WHAT WORKS? A HARD LOOK AT IMPACT EVALUATIONS IN SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH

For the last forty years social work researchers in the U.S. have concerned themselves with questions of the impact and effectiveness of social work services and policies. Public and private agencies, as well as consumers,... [ view full abstract ]

For the last forty years social work researchers in the U.S. have concerned themselves with questions of the impact and effectiveness of social work services and policies. Public and private agencies, as well as consumers, increasingly seek to justify expenditures or improve programs that do not work well enough or at all by using evidence of program effectiveness. Experimental designs are considered the “gold standard” of impact evaluations, yet debates rage about what research designs and analytical methods provide adequate evidence of impact of our programs on clients with complex and multiple service needs. Methodological advances in research design and statistics have strengthened inferences about effectiveness at the individual, program and system levels, but many argue that social work research has been overly concerned with the question of “what works” in relation to narrow treatment models that do not address the complex service needs of clients. Many argue we should broaden the focus of impact evaluations to include cross-system analyses, focus on prevention as well as intervention and concern ourselves with the adaptation and replication of seemingly effective models to new cultural contexts. It is the purpose of this symposium to take a hard look at emerging conceptual and methodological developments in impact evaluation in social work.

The symposium will examine approaches to impact evaluations in social work via three analyses: (1) of advances in the development of cross-system impact evaluations of interventions serving families with multiple and complex health and social problems; (2) of challenges in the use of randomized field trials in preventing child and adolescent problem behaviors in the U.S.; and (3) of the tension between fidelity and adaptation that arises in virtually all attempts to import evidence-based interventions (EBIs) to new cultural contexts.