ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, evidence-based practice has been hailed as signalling a new era of progress and offering great promise for social work. For some, however, it is the ghost in the machine because it carries with it a propensity for detrimental effects, which savagely undercuts core principles, values and traditional ways of working in social work. As a recent innovation, it has also heralded significant change that will move social work into unknown territories. This opening chapter begins our critical exploration of the emergence, parameters, consequences, ambitions and ideologies of evidence-based practice as it is seen to impact on social work. Trinder (2000) proclaimed the emergence of evidence-based practice as one of the success stories of the 1990s. But was she right? As a methodological program, based on a particular epistemology, it certainly came to dominate medicine towards the end of the last decade of the twentieth century. However, it only really began to influence social work in the late 1990s. Given its roots in evidence-based medicine, it is not surprising that it has been most successful in those disciplines closest to medicine but only partially successful in disciplines like social work. For us, evidence-based practice is an emergent phenomenon that has yet to be fully realized as ‘evidence-based social work’. We suggest that evidence-based social work is best defined as entailing the mobilization of a specialist research infrastructure that can guide particular interventions, support best practice governance and demonstrate positive outcomes for service users. Evidence-based practice becomes evidence-based social work at the point when it materializes, is performed and made durable in a more or less fixed set of locations within social work, e.g., in social work agencies or cultures of social work practice. The emphasis is on the transportability of evidence-based practice into social work based on a series of implementation moves to become ‘evidence-based social work’. As we show, there is a need for micro studies of methodological and policy formation, particularly around the challenging issues of implementation in social work. Such studies would allow us to understand how processes of improvization, purification and channelling are translated into local and national contexts, giving insights into the embedding – or not – of evidence-based methodology in day-today social work practice. In this regard, this chapter advances some of the key arguments of the book that turn on the following statements:
1 Evidence-based practice is essentially a process of formalization driven by evidence-based policy which allies with attempts to legislate a particular definition of ‘scientific inquiry’ (Maxwell 2004: 36) and, in some forms, a return to experimental design studies involving large, randomized samples recreated on the clinical model with its many attendant weaknesses (see Chapter 2).
