Chapter Two: How Do Social Workers Know Things?

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Chapter Two How Do Social Workers Know Things?
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Scientific Method

• Scientific Method p. 12 - an approach to inquiry
  that attempts to safeguard against errors
  commonly made in casual human inquiry.
• Features include
• Viewing all knowledge as provisional and subject
  to refutation
• Searching for evidence based on systemic and
  comprehensive observation
• Pursuing objectivity in observation
• Replication

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Scientific Method

• Emphasizes the pursuit of objectivity.
• Everything is open to question.
• The ideal of objectivity vs. the reality.
• Empirical (RB, p. 19) empirical evidence is
  evidence based upon observation.
• The act of observation affects the observed.
• Important to acknowledge biases.
• Back to the blind men and the elephant
• Replication (RB, p. 20) Replication means
  duplicating a study to see if the same evidence
  and conclusions are supported.
• Extension (replication over a different time
  period)
• i.e. What did human needs mean 1800-1921, and
  what did is mean 1921-1969 to the National
  Conference on Social Welfare?

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Ways of Knowing

• Ann Hartmans Editorial In Social Work
• Social workers as witnesses
• Perhaps one might call social work witnessing.
  The idea being that one is in a privileged
  position to witness and help alleviate human
  suffering and harm and therefore has a
  responsibility to testify to society about its
  nature. The goal shouldn't be to withdraw from
  that role but to fully implement it, no? (Dover
  2005)
• Practice Wisdom

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Other Ways of Knowing

• Charles Ragins Elements of Social Research
  (Handout)
• Research as one way of constructing
  representations of social life
• Others films, novels, diaries, process
  recordings of your practice and interactions

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Other Ways of Knowing

• Tradition (RB, p. 13)
• Each generation does not have to relearn the
  lessons that created the present body of
  knowledge.
• Knowledge is the cumulative, and an inherited
  body of information and understanding is the
  jumping-off point for the development of more
  knowledge.
• In practice tradition may involve conforming to
  an agencys preferred way of doing things.
• Example of substance abuse treatment.
• Downside of tradition
• Erroneous assumptions
• Overconfidence in veracity of current knowledge
• Sanction of controversial questions

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Other Ways of Knowing Continued

• Authority (RB, p. 13)
• Considering the reputed expertise of the source
  of information in deciding whether to be guided
  by that information.
• Knowledge is more likely to be accepted if it
  comes from an authority
• e.g. scholarly sources such as journals, reliable
  sources, etc.
• Can help and hinder human inquiry.
• MD Resistance to Expert knowledge or the cult
  of the expert

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Other Ways of Knowing Continued

• Common Sense (RB, p. 14)
• Pros Pragmatic and can generate scientific
  research questions
• Cons Risky and insufficient
• Why not research whether common sense makes
  sense?
• Popular Media (RB, p. 14)
• Pros Source of digested research results
• Only as good as the journalist who did the
  abstracting of results
• If an independent review of the cited sources
  shows a good source, can be helpful in informing
  practice and clients
• Cons Source of new but unvalidated results and
  misinterpretation

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Recognizing Flaws

• Inaccurate Observation (RB, p. 15) All inquiry
  is based on observation.
• Occurs when we are too causal in our
  observations, not making deliberate attempts to
  reduce errors.
• Essential to know what is occurring before we can
  determine why it is occurring.
• Human Observation vs. Scientific Observation
• General human observation is unsystematic and
  haphazard
• Scientific observation is conscious activity and
  thereby reduces error

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Recognizing the Flaws Continued

• Overgeneralization (RB, p. 15) the assumption
  that a few similar events are evidence of a
  general pattern
• occurs when we generalize based on an
  insufficient number of observations
• PB example of interviewing rioters
• My research in Detroit in 1967 - If you dont
  overgeneralize, can be a source of valuable
  hypotheses for further research, such as role of
  exempt property in deterioration of cities.
• Science guards against it with large samples and
  replication (hopefully independent)

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Recognizing the Flaws Continued

• Selective Observation (RB, p. 16) - We attend to
  events that correspond to our predictions and
  overlook contradictions.
• The world is as we see it.
• The review of peers assists scientist to control
  for this source of error
• Value of using eco-systems approach to organize
  research findings in a way which guides practice,
  and avoids selective observation
• Nobody Loves You When Youre Down and Out
  Knowledge of the Psychosocial Consequences of
  Unemployment, 1979 and 2004 (Dover 1979 and
  Dover in progress, see blackboard)

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Recognizing the Flaws

• Ex Post Facto Hypothesizing (RB, p. 16)
• Making new hypothesizes based on one studies
  results
• Happens when we think up reasons to explain away
  inconsistencies between what we believe and what
  we observe
• Ok to do as long as we test the new hypothesis,
  otherwise it is just made-up information
• EXAMPLE Battered womens outreach
• EXAMPLE Abandonment of the seduction theory
  (Freud and Fliess)

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Recognizing the Flaws

• Ego Involvement in Understanding (RB, p. 17)
• Can create error when we resist accepting
  observations that make us look less desirable
• Always a danger
• Partially controlled for in science by peer
  review.
• Commonly seen in program evaluation research.

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Recognizing the Flaws Continued

• Premature Closure of Inquiry (RB, p. 18)
• Occurs when we rule out certain lines of inquiry
  that might produce findings that we would find
  undesirable
• Overgeneralization, selective observations,
  made-up information, and defensive uses of
  illogical reasoning.
• A particular type of treatment that works with
  one client does not mean it will work with all
  clients

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Illogical Reasoning

• "the exception that proves the rule
• "gambler's fallacy
• a good turn of luck is just around the corner.
• Related string of good or bad luck seen as a
  real trend
• Saved by not wearing a seatbelt
• Key Concept
• anomalies

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Illogical Reasoning Continued

• Straw Person Argument (RB, p. 18)
• When someone attacks a particular position by
  distorting it in a way that makes it easier to
  attack
• Ad hominem attack (RB, p. 18)
• Attack the messenger rather than the message
• Bandwagon Appeal (RB, p. 18)
• where a relatively new intervention is touted on
  the basis of its growing popularity

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Illogical Reasoning Continued

• Mystification - occurs when attribute things we
  do not understand to supernatural or mystical
  causes.
• Assertion of the unknowable- A cherished belief
  about practice effectiveness must be true and is
  beyond the ability of researchers to test out.
• An article of faith in science is that everything
  is potentially knowable

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To Err is Human

• Science differs from casual, day-to-day inquiry
  in two ways
• Science inquiry is a conscious activity
• we decide what, how, and for how long we will
  observe the object or phenomenon of interest.
• Scientific inquiry is more careful than our
  causal efforts

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Objectivity and Subjectivity in Scientific Inquiry

• Paradigms (RB, p. 19)
• fundamental model or scheme that organizes our
  view of something
• Research Traditions (Laudan)

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Objectivity Subjectivity

• Acts a frame of reference that help shape our
  observations and understandings
• Positivist paradigm emphasizes the pursuit of
  objectivity in our quest to observe and
  understand reality
• Social constructivist emphasizes multiple
  subjective realities and the most impossibility
  of objectivity
• Postmodernism (an extreme form of
  Constructivism) an objective reality does not
  even exist

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Key Concepts By Page

• Direct, personal inquiry 11
• Scientific method 11
• Direct experience and observation (how we know
  things, p. 11)
• Everything is subject to refutation (tentative
  until proven) 12
• Everything is open to question 12
• Authority 12
• Dogma 12
• Empirical Support (G) 12
• Tradition 13
• Common Sense 14

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Key Concepts By Page

• Inaccurate observation 15
• Overgeneralization 15
• Replication of inquiry (G) 16
• Selective observation 16
• Ego involvement in understanding 17
• Ex post facto hypothesizing 17
• Ad Hominem Attack
• Bandwagon effect or appeal 18
• Straw person argument 18
• Illogical reasoning 18
• Premature closure of inquiry 18

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Key Concepts By Page

• Positivist paradigm (G) 19
• Postmodernism (G) 19
• Positivism (G) 19
• Social constructivist paradigm (G) 19
• Modernism 19
• Frame of reference (paradigm) 19
• All knowledge is provisional (tentative until
  proven beyond reasonable doubt)
• Hypothesis (G) 323

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Key Concepts ABC

• Ad Hominem Attack
• All knowledge is considered provisional
  (tentative until proven beyond reasonable doubt)
• Authority 12
• Bandwagon effect or appeal 18
• Common sense 14
• Direct experience and observation (how we know
  things, p. 11)
• Direct, personal inquiry 11
• Dogma 12
• Ego involvement in understanding 17
• Empirical Support (G) 12
• Everything subject to refutation 12

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Key Concepts ABC

• Everything is open to question 12
• Ex post facto hypothesizing 17
• Frame of reference (paradigm) 19
• Hypothesis (G)
• Illogical reasoning 18
• Inaccurate observation 15
• Modernism 19
• Overgeneralization 15
• Positivism (G) 19
• Positivist paradigm (G) 19

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Key Concepts ABC

• Postmodernism (G) 19
• Premature closure of inquiry 18
• Provisional knowledge
• Replication of inquiry (G) 16
• Scientific method 11
• Selective observation 16
• Social constructivist paradigm (G) 19
• Straw person argument 18
• Subject to refutation
• Tradition 13

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Key Points Ch. 2

• 1. Remember what Ann Hartman said about many ways
  of knowing? And how Charles Ragin pointed out
  that researching social life is much like other
  forms of inquiry such as journalism? Our
  attempts to learn about the world we live in come
  from all sources, including direct experience,
  tradition, authority, and direct, personal
  inquiry. But research is a special form of
  learning about the world. This is not to say
  that science offers total protection against the
  errors that nonscientists commit in casual,
  day-to-day inquiry, it doesnt. But we try.

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Key Points Ch. 2

• 2. Often, social workers tend to view
  psychiatrists and pschologists or social workers
  who have doctorates as authorities, when for all
  you know that MSW with a clinical license and his
  doctorate did a dissertation on property tax
  valuations in Ohios urban areas, so he is no
  more an authority on clinical social work than
  any other MSW with 10 years of post-MSW
  experience working with individuals. Lets not
  set each other up as an authority just based upon
  degrees. When a social worker makes a practice
  decision based upon the advice of someone just
  because they have a doctorate or some other
  credential, they are basing that decision not on
  evidence but on authority.

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Key Points Ch. 2

• 3. But lets say that that person with a
  doctorate just authored a small study of a
  particular intervention and it wasnt based on a
  random sample in any case. Wouldnt there be a
  danger of overgeneralization? Yes. In that
  case, what would be one way to try to gather
  further data? Well, you wouldnt want to
  replicate the study, since it wasnt based on a
  random sample anyway, and perhaps there wasnt a
  control group that received a standard
  intervention to which it could be compared. But
  lets say it was a well-designed study, but the
  sample was small. One way to guard against
  overgeneralization would be to do a replication
  of this study with another random sample from the
  same or similar population.

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Key Points Ch. 2

• 4. It is important not to prematurely close
  inquiry, thinking you already know enough.
  Thats a good lesson for our research in this
  class on SWK 100 students and the time schedules
  of social work majors and intents. Replication
  of a study is often a good idea, and there is
  nothing wrong with not exactly duplicating the
  study, if flaws were found. Improve by all
  means, even if it means items arent identical
  from year to year. After all, the sample has
  changed as well, and changes in samples are
  likely to affect answers more than changes in
  questions! Dont assume an intervention is a
  success if there is a risk that there was a
  premature closure of inquiry. For instance, in
  last years SWK 100 study, the ones studied were
  the ones who showed up for class, but there were
  a lot of absences! Anyway we could solve that
  problem? A blackboard survey by any chance?

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• 5. One of the worst errors in is to ignore events
  that don't correspond with a previously observed
  pattern of events is. That is called selective
  observation. Its important not to try to thing
  that concepts in the text mean what they might
  mean in everyday usage. For instance, selective
  observation doesnt mean something like choosing
  the wrong sample or picking which items to pay
  attention to. Nor does it mean the same thing as
  selection bias, covered in chapter 16. It means
  what it says it means in chapter 2, it is a
  common, human thing to do. You are used to
  seeing a pattern of events. You see something
  new and different that might contradict what you
  thought, and you disregard it! That is what
  selective observation means in this context. And
  the best antidote to it is using a clear research
  design, consulting with colleagues about the
  previous patterns and the new observations
  (rather than ignoring them), and planning
  research which studies things over time and
  across a sufficient number of observations that
  you can ascertain whether a newly observed
  finding is truly an exception to the rule or
  evidence that your rule needs to be rethought!

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• 6. Another hard to understand word is ex post
  facto hypothesizing. Unless you studied a lot
  of Latin or had a Latin dictionary handy, you
  wouldnt know that ex post facto means after
  the fact. Ex post facto hypothesizing is fine
  if it means you did an inductive study, the kind
  where you start without any clear hypotheses and
  collect data and then afterwards try to theorize
  about what you saw. Thats especially ok if you
  plan to do more research later. It really is
  legitimate to engage in ex post facto
  hypothesizing if doing so requires additional
  research.

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Key Points

• 7. But if your ex post facto hypothesizing
  amounts to explaining away your inability to
  confirm your initial hypothesis, thats a source
  of common misinterpretation of findings. Yes
  its illogical, but there are lots of kinds of
  illogical reasoning, this after the fact
  hypothesizing, a specific kind of flaw in
  scientific reasoning.

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Key Points

• 8. Ok, weve talked about Latin, now what about
  your typical everyday language. For instance,
  common sense. Im sure you will realize that the
  scientific method doesnt tend to put much store
  in common sense. So even if you might think
  common sense is a good thing in general, on the
  average research test, common sense may not get
  you very far. Knowing Latin, maybe. Common
  sense, problem know. But what about knowing what
  words like straw person means? Priceless. Me,
  Im always clueless and have to look it up, even
  though Ive been the victim time and time again
  of straw person attacks. You say A, someone says
  you said B and since B makes no sense whatsoever,
  you make no sense whatsoever. So what a straw
  person argument does is distort the position of
  the person you are trying to attack.

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Key Points

• 9. Now lets move from Latin to Philosophy! It
  is the philosophy of science and social science
  which has developed these concepts such as
  paradigm. A paradigm is simply a frame of
  reference shared by a number of people within a
  field or subfield. Another way of thinking about
  a paradigm is that it is a fundamental model or
  scheme that organizes our view of something.

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Key Points

• 10. One paradigm is the positivist paradigm, and
  you will hear a lot about how this paradigm
  strongly emphasizes the pursuit of objectivity.
  You will hear that it believes in maximizing
  precision and objectivity in testing whether an
  intervention reduces an undesirable behavior.
  The positivist paradigm embraces rather than
  rejects the pursuit of objectivity in our quest
  to observe and understand reality.

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Key Points

• 11. Whereas you will hear that the social
  constructivist paradigm does, and for the
  purposes of this course and the quiz, that is
  true, because the social constructivist paradigm
  stresses that people have multiple subjective
  realities. But what if it is objectively true
  that people have such multiple senses of reality,
  cant we study those perceptions objectively?
  Philosophically, the issue is whether or not we
  as scientists believe that there is some
  objective reality. Postmodernism is a point of
  view which actually does believe that there are
  only multiple subjective realities, and questions
  the existence of an objective external reality.
  So it goes beyond mere social constructionism,
  which although it is referred to as a paradigm by
  the authors is really in my opinion a theoretical
  point of view held by people from any number of
  epistemological perspectives. Modernism and
  postmodernism are more than pardigms, they are
  philosophies of science about how we understand
  the world around us, they are epistemologies.

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• 12. In my paper, Teaching Yourself to Write A
  Thesis Several Easy Steps, which Ive posted on
  the website, I cite Michael Mann as saying that
  it matters little whether the sociologist
  advocates positivism, interpretivism or realism
  or some other epistemological point of view,
  since in reality the sociologist operates as if
  they could apprehend and describe reality through
  the process of operationalization, and as if they
  could rely on absolute standards of scientific
  proof for their results to be evaluated (Mann,
  1981 548, emphasis in the original). (Not on
  quiz)

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Key Points

• 13. A word on overgeneralization The bottom line
  is that it refers to drawing conclusions about an
  entire population from a sample of that
  population which wasnt representative. Or, it
  refers to drawing conclusions about population B,
  when the research was on population A. Thats not
  selective observation! Thats overgeneralization.
  Yes, the conclusions draw from
  overgeneralization may be inaccurate, but they
  are not inherently inaccurate. In fact, they may
  not be inaccurate at all! Population B may in
  fact be like Population A. But you dont know
  that because you overgeneralized based on the
  study available.

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• 14. You are sure to be asked about ego
  involvement. Basically thats a form of bias in
  which you lose your ability to evaluate whether
  research is effective because you have so much
  ego involvement in the results. I mean lets say
  lets say you and your colleagues use nothing but
  ACT for treating cancer, despite the fact that
  ECT is used in Canada and Europe because of the
  cardiotoxicity of the A drug and because since it
  took so long to get E approved in the USA it
  costs 22 times as much here in the states. You
  see a study from France, one from Italy, and one
  from the US (but with the US one done by a doctor
  with consultant ties to the drug coming making
  E.) You put down the studies about ECT because
  it is not on the list of the approved regimens at
  the top 20 research universities, as approved by
  the board on which you sit! You call ECT an
  unnecessary treatment no more effective or less
  toxic than ACT and you call yet another new
  cancer treatment used at a top medical school not
  in your consortium an outlaw treatment. Thats
  a great example of ego involvement in
  evaluating research studies. It goes on all the
  time, and is done even by leading clinicians.
  Ego involvement is when you are biased against
  something because it threatens your authority,
  the tradition in which you work, or threatens
  your own work.

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Key Points

• 15. Now that doesnt mean you should disregard
  agency traditions. The ethics say you should
  respect your colleagues findings, but that
  doesnt mean you should agree with them. It also
  doesnt mean you should disregard authority,
  since the ethics discuss the appropriate use of
  consultation and stress our accountability (but
  note they dont say as much about supervision as
  you might think!). Think critically, and realize
  that tradition and authority arent always what
  they are cut out to be, but you have an
  obligation to seek out alternative sources of
  knowledge or research findings that might
  challenge that authority or tradition.

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Key Points

• 16. After all, all existing knoweldge, even that
  based on authority or tradition should be
• Provisional (tentative until proven true)
• Ssubject to refutation
• Supported by objective observations
• Supported by systematic and comprehensive
  observations
• Supported by a large and diverse sample of
  observations
• Supported by observations gathered in ways that
  seek to reduce the influence of researcher biases
• It is not enough that it is supported by the
  teaching of a few authoritative scientists.