Developing and promoting social work practice research

Abstract

While both practice and research in the realm of social work across the world are constantly developing, social work practice research has achieved remarkable progress due to its innovative approaches integrating of practice and research. Inspired by the increased need for effective social work research to address the dynamic and complex practice in China, Peking University-The Hong Kong Polytechnic University China Social Work Research Centre has been committed to developing and promoting of social work practice research in recent years. The centre has already organised several international seminars on practice research and developed a series of pertinent training programmes, which have significantly advanced practice research, particularly action research in the context of China. In November 2021, an international conference entitled “Dialogue: International Conference on Social Work Practice Research” was jointly held by the centre, the Department of Sociology of Peking University and the Department of Applied Social Sciences of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. A group of leading scholars who had greatly contributed to the development of social work practice research were invited to attend the conference and share their new ideas and the latest research in the field. The conference gained great success, and some speakers were invited to write their reports and publish in the China Journal of Social Work. The theme of this special issue is “Social work practice research: philosophy, ethic and practices”, which contains seven articles based on the invited talks given at the conference. The first article by Irwin Epstein was mainly inspired by the work of Greek philosopher Alexander Nehamas and conceptualised the relationship between practice and research in social work as a “virtue friendship”. It claimed that practice and research in social work did not just mutually benefit each other but also engaged together in cultivating “virtue friendship” between them. Irwin Epstein recommended that Cicero’s ever-relevant question “Cui Bono?” should be asked to evaluate the contributions of practice research to social work practice and policy. He particularly advocated using clinical data mining as an important approach to practice research in social work. It is always enlightening to see practice research in social work as a “virtue friendship”. In the second article, Martin Webber emphasised the significance of methodological pluralism in social work practice research. He used an intervention model entitled “Connecting People” as an example to illustrate the necessity of employing multiple methods to develop and evaluate social interventions. The article introduced the application of Connecting People in England and indicated that the development of the model started with a thorough understanding of the need for the intervention. To be specific, Connecting People was developed from an ethnography of social work practice and then piloted in quasi-experimental studies alongside focus groups and semi-structured interviews. Martin Webber stated that the intervention process and the resulting model were CHINA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK 2022, VOL. 15, NO. 3, 207–209 https://doi.org/10.1080/17525098.2022.2140926