Qualitative Social Work

In this article, I locate myself as a PhD student, of Indigenous and Settler heritages, enrolled in a first-year epistemology course. Using reflexivity as an approach in qualitative research, I take the reader on a journey of the intricate workings of my spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical experiences stemming from my grappling with the meaning of epistemology and how learning about this impacts the perspective I have in my life, social work, and for my dissertation research. Learning about knowledge and how it is conceived, impacted, and transformed through the interaction with others raises many questions about how I have come to know what I know. A question remains as to what I will know at the end of my research.

This article explores a social work doctoral student’s self-reflexive journey in search of a suitable epistemology for her qualitative social work doctoral research with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) youth in child welfare. It will highlight the deep influence that colonialism and imperialism can have on embodied knowledge and the importance of pushing against these paradigms to help bring forward the voices from the margins.

In this article, I tell the autoethnographic stories of epistemological tensions emerging from my entanglement with Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in my journey towards my doctoral research in social work. I link these tensions to broader socio-political and historical tensions that tie together the West and the Global South. I highlight the sharp contrasts and contradictions as well as the nuanced contestations in the production of knowledge. I follow a chronological order to organize my narratives into four parts. In the first part, I describe my experiences of walking in two worlds. In the second part, I explore how I knew what I knew, depicting my indigenous ways of knowing. In the third part, I examine Western ways of knowing, depicting the subjugation of my indigenous ways of knowing. In the final part, I address the hybrid ways of knowing that I embody by walking in many worlds.

As a first-year doctoral student, I experience challenges of confronting conflicts between my secular education, my Islamic beliefs, my past in Guyana, and my present and presence in Canada, while simultaneously contemplating my future. In this paper, I share my struggles with identity and epistemology through the contours of clarity, confusion, and twilight as I think about my doctoral research. I will present a brief synopsis of my professional and educational background, as well as my identity as a Muslim immigrant, and examine what emerged from this as a personal epistemology that will guide my qualitative research.

In this paper, I critically reflect on my epistemological journey going from professional social work practice to finding a suitable qualitative research methodology for my doctoral research with Chinese high school international students in Canadian homes. I start with exploring the new face of homelessness that I observed among the Chinese students in my clinical practice. I then explore some of the reasons that bring them to Canada and engage in the critical examination of whiteness in the Canadian educational system. I conclude with proposing the metaphor of way-finding as a qualitative methodology for my doctoral research.

In this article, I reflect on my ever-evolving epistemological journey through which I came to embrace a “wholistic” qualitative methodology for my doctoral research in social work. I offer a chronological account of my lived experiences starting with my locus of origin and highlighting the challenging twists and turns that brought me to my research interest of exploring meaningful peer support relationships in mental health and addictions agencies.

The author’s recent participation in a doctoral course on epistemology and the nature of social work knowledge produced an inner struggle regarding the validity of positivist and evidence-based approaches to social work practice and research. This article seeks to share some of this struggle as many social workers, students, and researchers have and continue to encounter debates regarding the use of evidence-based approaches in social work practice and research. The dichotomous nature these debates often take has often resulted in the exclusive embracing, defending and perpetuation of evidence-based approaches or the complete rejection and discarding of such approaches. The author suggests in this article that social workers, researchers, and academics consider an alternative approach to the debate.

In this article, I illustrate lived experiences within my roles as caregiver, clinical social worker, and researcher. Empirical attention has focused on the emotional toll of caregiving and management of emotions as clinical social workers, however, little attention has been given to the impact emotions have on the researcher and how emotional awareness can be useful in the creation of knowledge. Using a personal reflexive account, I “out” myself as an emotionally aware caregiver, clinical social worker, and researcher. Finally, I provide examples of how to incorporate emotion into the research process.

This article explores the journey of a doctoral student conducting field research in Mexico on how violence affects the provision of health care services and health. Mexico has seen a dramatic increase in violence caused by the Drug Wars in the last decade that has spread to many states throughout the country. Using translations, metaphors, and examples from my field research that refer to violence, I explore the complexity of inhabiting different cultures and languages simultaneously as well as my role as a researcher, translator, and interpreter of what remains hidden or silent. In the process, I am pulled in different directions as I learn to adapt in a reflexive process. I explore whether what I have learned in my academic journey is enough to study the relationship between violence and health care service provision. The journey is a reflection on what I have learned about breaking some of the silences around the topic. I discuss the tension of writing this article on a sensitive topic and my responsibility as a researcher, translator, and interpreter of lived experiences. The text is an arrangement, which can be interpreted as a whole (or in parts).

In this article, I revisit my roots in pursuit of my epistemology. I write about how my mother’s story significantly shaped my interest in narrative inquiry. By inviting my mother to tell her story and through the process of shared meaning making, I learn that narrations are temporal and complex. Stories are built on our lived experiences and as our perceptions about those experiences change with time, so do our interpretations of the stories that we live with. Exposing my own limited understanding of a story that is so deeply connected to me, I conclude that the essence of narrative inquiry lies in multiple interpretations and in letting participants have a significant say over the shaping, structuring, and telling of their narratives.

In this article, I trace the origins of my epistemological stance as a biracial woman with multiple marginalized identities that caused me to span categorical boundaries in life. My perspective has become one in which I am positioned in an ambivalent, hybrid, liminal space. I respond to the epistemological positions taken by other doctoral students and consider our common struggles with situating ourselves among established theories that do not easily accommodate the complexity and ambiguity of our lived experiences. I describe my attempts to locate myself within existing epistemological approaches that are compatible with my own perspective and my research questions about racial disparities in young adult mental health. I conclude by adopting a healthy skepticism of existing theories of knowledge and by looking forward to asking and answering questions with my own research that will help social workers to work more effectively with diverse populations.

The tattered social safety net in the United States allows many people with needs to slip through its holes. In this paper, I give case examples from my own life and my social work practice, which led me to question how social work practice and research is conducted. As a social worker, I wondered how other practitioners knew about poor people and now as a doctoral student, I question the assumptions we as researchers make about poverty and the poor. This discussion also sheds light on my nascent journey toward uncovering my ontology and epistemology of social work knowledge.

This paper offers an account of my own epistemological journey over four decades of social work practice and research. It traces the journey from my early years as a practitioner working from an approach largely grounded in what we called practice wisdom, to my current situation as a professor of social work, undertaking research and guiding students on their own research and practice journeys.

The paper begins with a vignette from a research field trip in the early 2000s – mid point in my journey and then takes a more chronological turn exploring disability research and the theme of voice and activism in research. Finally, I offer some reflections on the journey itself, what has influenced and guided my own learning, the challenges and the insights.

In this paper, I retrace my interest in narrative forms of inquiry. I begin by revisiting a series of research projects that I conducted early in my career, describing some of my own dissatisfactions with the methods I used at the time. I move on to a detailed re-examination of my first piece of narrative research, completed during my PhD. In that project I used a narrative pointed psychosocial method in an attempt to develop new knowledge in the field of drugs, ‘race’ and ethnicity. In the final section, I consider what I have learned from this approach in terms of knowing and not-knowing and how I have used this experience to explore different approaches to narrative inquiry. I finish by drawing out some lessons I have learned from these different studies, which I hope might be of relevance to other social work researchers.

This article is a reflective piece in which I account for how and why I have developed my current understanding of the relevance of epistemology to practice, to social work research and to the relationship between the two. Social work as a profession has itself faced something of an epistemological crisis of late, which has impacted on both practice and research in ways which have not necessarily been beneficial. I will draw my own practice and reseach to highlight the twists and turns in the development of my thinking about these issues and as a corollary, my views regarding the bridging role that pragmatic epistemology might play between research and practice.