Abstract
In this second edition of Evaluation in Practice, Ian Shaw continues to develop his idea that evaluation and inquiry are tasks that should be carried out in normal day-to-day social work practice just as planning, intervention and review are. He suggests that social work students, practitioners and educators ask the questions ‘Is social work worth doing? And how do I know if I am doing it well, or even well enough?’ (p. 2) of their practice.
His aim in writing this edition is to enable social work to embed qualitative evaluation as an integral dimension of good practice in every phase of social work, and he provides examples throughout the text to illustrate the point he hopes to make. The book does not aim to provide findings as a means of improving practice but to look at why and how to integrate the method of inquiry into social work. It helps the reader to understand the reason for and the means to develop and establish critical and disciplined practice in partnership with service users, to evaluate their own practice and to be rigorous in assessing the social work task.
The book does not offer a set of skills but offers a typography or map of skills and general principles that might be used. Each chapter concludes with examples and exercises to illustrate the necessary and feasible practice developments involved, and to suggest how evaluating in practice can be taken further. Concepts discussed include reflexive practice, plausible evidence, evaluating for and with service users, anti-discriminatory evaluation and ethical purposefulness that can be added to evidence-based and empirical practice. These can all be reasonably viewed as extended and elaborated forms of critical reflection. The chapters work through a range of qualitative methods to show how these can help social workers gain a better understanding of assessing and planning their work, beyond the narrow and routine ways they may be used normally.
The book is not about research or even in any obvious sense about how to apply research for enriching practice. It is about what social workers do and ought to do as part of their day-to-day work beyond the competence-based practice that forms the basis of much social work education and practice. Shaw suggests that social workers and service users need to be the kind of practitioners who are able to make imaginative lateral transitions, who are empirically informed, who work as both outsiders and insiders within social work, who are reflexive practitioners, committed to falsifying their favourite practice and above all are engaged to evaluate both for and with those who use their services (p. 9).
The discussion and examples are clearly presented and one of the methods explored is that of social workers carrying out a cultural review before embarking on a piece of work. This is based on McCracken’s (1988) idea that researchers should review their own experiences of the topic of interest so that they may avoid the dulling effects of deep and long-lived familiarity of the subject and to gain an intimate acquaintance with the object. These ideas are translated for the social worker to carry out a review of their experience related to the topic of interest before commencing the work. Shaw elaborates using an example from Miller and Crabtree (1992) who carried out a study of pain where each member of the research team carried out an inventory of their own past experiences of pain before carrying out the research. They recommended expanding the range of cultural categories to include any direct contact from members of the cultural group being studied and suggested that this gives a ‘reservoir of empathy for the researcher when the respondent shares similar thoughts and emotions’ (Miller and Crabtree, 1992: 199). This example can be translated to a social worker preparing to work with a service user around a particular issue, and Shaw identifies what the worker would need to do to carry out the cultural review and the kinds of topics they might include.
This, he suggests, helps the worker develop reflexivity and brings to the surface what the worker knows and does not know about this kind of situation and helps them to become conscious of their reactions to their work. Shaw suggests that social workers sometimes avoid the difficult process of living in the cultural review that might provoke strange and challenging perspectives on social work problems for a quicker and easier, less-helpful listing of the obvious.
I think the book achieves many of its aims in that it is thought provoking and raises a debate about challenging the conventional practice competence models that underpin typical social work programmes. It also presents a range of ideas and methods with which social workers could evaluate their practice. Rather than necessarily offering more knowledge about social work, Shaw accepts traditional sources of knowledge in social work (Pawson et al., 2003) and offers ways for the practitioner to extend their knowledge as well as engages service users into developing practice.