Investigating outcomes of social care programmes using creative study designs for service excellence

ABSTRACT In this paper, the author has reviewed four pieces of practice research that aim to investigate the outcome of social care programmes. Special attention is given to the process where the concerns of social work practitioners and stakeholders, including academic supervisors, agency administrators, funders and policy makers involved in the dialogues. In addition to the requirement of rigour in study design, priority is given to the significance of the contribution to practice knowledge through adequately interpreting and disseminating research findings through dialogues. Based on the mapping of individual practitioner−researcher, exemplars of randomised controlled trial and clinical data mining in social care programme evaluation are selected to illustrate how they respond to the research questions in a specific practice setting.