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Abstract
There is wide variability in the amount and type of practice evaluation conducted by social work practitioners. This article reports the results of a survey on the attitudes towards and methods employed for evaluating practice effectiveness among 222 graduate-level clinical social workers from New York State. Instruments consisted of two indexes: (a) an Empirical Evaluation Index (EEI) and (b) a Pragmatic Evaluation Index (PEI) following the work of Gerdes and colleagues. Findings suggest that clinical social workers are evaluating their practice and employ a variety of both empirical/quantitative and pragmatic methods. While respondents appeared more comfortable with pragmatic evaluation methods, a majority indicated that they were open to evaluating their practice using empirical/quantitative approaches. Graduate education had a positive impact on social workers' utilization of empirical methods. Implications of findings for social work education and practice are described.
Although the social work literature has stressed the importance of evaluating clinical practice for more than sixty years, more recently the social work profession has sought to mandate such activity as part of every social worker's practice. The current standards for accreditation by the Council on Social Work Education (1994) and the Code of Ethics of both the National Association of Social Workers (1997) and the Clinical Social Work Federation (1997) stipulate that social workers must engage in practice evaluation to build practice knowledge and to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions.
Practice evaluation is a basic component of clinical practice along with assessment and intervention. Systematic evaluation helps social workers to answer a fundamental question: Does the work we do make a difference? Clearly, social workers should evaluate their practice. However, there are questions about the extent of practitioners' involvement in evaluation of their practice, the means or methods they employ in their practice evaluation, and their sense of preparedness and confidence in evaluating their practice.
The literature suggests that social workers differ widely in their belief in, and use of, various practice evaluation methods (Elks & Kirkhart, 1993; Millstein, Regan & Reinherz, 1990; Penka & Kirk, 1991), differ about which existing methods are "empirical" (Alter & Evans, 1990; Klein & Bloom, 1995; Witkin, 1992) and are relevant to practice (Galinsky, Turnbull, Meglin, & Wilner, 1993; Heineman, 1981; Kirk, Osmalov, & Fischer,...