Relationship-Based Research in Social Work

Social work practice is rooted in developing relationships and this volume acts to celebrate how this professional skill, with its underpinning value-base, can be transferred to social work research. Importantly, it also reminds us of the centrality of building relationships to the profession, at a time when this can be seen as a luxury in professional encounters and, like other recent social work research texts, highlights qualities that social work research brings to the broader arena of social science research. Its pedigree stretches back to Schön (1983), Dewey (1933), Kolb (1984) and (in its structural dimension) Paulo Freire (1972). It is animated by and further develops the tradition of experiential learning, with its prizing of a meshing between professional practice and reflection. Secondary nutrients are provided by the psychoanalytical legacy with its emphasis on the professional’s interior life and subconscious transactions. The book’s editors and contributors are open-minded and exploratory, and much in their studies is quietly challenging. Notions that research should aspire to be detached, quasi-omniscient and ‘objective’ are spurned. Instead, the researcher that emerges from these pages is subjective, and self-aware about being so. The type of research both esteemed and practised is, for the most part, more qualitative than quantitative. It is also tentative, self-implicating and polyphonic (the book collects studies on relationship-based research from Finland and the UK).

Epistemology · Experiential learning · Pedagogy · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Research in Social Sciences

• The reflective practitioner

  Donald A Schon•The reflective practitioner•1991

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