Rational claims to effectiveness in social work's critical literature

Abstract

Social work's preoccupation with psychotherapeutics and the enormous pressure to prove the field's outcome effectiveness on scientific grounds are tied into the metaphor of “helping.” Yet social work's outcome studies and its discussion of those studies in its critical literature are neither scientifically credible nor usually coherent in the profound sense of science. This article reviews social work's outcome studies up to 1983 and discusses their shortcomings in light of the field's critical tradition. Social work's failure to develop a science of therapeutics and its inability to credibly demonstrate the effectiveness of its outcomes are tolerated in a political and social climate that encourages high status institutions to reinforce conservative values. The solution lies in replacing the metaphor of “helping” with that of “giving,” that is, accepting to a much greater degree the traditional role of providing social services to achieve the goals of greater social equality.

Cite this work

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

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

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