Research on Social Work Practice Does not Benefit from Blurry Theory

Social Work Education and Clinical Learning: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

“…Some have extolled the influence of the values of the research university on social work education (Cowger, 2003). There are those who argue that all practice teaching should be grounded in empiricism rather than theory or that an evidence-based practice model should be used in place of more usual ways of teaching practice (Gambrill, 2003;Thyer, 2001). This emphasis tends to favor the use of cognitive-behavioral techniques, which have been studied more extensively than psychodynamic approaches, for example.…”

A qualitative examination of attachment-based concepts in probation supervision

“…Robinson et al, 2014). The claim has also been levelled at social work (Thyer, 2001;Munro, 2002), and the riposte is usually that it is present, but is not explicitly labelled with text-book terminologyin much the same way that Curnock and Hardicker (1979) wrote about 'practice wisdom'. This research chose as its starting point the assumption that theory does find its way into practice -after all, the participants volunteered to give up considerable amounts of their time to discuss exactly that.…”