Research for People Who Hate Research (But Have to Do It Anyway): An Overview
Based on my experience of going through an MSW (master’s of social work) program and then several years teaching MSW research classes (both as TA and as primary instructor for the accompanying computer labs), I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of social workers: research people and people people.
As I tell my students, I’m about 95% research and 5% people. I’d much rather develop a methodology, run stats, and write a lit review than work with clients. I tell the story of my school social work practicum, where one of my clients, a kindergartner, was licking people. My reaction, of course, was to tell him, “Don’t lick people.” And now I’m working as a youth counselor for kids who tend to get violent. My numbers don’t leave visible bruises.
However, I also point out that I’m aware of my weakness and so I purposefully take jobs and seek out opportunities to work with clients. If I want to enact policy changes, then I need to understand how those policies affect not only clients but the ground level staff that’ll be enacting them.
I also tell my students that while I realize they’re probably more like 95% people and 5% research, they will be expected to do research when they start working after graduation. I remind them of what my own professors repeatedly told me and my cohort — we’d probably be in a supervisory position within five years. And with that supervisory position will come the expectation that we’ll be able to evaluate our agency’s performance. Even before we get to that supervisory position, we’ll be expected to evaluate our own performance with our clients, as well as their progress towards their goals.
So, with those future expectations in mind, I’ve designed a ten-step process for conducting evaluation and research on issues related to social work practice, from the micro practice level to the macro program or policy level.
Step 1: Define the problem — overview of the research process, determining research questions, and developing a logic model
Step 2: Research the issue — conducting an online/library search and creating an annotated bibliography
Step 3: Investigate the program: who — sampling methods and human subjects/ethics issues
Step 4: Investigate the program: how — research design and methodology, quantitative vs qualitative research, and primary vs secondary data sources
Step 5: Investigate the program: doing — administering the survey and/or collect secondary data
Step 6: Analyze the findings: quantitative univariate analysis — recoding variables into useful date, computing frequencies and central tendencies
Step 7: Analyze the findings: quantitative bivariate analysis — statistical tests to compare groups and show relationships
Step 8: Analyze the findings: qualitative — code responses for themes and patterns
Step 9: Explain the results — pulling it all together into a discussion of what you found and why
Step 10: Share the findings — presenting the research in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to your audiences
Over the next couple months I’ll be posting a new step every few days, to make social science research practical and maybe a little fun. And who knows, maybe to change that balance from 95/5 to 70/30 — or even 50/50.
Continue on to the next section: a look at the case studies we’ll be using as examples throughout the steps.
Emily is currently working on her dissertation for a PhD in school social work. Her past experience includes teaching high school, criminal justice administration, economic development, and residential foster care, but her passion is secondary education, especially regarding underprivileged populations, “bad” kids, and intersectionality. In her free time, she likes to travel around the US and the world to learn firsthand about nonprofit and governmental responses to societal and educational inequality.
