Abstract
We are pleased to announce that Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice has been accepted to the ISI Web of Knowledge database. This means that the journal will now become part of an international scientific database, and its impact and reach will be considerably expanded in the domains of social work, the social sciences, sciences, arts and humanities. In addition to being indexed in the web of knowledge database, the journal will also now, for the first time, have an impact factor. While there is certainly controversy (and room for discussion by the readership of this journal) over what an impact factor actually measures or what it indicates in relation to the quality of any given journal (see for example Blyth et al., 2010), the inclusion of Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice within this internationally accepted academic metric is good news for us and significant progress for the legitimacy, dissemination and reach of qualitative methods and social work research. It is a testament to the hard work put into the journal through the years by its founding editors, Roy Ruckdeschel and Ian Shaw and their team, as well as by you – authors, reviewers, advisory board members and readers.
This issue includes a rich variety of articles and essays, starting with a career interview with Norman Denzin, the author and editor of major publications in qualitative inquiry and the founder of the influential annual International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry. This interview gives a short but deep and lively glimpse to the personal history and worldview of a prominent scholar. The second article, by Karen Staller, aims to prepare novice qualitative researchers to successfully negotiate the politics of science, the politics of evidence, and the politics of methods within their home institutions by understanding the necessary links between epistemology, methodology, and methods.
The next two articles call for space for the visual in qualitative research. Kelly Jackson uses diagrammed timelines to interpret the complexities of racial identity and lived multiracial experience and Amy Russell and Natalie Diaz use photography as a supplement to a classic grounded theory research study to humanize the lesbian women whose experiences of identity, culture and oppression are at the heart of her study. The following articles throw light on different service users groups in various cultural contexts. Anette Brunovskis and Rebecca Surtees write on the challenges facing trafficked women and their family members after reintegration; Lisa Hines provides a meta-analysis of studies regarding the services and treatment for substance-abusing women; Sudha Nair and Mohammad Maliki Osman examine the meanings that adolescents in Singapore give to their experiences of having witnessed and experienced interpersonal violence; and Natalie Pope studies the plans of female caregivers for their own aging. These articles exemplify how culture, religion, gender, sexual identity and ethnicity shape people’s lives, experiences and perceptions and provide implications to professional practice. In the final article of this volume Karen Bell draws from her PhD study to investigate participants’ motivations to being interviewed in qualitative research.
This issue ends with our book review section, which includes this time an introductory essay by Mark Hardy on ‘Public’ social work and a review essay by Dawn Dowding dedicated to two recent publications on mixed methods.