intervention by administering a scale that measured burnout. This scale was to be administered before the service began and at the end of 6 months of service. She noted from the literature that this scale had been tested and was found to be reliable. Her next step in this process would be to collect and analyze these scores to see if the one taken at the end of the service was significantly better than the one taken at the beginning.
As is evident from the example given above, science can inform various aspects of social work practice. Practice, with this group of clients, was informed by science with regard to the definition and analysis of the client’s target behavior, the search for an effective treatment, and how to measure success. After Miley collects data, she will need to be careful to allow her data to inform her conclusions.
The above example is of direct social work practice. If you are engaged in a program evaluation, there are many avenues you could take. You could examine whether the clients in your program have the characteristics that the program is supposed to serve. If the target population consists of people in poverty, you could collect data on the proportion of the clients in this program who live below the poverty line. You could examine the standards employed in this program as compared with official standards of good practice, such as the credentials of the staff who provide the service. You could examine the efficiency of certain services compared with that of similar agencies. What, for example, is the cost per client served by this agency as compared with other agencies? And, of course, you could examine outcomes for this program, such as the recidivism rate for confirmed cases of child neglect or the gain in feelings of support among those in the support group for victims of violence.
Common Sense and the Scientific Method
There are commonsense sayings that we can relate to scientific inquiry. They are offered below to show that science and common sense often have much in common, even though they originated in different ways. These similarities were presented in a previous text by the same author (York, 1997) and will be summarized here. Most of these statements come from commonsense sayings you may have heard.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel!
In the history of human inquiry, there has been an enormous amount of social research that has been undertaken. When we develop a research question, we usually find that there is a great deal of guidance that can come from an examination of the literature. Often, we will find a suitable answer to our question from this review and will not find it necessary to undertake a new study of the subject. Even when we do not find a suitable answer to our question, we will find much guidance from the literature on those aspects of the question that have been left more unanswered, and we can find assistance with the conceptualization of our study and the measurement of social phenomena required to answer our question.
It is not reasonable for us to expect a novice researcher to acquire an exhaustive review of the literature on a given subject. You will find a wide range of knowledge in places that are not well known or easily accessed. However, we can expect a novice researcher to delve into the most available and best known literature on the subject of inquiry, so that he or she can avoid repeating the mistakes of early work on the subject or failing to contribute anything of substance about the topic.
You will find that there is normally a wide array of research on any given subject. You will also find that there is usually a good deal of research that needs to be added. Often what is needed is the use of a different type of person as the study subject or a different way of conceptualizing or measuring the phenomena under inquiry. Thus, we are not likely to encounter a situation in which the research we wish to undertake is substantially redundant. The greater reason for examining the previous literature is to help us avoid the mistakes of the past. We might find that the way we wish to undertake our study has been done many years ago but has been found wanting in its ability to provide a good means of addressing our research question. Later research will be found to have corrected for these mistakes in research methods.
Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse!
research process follows the same basic path as good problem solving and critical thinking. If you are engaged in good problem solving, you will start with the identification of the problem and the objectives to be achieved by solving it. You will then identify methods for solving the problem. Following implementation of the solution, you will evaluate the results. One of the common pitfalls in basic human problem solving is for us to state the problem in terms of only one solution. In doing so, we are starting with a solution rather than with the identification of the human condition to be addressed.
Social research begins with the formulation of the problem resulting in the articulation of the research question. After the research question has been clearly identified, we determine the methods to be used in the pursuit of the answer to our question. One of the mistakes commonly made by the novice researcher is to begin a process of inquiry with a research instrument. It is not uncommon for a student of research to review a set of research instruments that measure certain psychological conditions and become especially interested in the use of a certain instrument in some kind of research.
The process of research conceptualized in this book starts with problem formulation and moves logically to research methodology, then to data collection and analysis, and ending with conclusions. Obviously, we should not start with conclusions about the research question. We have covered this mistake in our examination of the purposes of scientific inquiry (discovery rather than justification). Likewise, it is not logical to start with data and formulate a research question that fits the data. (However, it is legitimate to use an exploration of data as a springboard for focusing a set of questions that guide the investigation of the literature.) Furthermore, as mentioned above, we should not start the process with the selection of study methods. We need to know our research question before we can select the optimal means of measurement of our variables.
Let’s go over the critical steps in the social research process. First, we decide on the purpose of our study. Do we want to describe the members of a class of students in a university program, so that we will know the distribution of these people by age, gender, race, and so forth? Or do we want to examine whether males and females are different with regard to satisfaction with life? Or do we want to know if after-school tutoring helps at-risk children improve their grades? The first of these examples is about descriptive research—our attempt to describe people. The one about gender and life satisfaction is sometimes referred to as explanatory research because we wish to explain whether there is a relationship between variables, which would help us explain the variables. The one about tutoring is evaluative in nature because we are examining if a service program is effective with regard to the objectives it is seeking to achieve.
Two Heads Are Better Than One!
Because objective reality is so difficult to discover in the field of human behavior, we must rely on a method of inquiry that reduces human error in observation. One such method is to ask for more than one observation of a given phenomenon in order to become confident that we have a true picture of it. In research, we assume that reality is more likely to be discovered the more we find different people perceiving things in the same light. We know, of course, that it is possible that one person who is in the minority has the true picture while those in the majority are incorrect. But in view of the fact that we have so little truly “hard” evidence of reality about human behavior, we make the assumption that our best bet is to go with the consensus of many people rather than the unsupported opinion of one person. And we have many methods that have been developed to test the dependability of a given method of measuring our subjects of study. Thus, we could say that this principle serves as one of the assumptions of scientific inquiry.
Some Things Happen Just by Chance!
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