Abstract
An old proverb states that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In our advanced academic discourse, we also call it path dependence. That is, in the social sciences’ sphere of knowledge, we argue that real change is rare and most often past events, norms, or decisions constrain later events or decisions from offering real transformation. We may slightly modify the way in which a society moves, but basically, we keep perpetuating the same actions over and over. Indeed, Dr. Ronald A. Felman's article reminded me of this sad axiom; I do agree with most of his observations. I am humbled to be invited to offer my response. My comments below reflect some of my thinking and my positioning vis-á-vis the history of social work research.
Feldman starts his review with the 1991 groundbreaking report by the National Institute of Mental Health's Task Force on Social Work Research. Back then, the study chair was David Austin who for many years advocated for high-quality social work research. The report essentially suggested that social work lacks relevant and/or high-quality research. When Feldman echoes the six specific conclusions about the state of social work research from the NIMH report, he does not directly come back to each of these conclusions to assess where we stand. In my view, each of them can still be claimed as if it was written in 2024 and no one will argue for a gross misrepresentation. We cannot argue that there were some significant advancements in social work research, but the overall tenor of the 1991 report still resonates. I believe that we won one major war, but maybe the wrong one.
I concur with Feldman's analysis and the nine challenges he presents. Each challenge can be further developed into its own book. But together, they serve as a mirror for us to assess where social work research is today. Some challenges are well-matured, such as “improving the quality of doctoral programs in social work research” and some are brand new, perhaps even revolutionary, such as “reckoning with the incipient AI elephant in the room.” Together, the challenges are thought provoking and highly needed. Writing a piece like the one Feldman wrote invites criticism and blame. He may be characterized as an elitist, arrogant, and old school.
However, I would like to offer a few personal observations directly or indirectly following Feldman's piece. First, I want to point out that I followed the same path as Austin and Feldman, doing research in the 1990s. What we faced, at that time, was the lack of acknowledgement from our academic peers from the other social sciences dismissing our research capabilities. I would talk with a non-social work faculty member at Penn or elsewhere and they would unanimously assume that social work research is unfounded. They were willing to accept a person from a school as a scholar but viewed the body of social work research as lacking rigor, ideologically driven, and failing methodologically. I myself and many of my colleagues at Penn and around the country worked hard to show that our rigor is equal to theirs. We learned the latest statistical procedures, we conducted large-scale studies, we used census data, we even worked on big data before it was popularized, we successfully competed for NIH grants, and we published in their most prestigious journals. It took over 20 years for us as a collective of scholars to become respected and recognized as members of the academia. Today, almost no one in Research I universities would outright dismiss social work research. Mission accomplished? I do not think so.
Austin (1998) noted that, in years after the report was issued more and better social work research was produced. However, he also cautioned that dissemination and implementation of the results hardly take place and as such new knowledge does not affect social work practice. Feldman correctly noted that “As social workers become more familiar with the research methodologies employed by the social sciences, it is essential that they refrain from adopting their flaws and deficiencies.” Yes! I go over dissertations from Penn and other schools and I marvel at the methodological sophistication. But when I look over it, I fail to find the people that were a part of these studies. Furthermore, I have read social work papers in our top journals and in other academic journals and I am proud of our social work peers for reaching this academic plateau. However, as Feldman aptly stated, most of these studies have no real value to practitioners who must apply research in the real world. For example, some studies use the World Value Survey or similar representative large samples with ingenuity but with zero application to the need of practitioners and their clients. We won the academic battle to be equals in the ivory tower, but we further disentangled ourselves from our field.
When a doctoral candidate asks me what the merit of community action-based research is, knowing that it involves years of real collaboration and cooperation with agencies and communities, I feel an ethical discomfort to answer this question. After praising the wonderful benefits of community action-based research and its contribution to the field, I also ask the students who are soliciting my advice if they wish to graduate in a reasonable time and have a faculty position somewhere. I advise them and make it clear that, by the time they garner publication-worthy material from community action-based research, their peers will possibly gain double the number of practice-irrelevant articles in top academic journals and would be wooed by top schools. When it comes to university professors, published articles are the currency needed for hiring and promotion. Bottom-line, our academic respectability widened rather than narrowing the gap between research and the field.
Second, Felman notes a significant decrease in the number of PhD graduates and an increase in the number of practice doctorates. As the person who conceived and implemented this trend of DSW education, I should have been devastated by these trends but, I am not and for a good reason. When reading the titles of DSW dissertations, irrespective of their methodological rigor, I find them field-relevant. Generally speaking, these dissertations focus on people's issues—and finding solutions to resolve them. This is the research that the field needs. The DSW dissertations, way more than the PhD dissertations, focus on what social work practice needs. DSW graduates come from the field and often plan to go back to the field. The topics they select to study are those most relevant to practitioners and their clients. I believe that a missing challenge in Feldman article is how to link the DSW field relevance with the PhD methodological sophistication. Finding ways to integrate these two in-house doctoral programs can yield the inclusion of the missing “people” from our highly sophisticated PhD methodologies.
Third, Feldman carefully or even artfully articulates what many of us think; not all PhD programs are alike. To say that, by 2021, there were only 200 PhD graduates and these numbers are hard to argue when they show a decline is correct but insufficient. Thus, the growth of PhD-awarding schools is not necessarily an advantage. Many of these new schools offer a PhD degree but treat the students as if they were DSW students. In most of these schools, students must pay full tuition, they are not offered research mentorship, they are not trained to write academic articles, and the rigor of many dissertations is questionable. I am convinced that several deans/directors view these programs as cash-flow programs because they accept working practitioners as part-time students and do not intend to give them the opportunity to be trained to become top-level researchers. In these schools, there is no expectation that graduates will later obtain positions in research-oriented schools. Those who do so are the exception rather than the rule. No one will publicly call any such program deficient; yet informally, when a PhD graduate from one of these many less investing schools applies for a faculty position at a top research university, unless they are exceptional, the relevant personnel/workforce committee would hardly glance at the application. So, the number of PhD awarding programs and the number of their graduates does not tell us much. In fact, we produce well below 200 research-qualified PhD graduates every year. Today, the title PhD does not by itself guarantee quality.
Fourth, when talking with many deans of social work in research universities, it reveals a related recurring problem. Many of the deans assess that between what is directly allocated to a doctoral student during the 4–6 years that it takes for graduation and the cost of the faculty staff and administration to maintain a PhD program costs about $250,000 per student or more. The more students in attendance, the lower the cost per student, but the higher the overall cost for the school. These deans are committed to their responsibility to higher education but can only support a small cohort of doctoral students. Evidently, the top schools receive way more applications than they can admit. From discussions with many ex-applicants, they preferred to apply to other social sciences departments than to apply to lower-ranked schools of social work.
Put differently, we can certainly have far more qualified doctoral students if there were financial resources to fund them. The question is, now, how do we find these resources that would last for many years? That, of course, is another challenge.
Finally, I want to thank Feldman for not falling into previous trendy traps. Few attempts to link the field and research made big promises and delivered too little. I specifically refer to “single-case design” and “evidence-based practice.” Each of them captured our academic attention for about a decade and was designed to bring us to the holy land of science-driven practice. This is my assessment; ultimately, I believe that not only did these trends fail to make our practice more science-related, but they also increased practitioners’ distrust in research. Many academicians got their careers advanced when advocating for these trends and yet there is nothing new under the sun.
