KEY QUESTIONS REGARDING knowledge and practice include the following: What values, knowledge, and skills increase the likelihood of attaining outcomes valued by clients? Do social workers have this? Do social workers have specialized knowledge that makes them more effective than empathic nonprofessionals? Do they draw on knowledge that maximizes the likelihood of helping clients attain outcomes they value? Is there any evidence that special training, credentials, or experience contributes to doing more good than harm? And in relation to all these questions, how do we know? Unlike the humanities, we have clients with real-life problems; we can look and see whether problems have decreased, increased, or have not changed and explore helper characteristics related to different outcomes. Social work claims to be a profession that provides special expertise to address certain kinds of problems. Schools of social work purport to provide this specialized knowledge to students. Consider the claims made in the "policies" approved by the NASW Board of Directors in January 1999 for inclusion on the assembly's final agenda.Professional social workers possess the specialized knowledge necessary for an effective social services delivery system. Social work education provides a unique combination of knowledge, values, skills, and professional ethics which cannot be obtained through other degree programs or by on-the-job training. Further, social work education adequately equips its individuals with skills to help clients solve problems that bring them to social services departments and human services agencies. (NASW News, p. 14) These claims all relate to knowledge. To my knowledge, there is no evidence for any of these claims. In fact, there is counterevidence. In Dawes' (1994) review of hundreds of studies, he concluded that there is no evidence that licenses, experience, and training are related to helping clients. If this applies to social work and, given the overlap in helping efforts among social workers, counselors, and psychologists, it is likely that it does, what are the implications? If social work is a profession based on claimed rather than demonstrated effectiveness in helping clients attain hoped-for outcomes, how is this embarrassing situation handled? One strategy has been to ignore the contradiction between claims and reality and to censor related data by not sharing this with students. This strategy is to simply pronounce what is and what is not even though there is no evidence for claims as seen in the proposals in the NASW News (March 1999) described earlier (i.e., to rely on authority) (Gambrill, in press). A second strategy is to investigate what values, skills, and knowledge are needed to achieve certain outcomes and then to determine who has them and the role of education or experience in providing them. These strategies reflect two different approaches to the relationship between practice and knowledge: evidencebased (the second) and authority-based (the first). The consequences of these different ap...

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of clients. The authors describe and offer counterarguments to objections to EBP. These objections could result in premature dismissal of this new form of practice and education that offers potential benefits to social work and its clients. Objections to EBP fall into six categories: (a) arguments from ignorance about the nature of EBP, (b) misinterpreted professional standards, (c) arguments appealing to tradition, (d) ad hominem arguments, (e) arguments on ethical grounds, and (f) philosophical arguments.Reviewing objections to EBP may help us to increase our understanding of barriers to use of practicerelated research findings in the helping professions and honoring related requirements described in our code of ethics.

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Choices about how to view evidence-based practice (EBP) are being made by educators, practitioners, agency administrators, and staff in a variety of organizations designed to promote integration of research and practice such as clearinghouses on EBP. Choices range from narrow views of EBP such as use of empirically based guidelines and treatment manuals to the broad philosophy and evolving process of EBP, envisioned by its originators, that addresses evidentiary, ethical, and application issues in a transparent context. Current views of EBP and policy are reviewed, and choices that reflect the adopted vision and related indicators are described. Examples include who will select the questions on which research efforts are focused, what outcomes will be focused on, who will select them and on what basis, how transparent to be regarding the evidentiary status of services, how clients will be involved, and whether to implement needed organizational changes. A key choice is whether to place ethical issues front and center.

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