Hey, so…I don’t know if this sounds harsh or not, but I don’t want to hold someone’s hand throughout the tribulations of their life (yikes, that sounds bad written out😱). I want to provide them with the tools needed so they can eventually help themselves. Don’t get me wrong! I love to help and give advice and solutions to my friends and family problems, but I get frustrated when they have the same problems EVEN AFTER I have talked them off the ledge NUMEROUS of times! This might sound cruel for a potential Social Worker, but my approach is “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime”.
You might be wondering, “Erica what does ANY of this have to do with the role science plays in social work?” I’m getting to it! Science gives us evidence of the effectiveness of treatment options. It provides us with solutions to truly help people and promote self-actualization. Science helps to explain and discover patterns in society of various demographics. Science allows Social Workers to use research-based knowledge to better understand their clients and essentially provide effective treatment. On an even bigger scale, Social Workers can use the results from scientific research to help in the policy- making process. With qualitative and quantitative data, policy makers should be more likely to implement suggestions made by informed Social Workers.
For any successful relationship, compatibility plays a significant role in the harmony of the connection. Social work depends on science to promote individual and social change. Science is as vital to social work as vultures are to maintaining the wellbeing of our ecosystem (hmm, maybe I could’ve found a better analogy, 🤔 “vulture” has such a negative connotation…but you get my drift! It’s a mutually beneficial relationship!) Social work provides the variables, hypothesis, and methodologies while science carries out the research and provides the results.
Literature reviews allow Social Workers and other health professionals to work smarter and not harder. If we can refer to research that has already been conducted, we can have proof of what worked, what improvements can be made, what flopped and see how to manipulate variables to produce a more favorable outcome. It also allows us to not do double work, if we see that a study has been conducted on a specific issue already, we can find another angle to tackle or make adjustments to the variables used or the procedure implemented.
In order to help men feed themselves for a lifetime, Social Workers have the responsibility to provide informed solutions to their issues and tools that they can use to maintain their progress. Science allows social workers to adapt to the changing needs of their clients, present new ideas to implement to support their clients, and help to analyze the motivation behind their clients’ actions and behaviors.
(this sounds so cliché 😂 but…)
Cheers to the role Science plays in helping to create a better world for mankind!