ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have introduced evidence-based practice (EBP) in the wider context beyond social work, where it is influential in a range of disciplines and in the realms of public policy and service provision. This chapter narrows the focus to what evidence-based practice has come to mean for social work and the process of knowledge formation within the profession. As we suggested in Chapter 1, a broad definition of evidence-based social work entails the mobilization of a specialist research infrastructure to inform particular interventions, support best practice governance and demonstrate positive outcomes for service users. We noted that evidence-based practice becomes evidence-based social work at the point when it materializes in a more or less fixed set of locations within social work and is performed and durable. We place an emphasis on the transportability of evidencebased practice into social work, based on a series of implementation moves. In this sense, evidence-based practice becomes ‘evidence-based social work’ through a process of translation.
