Research on Social Work Practice

In 2015, the University of Southern California School of Social Work convened the Social Work Innovation Roundtable with the goal of rigorously discussing the role of innovation in social work science and research. We convened a group of senior scholars in the field of social work along with emerging scholars (doctoral students and early career professors or researchers) to debate the practice of innovation, the nature of innovation, and how innovation may move social work forward. We posed the following questions to presenters and discussants: (1) Is innovation the enemy of science? (2) Does innovation have a role in science? and (3) Are innovation and scientific ideas simply different? During the course of 2 days, we argued over different perspectives on science and innovation with our colleagues. Out of those debates, this special issue of Research on Social Work Practice emerged.

Social work as a human services profession has been distinctive for its inclusion of research as a required element of practice and instrument in instigating reform. At the present time, the relationship of social work to science and a redefinition of social work as a science have reentered our national dialogue with new force. This expansion of perspective has, however, failed to explicitly attend to a closely related intellectual and practical domain, the world of social innovation. Innovation as an end itself, a synonym for progress, has largely been owned by the professions of business, engineering, and the biosciences. This essay presents a discussion of how social work may engage with social innovation and the tensions inherent to such an engagement. A place for social innovation within the recognized domains of scientific investigation and social work is essential. Social work would make a unique contribution to the enhancement of this conception through the weight given to values, social purpose, and context that is endemic to the social work perspective. The result of combining science and social innovation perspectives in the same academic home might be a flowering of new social configurations, networks, organizations, and relationships disciplined by repeated appraisals through the scientific method.

This article highlights how the social work academy can support innovative research, dissemination, and implementation and is a response to and extension of arguments made by Dr. Marilyn L. Flynn on innovation in social work. It argues that social work researchers need to strike a balance between the often slow and methodical scientific research community and the often rapid and reactive social innovation community to best respond to societal needs. From an emerging scholar’s point of view, it concludes by emphasizing how shifting priorities in social work tenure and promotion processes can broaden the impact of social work research.

This response article discusses opportunities to bridge social work and social innovation as a promising partnership to address the issues impacting vulnerable populations across the global context. It starts by revisiting the conceptualization of innovation in social work and continues by considering factors that contribute to the growing interest in social innovation and related concepts. This article concludes by discussing differences in social work and social innovation and how these differences can be turned into opportunities for a fruitful partnership that can push both fields forward.

Social innovation is defined by novelty and improvement. This definition requires social work practice to be more effective or efficient than preexisting alternatives. Practice innovation is accomplished by leveraging technical, social, and economic factors to generate novel interventions, diffusion or adoption of the interventions into broader use, and identification of the value created by the new approaches or processes. Innovation in social work practice is fundamentally hindered by the foundational trifecta on which the profession is built: (a) the structure of social work education, (b) diffusely focused professional organizations, and (c) siloed professional environments. This article explores the elements of social work education, professional organizations, and practice environments that impede innovation and offers recommendations for changes in each sector that can facilitate innovation.

The Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative aims to focus the profession’s attention on how social work can play a larger role in mitigating contemporary social problems. Yet a central issue facing contemporary social work is its seeming reticence to engage with social problems, and their solutions, beyond individual-level interventions. Social work research, we contend, must more consistently link case and cause, iteratively developing processes for bringing micro-, mezzo-, and macrostreams of information together. We further argue that meaningful engagement with the initiative requires social work scholars and practitioners to actively scale up practice and research inquiry. We detail two key strategies for employing a scaled-up social work practice and research ethos: (a) employing a critical economic lens and (b) engaging with diverse publics. As proof of concept for these arguments, we offer an early example of progressive era social workers scaling up responses to a pressing social issue: infant mortality.

Changing social work from a profession with innovators to a profession that innovates will likely require an innovation movement. This article draws on lessons from a prior movement in social work to suggest implications for a future innovation movement. Empirical clinical practice (ECP), a movement in social work in the 1970–1990s, sought to transform social work into a profession that was thoroughly grounded in the empirical investigation. The success of ECP was stifled by four factors around investment from key stakeholders, developing useable and effective technologies, propagating the movement, and addressing workplace barriers. This article argues that an innovation movement will require early investment from many sectors and levels of the profession, effective arrangements for generating new options for addressing social problems, effective methods for diffusing and implementing the movement, and frank appraisal of organizational contexts that can stymie innovation.

The field of social work does not currently have a widely adopted method for expediting innovations into micro- or macropractice. Although it is common in fields such as engineering and business to have formal processes for accelerating scientific advances into consumer markets, few comparable mechanisms exist in the social sciences or social services. Given that beta testing is successfully used to scale innovation in business and engineering, why is there no method for beta testing in social work? Could this be the reason that innovations in social work practice remain decades behind scientific research findings? This article explores reasons for the scarcity of options for scaling innovation in the field of social work and proposes a method for shortening development cycles for social work innovations to ensure that advances reach consumers—and ultimately improve their lives—more quickly.

As the scientific marketplace rapidly evolves, we must keep revisiting strategic preparation of our doctoral students and early career scholars to be successful innovators in these contexts. As an inherently integrative, change-oriented, community-engaged, and context-sensitive discipline, social work has enormous potential as a value-added partner for greater cross-fertilization among scientists and stakeholders not only from the academy but also from clinical settings, laboratories, industry, and systems leadership. Yet social work researchers not uncommonly encounter perception challenges as they strive to bring their scientific potential and wares to the marketplace. This article argues that innovation and impact are now central expectations of research. Current research priorities increasingly require teams to function at a transdisciplinary level of theoretical and methodological integration and to develop translational partnerships. The article concludes with thoughts on educational directions to better prepare our T-shaped emerging scholars to be perceived and function as value-added research innovators.

Grounded in an indigenous holistic worldview and borrowing from the four Rs (values of relationships, responsibility, reciprocity, and redistribution), this article supports the inclusion of translational science and the integration of core metacompetencies into social work doctoral education as innovations in the field of social work science. The author argues that these innovations will enhance the ability of social–work–trained researchers to serve on transdisciplinary research teams, which are necessary to address complex metaproblems found in the natural world. Further, the author asserts that transdisciplinary scientific integration is helpful to social work science, as it builds awareness and appreciation of social work scholarly inquiry, promotes the inclusion of social work values in scientific research, and helps erode the scientific hierarchy that has traditionally existed between the natural and social sciences. By leveraging personal experiences in transdisciplinary education, the author offers a conceptual framework for innovations in doctoral education.

The aim of this article is to address some of the questions Dr. Paula S. Nurius presents in her article, Innovation and Emerging Scientific Careers: Is Social Work Prepared to Compete in Today‖s Scientific Marketplace? Specifically, this article will focus on what we can do to better prepare our emerging research scholars to be successful innovators through trans-disciplinary training and educational activities. This article recommends two main ideas. The first main idea is that social work co-host meetings, lectures, roundtables and trainings with disciplines we do not tend to collaborate with, in order to build inter-disciplinary partnerships. The second suggestion is that students are socially integrated, via extensive interaction of outside disciplines, through customized semester-long rotation style trainings. By implementing these suggestions, we will be providing a space for our doctoral students to gain an understanding of how different disciplines‖ researchers, technologies, and/or methods can add to their ability to produce innovative ideas, encouraging creative and complex thinking and problem solving.

Recent efforts to identify and promote a distinct science for the discipline of social work have led to an ongoing debate regarding the nature and function of such a science. Central to this debate is a lack of consensus as to how to operationalize a social work science. Drawing from the field of implementation science and its application in reducing the gap between research and practice in child welfare and child mental health, this article examines the role of research–practice partnerships in creating and advancing social work science. Through the exercise of cultural exchanges among researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and other stakeholders, such partnerships offer the potential to integrate different disciplinary approaches to understanding why populations experience inequity or disadvantage and what to do about it as well as different perspectives on the nature and use of research evidence to achieve such understanding.

We present a preliminary theory of innovation in social work science. The focus of the piece is two case studies from our work that illustrate the social nature of innovations in the science of social work. This inductive theory focuses on a concept we refer to as transformative innovation, wherein two sets of individuals who possess different expertise and different network connections come together to solve a problem and in so doing transfer ideas from one network and field of expertise to the other. This transfer of ideas inevitably involves the transformation of ideas, such that the final innovation is something new to both groups of people, and as such innovative.