What good is soft evidence?
Along with other helping professions, social work is today struggling to become a more "evidence-based" activity. This article explores some of the issues raised by this reevaluation of social work, especially as it relates to the issue of direct social work practice. Despite the current push to base social work helping methods on scientific results ("hard" data), social workers in direct practice continue to rely heavily on qualitative evidence from nonscientific sources ("soft" data) in their daily work. The author explores the main sources and categories of soft data typically encountered in direct practice and analyzes the ways in which practitioners can seek to determine the value and usefulness of such evidence in their daily work.
Murdach
Allison D
AD
allisonandjo@hotmail.com
D003142:Communication; D003657:Decision Making; D055317:Evidence-Based Practice; D006801:Humans; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D012942:Social Sciences; D012947:Social Work; D013850:Thinking; D014956:Writing