The importance of not being judgemental (or how chaos theory relates to social work!)

When people tell us about their lives and their situations, it's natural for us to connect them to our own experiences and draw parallels.  Indeed, personal experience is a very useful part of any social worker's knowledge base.  However, without checks and balances it can also be very damaging to the way in which we practice.

The obvious example is where a social worker feels that they "know" how someone is feeling.  Philosophers of Mind would quickly tell that social worker that they cannot know how someone is feeling.  Empathy has a large role to play in social work interactions, but is not about knowing.  Rather, empathy is "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another" (Oxford English Dictionary).  Albeit quite subtle, the difference between sharing / understanding and knowing is very significant.

Even where a service user has superficially the same experiences as us, we cannot extrapolate to say we know how they feel.  Say, for instance we are the same age, gender, ethnicity, etc. as a service user and are disabled in the same way as them.  Perhaps we also went to the same school and live in the same town.  Can we say we know what their experiences are and how they feel?  Chaos theory is a good analogy here: the same prima facie initial conditions of a system can produce widely divergent results.  Similarly, experiences that look exactly the same can be perceived very differently by two different people.

When working with a service user (or talking to someone in the street!) we need to remember that we are not that person, and that no two people have the same experiences regardless of how similar we might think they appear.  Our best guess comes from spending a long time talking to and being with that service user, and even then we are still guessing.

Power and Evidence-Based Practice

Despite the attempts to try and include service users, social work research is always going to be a top-down exercise, i.e. not conducted by the poorer members of society or the most vulnerable.  This begs the question of whether using an evidence-based approach can exacerbate the part of social work which says "we know what's best for you".  When we, as professionals, know what is most likely to work to help a service user with their situation, it can be tempting to think we have the answers.

Remembering that there is definitely not one definitive answer, and we are always working with probabilities, is one way of ensuring that we address the power imbalance.  More importantly, we need to keep in mind that although interested in "what works", we are more interested in "what matters" to that particular individual (Newman et al, 2005).

This social work malarkey's all quite simple when you've got a reductive way of thinking, I think.

The Ethics of Evidence-Based Practice

I'd not really given much thought to how to argue the point for evidence-based work in social work - but I was pretty aware that there would be lots of counter arguments about how social work needs to focus on the individual and each case cannot be scientifically thought-out.

I came across this rather lovely summary that gets to the crux of the argument:

"...it can be argued that only practice that has been subject to rigorous effectiveness research can truly claim to be ethical practice."

[Ainsworth and Hansen, 2002, quoted in "Evidence Based Social Work: A Guide for the Perplexed" by Newman, et al]

Of course there's a need to tailor each individual intervention, each piece of social work practice to the service user that you are working with.  The professional judgement of how to intervene should be based on what is most likely to work for that individual - and the only way to really determine that is by matching the results of research to the real-world context.