Evidence,Expertise,and Ethics

Influentials: What Are We?

In the early 2000s, Gladwell (2000) and Keller and Berry (2003) posited and popularized the “influential hypothesis.” The central idea is that opinions, insights, and support of a minority of people drive public opinion by influencing large numbers of their peers. Others, principally Duncan Watts and colleagues (Watts & Dodds, 2007), have since used complex social network analysis to show that influence is actually more bidirectional, distributed, and stepwise than had been imagined. In other words, they argue, network thinking replaces instinct.

Acting solitarily and in networks, academic influentials are those individuals, institutions, and ideas that shape the development and application of knowledge, primarily through traditional channels of research, teaching, and service. Influence is easier to define than to measure. Citation metrics are now in vogue as indicators of scholarly productivity and impact, although not overall influence. Meho and Yang (2007) conclude from a comparison of Thomson–Reuters Web of Science, Scopus (limited to 1995 onward), and Google Scholar that the latter database best captures broad impact.

A look at Eileen’s work in Harzing’s Publish or Perish database (Harzing, 2010) shows 5,592 citations to 214 publications and an h-index of 31 and Google Scholar ih-index of 73. This report certainly confirms strong influence; but other features of her body of work reveal much more about her qualities as scholar, colleague, and mentor—visionary and pragmatic; autonomous and inclusive; leader and participant. She spearheaded the two core academic domains of the profession as editor in chief of Social Work Research and Abstracts and the Journal of Social Work Education. She also served terms as editor of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy Newsletter (1974–1977), as elected representative at large to the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (1979–1981), as elected member by Division 25 of the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (2003–2005), and as elected member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Social Work Education (2000–2002). Through this array of venues, she engaged a remarkably wide and diverse group of stakeholders in scholarly and professional dialogue.

Patterns of authorship are also instructive. Nearly 60% of Eileen’s publications are sole authored. Excepting the humanities, this diminishing model of publication has given way to “fractional authorship,” which can easily obscure a scholar’s actual contributions (Plume & van Weijen, 2014). In an analysis of the 100 most-cited articles in disciplinary journals from 2000 to 2009, Eileen was sole (Gambrill, 2006) or coauthor (Gibbs & Gambrill, 2002) of two of the top three articles and sole author of a third (Gambrill, 2001; Hodge, Lacasse, & Benson, 2011). Another review lists her among the 25 “most-cited female faculty” in 25 top-rated schools of social work between 2004 and 2014 (Holosko, Barner, & Allen, 2015). Of the 14 articles listed in the h-index for that period, Eileen is sole author of 12 and one of two authors on the others. It is also worth noting that her coauthors include mentors, students, and colleagues, and both her productivity and impact have only increased over time.

Finally, it is useful to consider content. Professional school faculties are obliged to orient their work toward building knowledge, developing skills and attitudes, and inculcating values to guide professional practice. Eileen’s scholarship is singularly marked by its consistent, coherent bearing on these intersecting aims. With clarity of thought and purpose and a willingness and ability to take up controversy, she has long led the vanguard of imperatives for social workers to make informed, judicious use of evidence in practice, to develop the requisite expertise to apply such evidence, and to identify and address critical, often thorny ethical issues in doing so.

The aforementioned life-course scholar Glen Elder, in reflecting on his own life, observed that the research questions and insights of social and behavioral scientists typically evolve from personal experiences. Having established Eileen’s influence as a social work scholar, I turn next to the alchemy of person and environment that underpins and shapes the nature of one’s impact.

Influentials: Where Do We Come From?

William and Irene Gambrill were first- and second-generation immigrants, respectively, from the United Kingdom. He arrived from England at age 17 with an eighth-grade education. After a brief stint as a cowboy in California, he moved east to Philadelphia. He had wanted to develop his creative talents as a cartoonist; but, lacking funds to complete the art program, he became a self-employed awning painter. Here, he met Eileen’s mother, a high-school graduate who applied her talents in math as an accountant for a lumber firm—a position she reluctantly resigned when they married. Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1928. Seven years later, in the crucible of the Great Depression, they welcomed Eileen Duane. They chose her first name for its alliteration with her mother’s name; her father selected her middle name, a unisex moniker originating from a Gaelic surname, from a telephone directory for its pleasing sound with Eileen.

What truth there is to the Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” must also hold for females. Eileen was an easy-going, happy child with a “strong personality.” Her life course was seeded and nourished in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood of row houses, where she grew up amid other immigrant families from countries that included Germany, Norway, and Russia. On the subject of her upbringing, she avowed, “I certainly owe a great deal to my mother and father,” a debt she would come to appreciate more fully through her practice and research in child welfare. In the early 1930s, Viennese psychologists Alfred Adler, a student of Maria Montessori, and Rudolf Dreikurs introduced a model of “democratic parenting” in the United States. The Gambrills’ parenting style was decidedly in line with this model, which fostered independence, freedom within limits, discovery, and respect for a child’s natural development (Montessori, 2007).

Eileen enjoyed and excelled in public school, but her early “character education” took root and flourished at home. In the protective, instructive shadow of her father and his work, the nourishing warmth and intelligence of her mother and her love of books, music, and adventure, and the constant companionship of her best friend David, who shared her freewheeling life in the “driveway,” meaning the unoccupied alleys between row houses that allowed safe room for play. I asked whether she felt cherished as a child and she replied, “I wouldn’t particularly use those words. I felt safe, very safe. If you’re safe, you can play.” Play is, of course, a crucial source of creativity and an essential medium for healthy social, emotional, and cognitive development.

The Gambrills shielded their daughters from their precarious financial status. Her father occasionally supplemented his painting of awnings with painting houses, especially when canvas was frozen during World War II. The autonomy and reach of his work allowed her to join him in drives to the far-flung neighborhoods of Philadelphia, where, she recalls, “There was always this sense that something bigger was going on.” In this sprawling urban milieu, she absorbed the ethos and ethics of her father’s politics, his character, and his trade. Her mother’s values and politics were closely aligned and they modeled joint advocacy, lobbying successfully on one occasion to prevent the opening of a bar next door. Her parents read the newspapers daily and listened to the radio. There was always talk of politics at home, often centering on concerns for those who were less fortunate. Everyone was encouraged to have opinions in these discussions, and disagreements were not taken personally. An atheist and a socialist, her father took an avid interest in labor unions. “For him,” Eileen said, “The most important thing was fairness.”

On a more intimate level, Eileen would often sit on the steps to the basement where her father worked and talk with him while he lettered awnings. He arranged a space for her to work independently on her own projects. He taught his daughter the safe and proper use of tools and the virtue of attention to detail and quality, persistence, and learning from mistakes.

From him, I got the idea that you should enjoy work, but no one enjoys it all the time. There are times you don’t feel like working, but you do it anyway. That seems to be a big lesson in life. You learn to get over that hump.

The leeway to learn as a child also entails the freedom to discover and develop one sense of self. Eileen occupied herself with the people and activities she preferred; she was not lonely, but she had a sense of being “different.” An avowed tomboy, she construed the sex difference between her and her childhood friend, David, as “remarkably unimportant.” Nor did her father ever impose any “artificial gender limitations” on her. Yet, conformity is a defining feature of adolescence and it was a decisive social norm in mid-20th century. Her handling of a sense of being different is thus especially noteworthy:

I don’t know where I got it, but it was a great help in my entire life. If I felt something, no matter how poorly thought of by some people, I assumed, ‘If I feel this way, lots of other people do, too.’ So I never thought that I was weird. I think I perhaps had to be careful about discussing or showing what I felt. I remember the exact moment when I became, I would say, self-conscious; by that I mean, thinking someone might not like you. Two girls I didn’t know well were walking ahead of me and as I approached them it occurred to me, ‘what if they don’t like me?’ To get to tenth grade to have that was remarkable.

She was still close to both parents, but her immersion in the social and intellectual world at Penn would set her on paths that were increasingly unfamiliar to them. Among the many great scholars she encountered, one seemed especially memorable. “Imagine,” she said, “being a 17-year-old in a class of 15 students with Loren Eiseley.” Eiseley, an anthropologist, naturalist, and latter-day ecopoet, was exceptionally gifted at integrating science and humanism. It is easy to see the appeal of his incisive, capacious, and lyrical read on the world for a student like Eileen.

The promise of science for human betterment was also the Zeitgeist of psychology. With the return of World War II veterans and the Cold War on, the profession enjoyed new popularity. At Penn, the department stepped up requisites for the major to cull a swelling applicant pool. Eileen made the cut and she completed an honors thesis on reactive inhibition in Hullian learning theory in 1956. Her interest in the science of behavior persisted throughout her career. She truly valued her undergraduate education, especially the humanities. She was introduced to Emerson and Thoreau in Lewis Mumford’s course on American civilization and she enjoyed courses on the short story and romantic poetry. She lived on campus for 3 of her 4 years, forming close friendships with other students. She participated in varsity sports, including softball, volleyball, and bowling, and captained the latter two. These team sports served as another important model of cooperative competition, much like she had experienced in “the driveway” as a young child.

As with many bright young women of her generation, the postcollege transition proved challenging for Eileen. Her college network dispersed, and there were few engaging options and little direction. In 1950, only 34% of women were in the labor force (Toossi, 2002), and there was intense pressure to marry. Writing in the Barnard College 1951–1952 Blue Book of rules governing undergraduate women, Dean Millicent McIntosh opined, “Never has there been such urgent need for trained women college graduates—to serve our communities, to enter our professions, and to give wise direction and inspiration to home life” (Gross, 2015, para. 1). Eileen’s father wanted his daughters to have work they enjoyed and that they could fall back on if need be, and her sister pursued nursing. Their mother wanted them to find happiness and security in the traditional paths of marriage and family.

At 21, Eileen was sharing a “dingy” apartment in Center City Philadelphia and working in an unsatisfying job in advertising when a young medical student took notice of her on the street. Inside a year, they had married and moved to Charleston, SC. He had an internship with the navy and she took her first social work job at the state welfare department. She recalls being intrigued by her fiancé’s beautiful West Virginia accent and his strong will—she did not want “someone I could push around.” But with time, she became increasingly concerned about his controlling behavior. She asked to cancel the wedding, but her mother said everything was planned and she recalls thinking as she walked down the aisle, “Well, I’ll just get a divorce if it doesn’t work out.” The relationship turned abusive, and she left immediately, catching a train to Philadelphia while he was at work. She explains, “I got a divorce while he was in the navy because who knows how much trouble I would have had later. Back then it was more difficult to get a divorce. I wanted my name back and I wanted to be free.”

At age 22, back with her parents, Eileen landed a job in Philadelphia’s adoption division. Swimming in the familiar waters of neighborhoods she had traversed with her father during her childhood, she conducted interviews, performed background checks, and wrote reports on biological and adoptive parents. She enjoyed the work immensely, and it was a short distance from there to graduate school in social work. Case Western had an assessment task force that interested her, but she chose Bryn Mawr. She rented an apartment near Penn to be closer to Bryn Mawr and to a philosophy PhD student, the first woman with whom she would develop an intimate, long-term relationship. The liaison created great strife with Eileen’s mother, who gave her an ultimatum to choose between her partner and her family. Within an hour, she was out of the house. Her father, ever the Englishman who disdained meddling in private matters, deemed the whole matter “unnecessary.”

By the time she entered graduate school at 25, Eileen had laid the foundations for love and work in her life. She had experienced a happy childhood, a sense of being different, a rich college experience, a brief, abusive marriage, and estrangement from her mother. She was good natured and intelligent. Positive relationships and environments had supplied her with the resources and skills to thrive. Caring and support, a sense of adventure, opportunities for democratic participation and leadership, and high expectations had fostered a healthy sense of autonomy, belonging, and competence. She enjoyed a secure attachment with a significant partner and was poised for graduate school. Among the lessons she had learned along the way: experience nonconformity as liberating rather than stigmatizing; question rather than succumb blindly to social pressure; take risks and be responsible for and learn from mistakes; work hard at work worth doing; practice self-discipline; nurture and exploit natural curiosity; think and communicate clearly; appreciate the lessons of science, the humanities, and aesthetics; feel and share the boundless joy and awe of learning; and know firsthand the intrinsic and extrinsic value of love, kindness, fairness, and justice.

These lessons portend the theories and topics Eileen would take up as an academic and the manner in which she would do so. She would study and teach behavioral and social learning theories, which emphasize human malleability and use client strengths and research evidence to address difficulties and build capacity. She would take up topics of duty, dignity, and rights, for example, child welfare, assertiveness, social skills, competency, and decision-making. She would coedit a book series on controversial issues in social work practice and education. Her approach to this work would be shaped by her character and her experiences before and during graduate and postgraduate training. In Scholarship Assessed, a volume in the aforesaid Carnegie Higher Education series, Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997) suggest that in addition to the indispensable habits of “thinking like a scholar,” successful academics possess three basic characteristics:

We propose that three characteristics merit especial consideration: integrity, perseverance and courage.… The foundation of academic life is integrity.… Scholarship cannot thrive without an atmosphere of trust.… Institutions of higher education need scholars who persevere in their efforts.… Good scholars, like good workmen, seek to perfect their craft over a lengthy period.… As a third attribute, a scholar must have the courage to risk disapproval in the name of candor. A scholar must possess the will to take on difficult or unpopular work that others avoid, transcending ideas, rules and patterns, and imagining new questions and problems. (p. 65)

She was told that she would need to “go with” either (Annette) Garrett’s psychodynamic casework model or (Florence) Hollis’s problem-solving model. She chose Hollis, who turned out to be the less favored option. She upset the professor of her group work class by asking him about group dynamics; she still believes he should have simply answered the question. Her first paper earned a “B” and a single comment—had she not felt more than she implied? She found the question and its tone impertinent. She notes with a wry smile that, according to the people with whom she has lived, “I was never much for process, but I have gotten better over the years.”

Her first-year field placement was at a Family Services Agency in Chester, PA. Here, she learned a great deal by eavesdropping on sessions led by Mrs. Rapkin, a graduate of Penn’s functionalist school. Professor Hertha Kraus’s course on community practice was a beacon of light. An iconoclast of sorts, Kraus wrote about casework and social statistics, here and in her native Germany. During her PhD program, she relinquished Judaism to become a devout lifelong Quaker. She shares a grave in Pennsylvania with her female life partner.

By the end of her first year, Eileen’s trajectory shifted radically. A special meeting was called to discuss “what to do with Gambrill.” She was creating problems in the field by asking her psychoanalytically oriented supervisor too many questions. Professor Jane Kronick, who had just taken a PhD in sociology at Yale and had never met Eileen, suggested a solution to “getting her out of casework” by moving her into a research curriculum. Here, she would take doctoral-level research courses from Ed Mech and a research internship at Children’s Seashore House in Atlantic City. George Moed, a psychologist who was a “very good experimentalist and an excellent mentor,” would supervise her work and pressure her when needed.

Moed introduced her to Beatrice Wright’s classic, Physical Disability: A Psychosocial Approach. She attended case conferences at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia and conducted the first follow-up study of posthospitalized children, making use of interviews and measures such as the Semantic Differential (Gambrill, 1963). She also made a “big discovery” while perusing one of her partner’s course syllabi in philosophy. It was a book titled Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition. The author, a South African psychiatrist named Joseph Wolpe, was applying learning theory to everyday human problems.

Resilient young people tend to have at least one key adult champion. In addition to nurturing intellectual characteristics, these individuals may serve as protectors. Eileen explains,

One theme here is the importance in one’s career of having people who normalize what could be a situation that would interfere with your career when it shouldn’t. I think probably it’s a matter of luck to meet such people ….

May 1961 was an especially challenging turning point for Eileen, as she graduated from Bryn Mawr and lost her mother to breast cancer. Consistent with the standards of the day, no one spoke of her mother’s illness. Eileen was admitted to the joint doctoral program in Social Work and Psychology at the University of Michigan (UM). She knew she wanted to learn more but is not sure she would have left Philadelphia had her sister not been there for their father. Through letters she has saved and visits, she stayed in close touch with him until his death in 1973. She and her partner could have gone together to Ohio State—Eileen in psychology and her partner in philosophy. But, Eileen strongly preferred the interdisciplinary program at UM. Lengthy periods of separation during three of the following 4 years took a toll on the relationship. Reflecting ruefully on this time in her life, she observes, “I often made decisions about work at the expense of my personal life.”

Eileen found fulfillment in the demands at UM and declared it “a perfect fit.” The courses were challenging, the faculty inspiring, and the environment energizing. As Henry Meyer, one of her early mentors put it, the program aimed to “get the best people you can into the program, and then get out of their way.” Studying with other future luminaries in the field, such as Maeda Galinsky and Aaron Rosen, she was absorbed in no time into the ranks of those who “just work all the time.” The furor of social and political unrest that blazed across the nation’s campuses and around the globe was a world apart from her experience.

The importance of doctoral mentors cannot be overstated. With gratitude, Eileen recalls the goodness and wisdom of many. Henry Meyer, who garaged her mattress and bicycle on her arrival in Ann Arbor, led an engaging integrative seminar, as did Bob Vintner and Ed Thomas.

Like Jane Kronick at Bryn Mawr, Thomas was instrumental in Eileen’s development, and she was honored by invitations to speak at their respective retirements. Thomas had in fact been key to her admission at UM, having allayed concerns among the field faculty that her undergraduate honors thesis on a complex issue involving Hullian learning theory was too specialized.

Eileen summarizes her central abiding scholarly interest as “the application of learning principles to human concerns.” She used all means at her disposal to learn from the range of scientific domains in the discipline. In her senior honor’s seminar at Penn, Francis Irwin had steered her away from B. F. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior because of “its lack of footnotes.” She rediscovered the science of behavior as a teaching instructor in a “masterfully designed class” offered by psychologist Harlan Lane at UM. Each student had her or his own rat, which they involved in experiments that were designed to demonstrate behavioral principles such as shaping. Teaching the lab exposed Eileen to the logic and power of behavioral principles and highlighted the importance of firsthand observations and hands-on learning for students.

A superb course on personality assessment with Warren Norman laid a firm foundation on reliability and validity, which she drew on to codevelop and test the Assertion Inventory (Gambrill & Richey, 1975). This scale is still widely used and has been translated into a number of other languages. An earlier course with Julian Rotter on projective methods, taken after her BA, also contributed to knowledge in this area, while permission to enroll in an advanced seminar with Helen Peak in her first year of her PhD program introduced her to social psychology.

Ed Thomas arranged for Eileen to work with David Birch in psychology. Birch was interested in motivation and in developing methods to decrease anxiety reactions. Eileen took up a thread of this work in her dissertation—itself a 38-page distillation of integrity, perseverance, and courage. The research question was: “Would engaging in a consummatory response in the presence of an anxiety provoking stimulus result in a greater decrease in anxiety compared to engaging in a nonconsummatory response?” In a detailed recounting of the dissertation process, Eileen focused almost exclusively on what and how she had learned during the process. She and Birch discovered that an important control condition had been overlooked, an oversight that required them to introduce another group into the experiment. This amounted to 6 more months of separation from her partner, which ultimately led to the dissolution of their relationship.

Apart from a protected place to learn from one’s mistakes, the lab for Eileen was a sphere for honing curiosity, creativity, and conscience. Serendipity is crucial in science, as is a prepared mind. Eileen recalls running across a piece of advice from Skinner later in her career that resonated with her doctoral experience: “If you find something interesting in the lab, drop everything and go with it.” She had noticed, contrary to expectation, that satiated rats continued to perform a response reinforced by food. She discovered promising clues to this phenomenon in Berlyne’s theory and experimental work on curiosity and exploration. On the aesthetics of order in nature, she recalled, “It was like an extinction curve, which was fascinating. Cumulative records are beautiful to work with. You can see the shape of behavior change so clearly.” She made careful use of observational skills and what I might call “empathic interrogation.”

What is the rat’s life like? In this little cage, being handled; a larger chamber with a lever or wheel that looks very different, does it lead to different consequences? That is what I love about behavioral approaches. That it’s trying to bring these things together, because we are an animal. We have huge cognitive capacity, but otherwise we are very similar.

In summarizing the enduring value of what she learned at the UM, Eileen says, “So I think these experiences helped me observe people and their environments—what they are doing, where they’re doing it, where they’re looking and what they’re saying, all that kind of thing.” She offers an example of how years later, as a faculty member of the School of Social Welfare at Berkeley, these same skills of observation and interrogation led her to a new area of inquiry. “It was like sitting in faculty meetings and thinking there is something wrong with me because I don’t seem to be effective in countering very weak appeals. This led me to the whole area of critical thinking.” She began to read extensively on fallacies and biases and how to remedy them. This endeavor also led to the development of a coalition of women faculty at the school, who upon discovering they had common concerns, found strength and voice to address these collectively. This group also developed and tested a work climate scale which revealed a “less than happy picture.” They presented the results at the Council on Social Work Education Annual Program Meeting and submitted it, albeit unsuccessfully, for publication. Eileen went on to expand her interest in critical thinking to exploring propaganda in the helping professions and to integrating these different areas of inquiry (e.g., Gambrill, 2012a).

In 1965, with her dissertation completed and doctoral studies drawing to a close, Eileen faced the now more familiar question of “what next?” As Jane Kronick had done at Bryn Mawr, Ed Thomas approached Eileen in the hallway at UM and asked whether she might be interested in a 1-year clinical postdoctoral fellowship at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, with Joseph Wolpe. “This was perfect for me,” she says, “because behavior therapy was new and I had never practiced it.” She described the fellowship application as particularly onerous, and I delighted in her telling of how she broke it into chunks to make it manageable and to mark her progress—the same behavioral advice she would give me and many others on our dissertations.

Eileen described Wolpe as “a marvelous mentor, a master clinician and a master coach.” In contrast to how she had heard him depicted, she found him to be “warm, empathic, and deeply caring.” As the only fellow that year, there was no hiding from his steadfast questioning, “Well, Eileen, what do you think?” I asked her for an example of something important she had learned, and how. She described how she had conducted clinical interviews often with three to five observers. She concluded, “So one key thing I learned from that year is the value of critical feedback and the fact that it doesn’t have to be unpleasant. In fact, you want it. It’s so helpful.”

Although she has identified as a social worker throughout her career, Eileen’s first faculty position at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, included a 1-year lectureship in psychology. She recalls this as “an unusual year because it was the only department I’ve ever been in that was like a family.” She credits this climate and its positive outcomes to Martin Loeb and colleagues like Al Kadushin and Virginia Franks. In January, Ed Thomas recruited her back to a faculty position at UM. She was there from 1967 to 1970, which she remembers as “a golden period of social work education.” She and other colleagues worked on Ed Thomas’s research grant to develop clinical procedures in open settings (e.g., Gambrill, Thomas, & Carter, 1971) and tools to increase positive communication in couples, including a patented signaling system (Thomas, Carter, Gambrill, & Butterfield, 1970).

At 35, Eileen was a tenured associate professor in her preferred profession at a top-ranked school and university. She was thriving in the keen intellectual environment at UM and she enjoyed the natural beauty of Ann Arbor and its surrounding countryside. But she describes a mixed emotional attachment:

I remember at Michigan one time wondering if I dropped dead, would anyone even know it? I like Ann Arbor in some ways, but I miss the ocean and I miss more of a metropolitan area. So it’s partly geographical. What a big city offers. On the other hand, here in California, I get nostalgic for beautiful autumn leaves and the farms. It’s just exquisitely beautiful. And again, the intellectual atmosphere, but somehow there was something missing.

In what she describes as one of the most difficult times of her life, Eileen decided to leave Michigan. She was growing intellectually but not in other ways. She missed the vibrancy of a bigger city. Judging the Bay Area, with its ocean and its sizable gay and lesbian community, worth the risk, she traded the first house she ever bought and a tenured associate professorship for an unknown community and an as-yet uncertain lectureship at UC–Berkeley. Once there, she quickly began to build her research and teaching portfolios. She was licensed as a psychologist in California in 1973 and she continued with a small practice. Her practice experience led to the development and evaluation of a self-help program designed to help individuals meet people.

She presented this work at the Association of Behavior Therapy conference and with Cheryl Richey drew on the content for “It’s Up to You: Developing Assertive Social Skills” (Gambrill & Richey, 1976) and a sequel titled “Taking Charge of Your Social Life” (Gambrill & Richey, 1985). Her training in experimental research also led Eileen to contribute to the design of “The Alameda Project,” an experimental study of decision-making in child welfare (with Kermit Wiltse and Ted Stein, e.g., Stein & Gambrill, 1978) and to use of single-case designs to explore the effects of a token system to improve staff-resident interaction in a juvenile hall (Gambrill, 1976). In 1977, Eileen was tenured and she published a major contribution to the field, Behavior Modification: Handbook of Assessment, Intervention and Evaluation. These achievements, together with meeting of her life partner in Berkeley, would secure her place at UC and in this geographic locale.

The path from first-generation college student to distinguished university professor was arduous, especially for women. When Eileen left the UM in 1970, the social work faculty numbered 60, 44 men and 16 women; 39 held doctoral degrees and 49 held social work master’s degrees (Fellin, 2009). Yet, by her own reckoning,

I’ve always felt I had a great influence over my life. I mean, I felt I really had a choice. I always figured that if it was something within reason, I could get it. I realize that in some ways, I am prototypical American. I think there are some really good things about that. I got this from my father, I think. He was proud to be an American—in the best way.

Influentials: Where Are We Going?

Having discussed various types, sources, and pathways of Eileen’s influence on the course of the social work profession, I turn finally to the question of outcomes. Here, I revisit Boyer’s (1990, 1997) Scholarship Reconsidered to frame a discussion of one of many influential outcomes of Eileen’s work, that is, the profession’s move toward evidence-based practice (EBP; or the often preferred term, evidence-informed practice). I single out this contribution among many because it stands as a clear and compelling example of the complexity and importance of the type of scholarship Eileen chose to pursue and the manner in which she did so.

To recap, Boyer (1997) argued to expand the definition of scholarship beyond the discovery research that advances knowledge to include the scholarships of integration, application, and teaching. Importantly, the latter two types of scholarship go beyond standard service and scholarly teaching duties of faculty in requiring rigor and disciplinary expertise that produces results that are shared and/or evaluated by peers in public forums (p. 67). Eileen’s scholarship has certainly informed applied research on social work practice and she has played an unquestionably significant role in shaping social work education. But I think she has mainly labored in the crucial and challenging scholarship of integration. Indeed, when asked to reflect on the corpus of her work, she noted,

I’ve come to realize that one of my strengths is integration, particularly starting with the critical thinking in clinical practice book. All that material had to be integrated. I think it is one of the jobs of academic writers, particularly in a profession, to do this if it is appropriate to their task.

What then would draw one to this path? I suggest that the same alchemy of dispositional and situational factors that inspired Eileen to pursue the joint program in psychology and social work at the UM steered her to the scholarship of integration. Her formal education capitalized on and honed her natural curiosity, self-discipline, and spheres of commitment, which led to career-long intellectual pursuits that are broad based and require careful synthesis of knowledge for practice. This last point is key to understanding Eileen’s influence. The fundamental raison d’être of the social work profession is to improve the quality of human life. To that end, practitioners must know what to do and be able to do it effectively. Perhaps the most striking and binding feature of the corpus of Eileen’s work is its consistent attention to improving the means for skillful, responsible use of knowledge.

This orientation to scholarship requires cycles of broad and extensive reading, observing, discussing, and thinking. I noticed that Eileen’s home desk sported several well-organized stacks of ongoing work–books and articles with notes on what she had read, alongside incubating ideas and lists of items yet to read. She is often asked how she manages to read so much and so widely. I recall her advising me and my fellow doctoral students to regularly scan the literature “in and around” our developing areas of expertise and to read an article each day. “You’ll be amazed how much you can learn.” This rhythm of inquiry, synthesis, application, and evaluation is an inherent feature of the scholarship of integration and is clearly demonstrated in Eileen’s work.

Connecting with her parents’ roots, she traveled periodically to England from 1978 on, sometimes spending an entire year there. In her first full year (1978–1979) in London, based at the National Institute of Social Work, she discovered the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, whose writings would come to influence her own work. In 1983–1984, as a visiting scholar at Oxford’s Department of Applied Social Studies and Social Research, she lectured in psychology. In 1999, she was a Benjamin Meaker Visiting Fellow for 2 months at the University of Bristol. That same year, she published an influential paper on the relationship among evidence-based clinical behavioral analysis, evidence-based medicine (see Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, & Richardson, 1996), and the Cochrane Collaboration (which prepares systematic reviews of primary research in health care and health policy; Gambrill, 1999). Smith and Rennie (2014) provide an excellent oral history of the development of EBP from its origins and links with the National Health Service. A similar entity, the Campbell Collaboration, maintains and promotes access to systematic reviews in education, criminal justice, social policy, and social care.

Practitioners of EBP draw on their clinical expertise in integrating multiple sources of information, including research evidence, client values and preferences, and client characteristics and circumstances. Research evidence entails knowledge about which practices and policies are most likely to be effective with a given person, population, or problem. Knowledge of clients and their circumstances is acquired through competent, sensitive inquiry and interactions, and decisions are guided by principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmalfeasance, and justice. Clinical expertise includes relationship and decision-making skills in addition to background knowledge and related skills.

The integration and application of these elements of EBP capture Eileen’s decisive influence on the directions of the profession in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries. To begin, effective, responsible social work practice requires a systematic and reliable means of accessing knowledge that can inform how best to deal with a problem at hand. But access is only the first step; the practitioner must also be able to make sense of the information and to judge its credibility and relevance. On the one hand, computer technology has revolutionized information science and communications in ways that were unimaginable in Eileen’s early career. But she is careful to point out that the exponential increase in information and communication does not ensure, and in fact may obfuscate, judgments and decisions about knowledge for practice. “You have to strive to be clear,” she says, “and to be clear you have to be critical.” As such, she argues, social work faculty have a duty to teach students to make good use of evidence, to think critically about their practice, and to ensure that their clients are educated shapers and consumers of services.

This last point, which Eileen addressed in 2000 at the 18th California Association for Behavior Analysis Conference on Informed Consent and Applied Behavior Analysis is central to her scholarship of integration for professional practice, as it involves the informed, judicious use of knowledge and skills, and invokes consumer rights to self-determination and informed consent. Taken together, these principles requisition standards that promote clarity, transparency, and accountability. Early on, Eileen called for strengthening the clarity and rigor of standards for practice in works such as Casework: A Competency-Based Approach (Gambrill, 1983). She further expounded these ideas in Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice (Gambrill, 2012b) and Social Work Practice: A Critical Thinker’s Guide (Gambrill, 2013), two widely used texts that are now in 3rd editions.

During the first decade of the 21st century, Eileen published and presented more than a dozen of highly influential papers on practical and ethical rationales for the teaching and use of evidence in practice (see Gambrill, 2007). Her efforts and those of like-minded colleagues reached a watershed in 2008, when the Council of Social Work Education shifted its Education Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) from assessing program content to evaluating the training of students to use research in practice and to demonstrate proficiency in 10 core competencies and 41 practice behaviors. Nearly 10 years on, there are still challenges to the full implementation of these curricular goals (Bellamy et al., 2013; Betts, Matto, & LeCroy, 2009). Nevertheless, the 2015 EPAS standards continue to hew closely to these precepts, and there is little doubt that this will remain the profession’s focal direction for the immediate future.

Coda: No Beginning Without End

During our interviews, Eileen talked about the opportunity costs involved in personal and professional decision-making. She ventured that she would like to have developed more grant writing skills. This direction may have been beneficial, but it might well have taken her down a different path. As the volume, complexity and speed of knowledge production grow, the less-traveled paths of integrative and applied scholarship will take on new urgency in the professions. There is strong and growing interest in the use of oral life history methods to understand the development of careers—how they are influenced and how they influence. The courage to put one’s personal experiences into the public sphere requires a deep love of learning and an abiding trust in the thread that binds generations of scholars and their work through time. For those who thirst for knowledge and aspire to use it as an instrument for human betterment, this lineage can furnish the spark that fuels the caravan to which Eiseley (1957) refers in describing the brevity and uncertainty of life but also its richness and continuity:

The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it. We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know. (p. 12)