Moving Best Practice to Evidence-Based Practice in Child Welfare

Michelle L. Kessler · Emmanuelle C. Gira · John P. Poertner

62 citations0/0 files storedFamilies in Society The Journal of Contemporary Social Services

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Child Welfare and Adoption Social Work Education and Practice Health Sciences Research and Education

Abstract

Increased emphasis is being placed on improving outcomes for abused and neglected children served by the child welfare system. To achieve this goal, the notion of “best practice” is widely embraced. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on its definition. Various interpretations include (a) practice wisdom, (b) emulating other systems, (c) expert consultants, (d) professional guidelines, and (e) evidence-based practice. In this article, the authors describe the advantages and disadvantages of each of these definitions. While all of them have a role to play in improving results of child welfare interventions, the authors argue that best practice is optimally defined as evidence-based practice. At the same time, there are many difficulties in employing this form of best practice, including a lack of evidence, the transfer of information, and the organizational culture in which the worker operates. Suggested solutions to these difficulties are discussed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.

References

1983Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment.1981Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment.2014Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers 2001Some considerations on the validity of evidence-based practice in social work 1999Evidence-Based Practice: An Alternative to Authority-Based Practice 1995Child Protection Practice: Private Risks and Public Remedies 1995Child Protection Practice: Private Risks and Public Remedies 1996Parental Participation in Child Protection Work: Rethinking the Rhetoric

Cited by

2012The impact of the Solution Based Casework (SBC) practice model on federal outcomes in public child welfare 2008Solution-Based Casework in Child Welfare: Preliminary Evaluation Research 2013Factors Influencing the Uptake of Research Evidence in Child Welfare: A Synthesis of Findings from Australia, Canada and Ireland 2019Building learning cultures in the child welfare workforce 2014Adapting an evidence-based parenting program for child welfare involved teens and their caregivers

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.