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Research Methods in Child Welfare resources

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2 Introduction to Child Welfare Research social science research, (2) graduate students and child welfare profession- als who need to acquire research method skills in order to better understand published research so that they can integrate the fi ndings into their prac- tice, (3) professional researchers working in a child welfare context who need to understand how to apply the basic tenets of research practice into this par tic u lar setting, and (4) professional clinicians and administrators in child welfare settings who want to conduct their own research and need a thorough and practical guide for doing so. It is also quite likely that child welfare administrators, both public and private, will consult this book in or- der to sharpen their understanding of the research being conducted in their agency or under their auspices. To set the stage for the book, this chapter begins with a brief discussion of the book’s philosophy of science, followed by a brief history of child wel- fare research. A Brief Overview of Philosophy of Science All research is conducted within a par tic u lar worldview about the nature of reality and the ability of scientifi c inquiry to discover and predict that reality. The worldview—also known as an epistemology—of social science research- ers has evolved over the course of social science research and shapes the general paradigm that guides the researcher’s projects. A paradigm is a ba- sic model or schema that organizes the way a researcher views his or her world (Kuhn 1970). The French writer and phi los o pher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is widely credited with being the fi rst to apply the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences, an approach he termed “positivism.” This approach be- came the dominant epistemology for scientifi c inquiry beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. As a philosophical system of thought, positivism maintains that the goal of knowledge is to describe systemati- cally observed phenomena. In a positivist view of the world, scientifi c “truths” exist and the scientifi c method is the appropriate means for discov- ering these truths in order to understand the world well enough so that events and experiences can be predicted and perhaps controlled. Thus, the “objective” world exists in de pen dently of the perspectives of or mea sure- ments by researchers, and the goal of research is to disclose these “objec- tive” facts. A distinguishing feature of positivism is the absence of any distinction between reality (as things that exist) and knowledge of reality (as things that are recognized). The universe is viewed as deterministic and

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