and enquiry.

Taking apart a term like ‘communication’ may seem a pointless exercise, but it allows us to test out for ourselves what taking a questioning approach means. Taking a questioning approach is the most fundamental building block in becoming ‘research minded’; in my view:

A research minded person does not simply ask ‘what information do I need’? Rather, s/he should ask first, why is this the information or perspective that I need to include in my enquiry?

Why should I ask these people rather than those people when seeking information or perspectives on something?

Have I covered everything I think I need, and can I justify having done so?

Asking these questions will help you to develop problem-solving skills, which are also essential in professional practice.

As well as aiming for this kind of approach to communication and information seeking, I should try to take up a questioning approach systematically (which we could summarise as ‘going from one logical point to another’), but I am only human, after all, and cannot necessarily expect to achieve total comprehensiveness! I need to justify that what I have decided is in some way logical and needs to be included.

Another important point to reflect on is, ‘why do I need to carry out my enquiry in the first place?’ We have been using the term ‘research’ to refer to what I am planning to do, but, in fact, ‘enquiry’ seen more broadly can take different forms. Later in this chapter we will consider some differences between what we are now calling ‘research’ (e.g. in relation to academic study or to student project work) and ‘evaluation’, which is another very commonly occurring form of enquiry often used by social workers and other professionals (see e.g. Cree, Jain and Hillen, 2016). Suffice it to say here that these forms of enquiry do overlap and that they use many of the same methods; it is mainly the purposes of each of these forms of enquiry that are different.

This way of thinking about definitions can result in some anomalies. I have sometimes been informed by ethics committees (usually from health settings) that what my master’s students are doing is not research, by which it is usually meant the student does not need to obtain formal ethics approval for her/his project. Very often these students will be carrying out some form of evaluative enquiry, perhaps in work settings, and whilst they may be relieved not to need formal ethics approval, I also feel somewhat cheated on their behalf that the committee does not seem to recognise all the very tangible research skills that these students are learning and displaying in order to achieve their master’s degree! Enquiry is enquiry, so perhaps this is a more useful concept to adopt?

Next we need to focus on what we are collecting or exploring. I have already said above that we need to examine why we think we need particular form(s) of information. Information is all around us every day, but a basic idea in research or enquiry is that we need to establish what we need in terms of it becoming our data. Data at its simplest is information that we have recorded for a particular purpose. It may simply be ‘lifted’ from an existing data source, e.g. National Statistics, an article from a journal, or a piece of information from the Internet. Or we may have constructed it ourselves, e.g. by carrying out a survey using an online questionnaire and recording the statistical data produced, by interviewing a sample of participants to produce a series of interview transcripts (accounts), or by taking a photograph or making a video. In every case, we need to be able to record our data in some way so that we can go back later and analyse it as part of our project. As we will see later, if, for example, we are carrying out observation as a method, we need to be able to record and verify what we have observed in order to turn our observations into data. It is not usually enough just to experience something; we need to either make notes about it, video it, take photographs or make audio recordings – this provides everyone with evidence that we did not simply make the whole thing up!

One big change that has come about in the past few years is that communication and sharing of information or data have become much more instantaneous, and larger and larger volumes of information are being shared globally, through social media in particular. This also suggests that we all need to develop good time-management skills, in order to cope with such demands (and this is surely an essential skill for social work or health practitioners in other contexts). Instantaneous communication may mean that whilst more and more people have a chance to express their opinions, a lot of miscommunication can also occur as people do not always have time to reflect on what is being shared. Communication in these circumstances becomes much more about instant response, often through short, decontextualised comments. Think tanks such as DEMOS have already conducted research into the use of Twitter and have monitored real-time responses to events such as TV programmes. This work suggests that whilst it is possible to monitor large-scale trends in people’s behaviour, and various new methodologies are being established to do this, these approaches to enquiry often depend for ethical reasons upon anonymity of participants. Such approaches are also more about observation of what is actually happening between people who are already communicating, rather than about asking people to participate in more conventional research approaches such as surveys. This has many implications both for research methods and also for ethical aspects of research.

What I have been trying to do in the introductory section of this chapter is encourage you to think critically about ways in which we address concepts of information and communication. Developing problem-solving, time-management as well as critical-thinking skills is therefore vital, as in professional practice, and becoming involved in research or any form of enquiry will certainly help you to develop all those skills.

I have also tried to briefly introduce some other concepts that are essential for developing our understanding of these basic ideas underlying research. These include issues of subjectivity, being systematic and considering the importance of context. I think it is also important to make a basic distinction between the design of a research project (what I would term its ‘methodology’) and the actual techniques or methods used within that design, as we will see later.

Finally, I have tried to suggest how we need to take account of the social and technological contexts of research and enquiry, which are changing and evolving more and more rapidly. All of these considerations, I would argue, will help you to start developing your own approach to becoming and being research minded.

Working towards research mindedness

Identifying researchable problems and developing research questions

At the beginning of this chapter I stated that ‘research always starts with questions’, and so following this idea through we ought to now start thinking about how to develop questions that could form the basis of research or some other kind of enquiry (such as evaluation or auditing). Bearing in mind our earlier discussion of information and communication, a key issue here is how, if you are a social worker or a student, you can be encouraged to identify researchable problems derived from social work practice. How do you know whether something could be focused on in such a way as to make an appropriate research topic?

This process is not easy for most soci...