ABSTRACT
This chapter offers several entry points into the debate about best practice and evidence-based practice. Like most professions in the postmodern era, social work has lost its sense of certainty and its faith in rationality. Social workers need to respond to client situations in a self-consciously self-reflective way, questioning the way discourse shapes and directs policy, and empowering some and disempowering others. There are a number of methods available for assessing practice, some of which are more effective than others. These range across the spectrum of methods from the experimental design to qualitative models of assessment. Many social work research texts outline practice evaluation techniques that are grounded in a scientific, rational approach. In particular, the use of experimental methods using strict scientific design came to be seen as the optimal design model. In social work, experimental design is not often appropriate or possible.
