Chapter 3 Review Questions and Exercises
1. Think about a social work practice approach or a social justice issue or cause to which you are strongly committed and about which you fiercely hold certain beliefs. Rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10 on how scientific you are willing to be about those beliefs. How willing are you to allow them to be questioned and refuted by scientific evidence? How much do you seek scientific evidence as a basis for maintaining or changing those beliefs? Find a classmate whose beliefs differ from yours. Discuss your contrasting views. Then rate each other on the same 10-point scale. Compare and discuss the degree to which your self-rating matches the rating your classmate gave you. If you are not willing to be scientific about any of those beliefs, discuss your reasons in class and encourage your classmates to share their reactions to your point of view.
2. Examine several recent issues of a social work research journal (such as Research on Social WorkPractice or Social Work Research). Find one article illustrating the idiographic model of explanation and one illustrating the nomothetic model. Discuss the value of each and how they illustrate the contrasting models.
3. Suppose you have been asked to design a research study that evaluates the degree of success of a family preservation program that seeks to prevent out-of-home placements of children who are at risk of child abuse or neglect by providing intensive in-home social work services. Under what conditions might you opt to emphasize quantitative methods or qualitative methods in your design? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? How and why might you choose to combine both types of methods in the design?
Chapter 3 InfoTrac/Internet Exercises
1. Use InfoTrac College Edition to find an article that discusses the scientific method. Read an article that sounds useful. Write down the bibliographical reference information for the article and summarize the article in a few sentences.
2. Use InfoTrac College Edition to fi nd an article in Policy Studies Journal (Spring 1998) by Ann Chih Linn entitled “Bridging Positivist and Interpretivist Approaches to Qualitative Methods.” Briefly describe Linn’s thesis that these two approaches can be combined and are not mutually exclusive.
3. Using a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or Lycos, find information on the web for at least two of the following paradigms. Give the web addresses and report on main themes you find in the discussions. (Critical social science, Feminism, Interpretivism, Positivism, Postmodernism, Social constructivism)