Science And Social Work A Critical Appraisal Stuart Kirk William J Reid
Science And Social Work A Critical Appraisal Stuart Kirk William J Reid
Science And Social Work A Critical Appraisal Stuart Kirk William J Reid
Science And Social Work A Critical Appraisal Stuart Kirk William J Reid
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9. This book is dedicated to two young
experimentalists, bright and energetic,
but not yet old enough to read:
lucas dylan kirk and
michael steven reid twentyman
11. Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
. Knowledge, Science, and the Profession of Social Work
. Science and Social Work: A Historical Perspective
. Client Problems as Organizing Foci for Knowledge
. The Scientific Model in Practice: The s and Beyond
. Engineering Social Work Intervention
. Computer-Assisted Social Work Practice:
The Promise of Technology
stuart kirk, william reid, and carrie petrucci
. Research-Based Practice
. Research Dissemination and Utilization: Spreading the Word
. Knowledge for Practice: Issues and Challenges
References
Name Index
Subject Index
■ contents
13. The title of this book may strike some people—and perhaps some social
workers—as an oxymoron. The stereotypical white-coated scientist in a
university basement laboratory, bent over a microscope and petri dish,
might appear completely dissimilar from the standard image of a social
worker finding her way through a public housing project to investigate a
report about an abused child.
The scientist is physically separated from the social world, working in a
specially constructed space designed to allow the study of natural phe-
nomena under highly controlled conditions. He or she builds on the work
of other scientists by following a highly formalized set of procedures to
ensure that the inquiry is objective, verifiable, and unbiased. The knowl-
edge being pursued may have very limited or no immediate applicability in
the world outside the laboratory. The results of the experiment may appear
in a scientific journal months later and be read by only a few other
researchers. Yet the scientist’s study may become a footnote in the work of
successors, a small brick in the edifice perpetually under construction. Sci-
ence is about many small discoveries, laboriously built on one another over
the decades in the quest for knowledge.
The social worker operates in a world outside the university, contending
with a flow of events, people, and problems that are far from controlled. In
fact, social workers are often enlisted precisely because normal processes
and structures have failed: children are not developing well; families are
disintegrating; communities are disenfranchised. Social workers are called
■ preface
14. upon to help a particular client, to improve the situation, to make a differ-
ence today. They often must act without much time for contemplation, con-
sultation, or research, intervening in ways that may appear unique to the
particular circumstances or to the personal style and experience of the
worker. The results of the intervention are rarely made public and are often
difficult to assess objectively. Social work is about many small acts of kind-
ness, persistently pursued in the quest to be of service to others.
From the earliest years of the profession, however, social work leaders
have acknowledged the need to make use of science in two broad ways. One
has been to use its rational, structured methods in delivering services to
clients. Social work, they have suggested, could emulate science if practi-
tioners gathered information more systematically, tried to formulate logi-
cal inferences, and carefully developed and monitored their interventions.
That is, social workers could use the methods of science as techniques of
practice. A second approach has been to use scientific evidence to inform
social work activities. The products of science—the knowledge developed
by researchers—could be used by social workers to better understand their
clients’ problems and to select inteventions most likely to be effective. That
is, social work practice could be grounded in and guided by scientific
knowledge.
Although the use of science in social work has rarely been a topic that
has engaged or preoccupied the entire profession, it has been a persistent
concern of small groups of prominent leaders, researchers, and scholars for
a century. In different ways in different eras, dedicated advocates have
called for closer collaboration between the worlds of science and social
work practice. In this book, we trace the history and success of these varied
efforts and offer a perspective on the enduring challenges that lie ahead.
In a sense, this is a personal as well as historical reflection. Both of us
have spent much of our professorial lives thinking, teaching, and writing
about the role of science and research in social work. It’s certainly been an
important, complicated, intriguing, and controversial endeavor. But it’s
been a frustrating one as well. We acknowledge that we are often preaching
only to the choir at the university and in the academic journals, that we
have made relatively few converts among practitioners, and that our efforts
devoted to knowledge building seem small in relation to the enormity of
the need for information and the tasks social workers undertake. Within
the profession, science remains on the cultural margins, struggling for a
voice and a following. In our critical appraisal of the efforts to link science
and practice, we try to present a balanced and fair view, if for no other rea-
x preface
15. son than that we have been active participants in many of these very efforts.
Therefore, our criticisms of the work of others—many of whom are our
friends and respected colleagues—are also, in part, self-criticism.
Since this book draws on our work over many decades, our gratitude for
help received extends more widely than usual.Of course,we are grateful for
the diffuse personal support that comes from our spouses, Carol Ann and
Ricky, who intimately tolerate our peculiar habits of authorship. But we are
also indebted to many people from many universities who have worked
with us as coauthors, mentors, and colleagues over the years as we have
struggled with the problems that we discuss in this book. Their names are
scattered throughout the bibliography. By joining in our endeavors, many
of our former students have kept the quest alive and satisfying. One, Carrie
Petrucci, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, not only served as a coauthor of a
chapter but also assisted us with unfailing industriousness on numerous
other tasks.We are grateful, also, to our deans and department chairs, Dean
Barbara Nelson and Professor Ted Benjamin at UCLA and Deans Lynn
Videka-Sherman and Katharine Briar-Lawson at the State University of
New York at Albany, for providing academic environments that respect and
nurture scholarly inquiry.
In the end, however, our debt will be to the readers of this book, if they
can understand what the scientist and the social worker have in common
and if, in their own careers, they work to ensure that in the future,“science
in social work’’ will no longer be viewed as a contradiction in terms.
Stuart A. Kirk
William J. Reid
preface xi
17. The authors acknowledge, with thanks, permission to take and adapt some
material from our prior publications: William J. Reid (), “The Empiri-
cal Practice Movement,’’ Social Service Review :–; Stuart A. Kirk
(), “Understanding Research Utilization in Social Work,’’ in A. Rubin
and A. Rosenblatt, eds., Sourcebook on Research Utilization (New York:
CSWE), –; Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk (), Making Us Crazy:
DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders (New York:
Free Press); William J. Reid and Anne Fortune (),“Research Utilization
in Direct Social Work Practice,’’ in A. Grasso and I. Epstein, eds., Research
Utilization in the Social Services (Binghamton,NY: Haworth); Stuart A.Kirk
(), “Research Utilization: The Substructure of Belief,’’ in L. Videka-
Sherman and W. J. Reid, eds., Advances in Clinical Social Work Research
(New York: NASW Pres), –; Sturat A. Kirk (), “Scholarship and
the Professional School’’ in Social Work Research and Abstracts (): –;
Stuart A. Kirk, ed. (), Social Work Research Methods (New York: NASW
Press); William J. Reid and P. Zettergren (),“Empirical Practice in Eval-
uation in Social Work Practice,’’ in I. Shaw and J. Lishman, eds., Evaluation
in Social Work Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).
■ acknowledgments
21. J
ust before noon on Monday, May , , a young reformer
from the General Education Board in New York City rose to
speak at the nd annual meeting of the National Conference
of Charities and Correction in Baltimore. The program for that day covered
the topic “Education for Social Work.” In his disarming opening remarks,
the educator questioned his own competence to address the subject
assigned to him, “Is Social Work a Profession?” because of his limited
knowledge of social work and stressed that he was not prepared to press his
points if they seemed unsound or academic. Although it is not known
exactly how the audience that morning reacted, the speech caused a ring-
ing in the ears of social workers that lasted nearly a century.
In the course of his speech, the educator, Abraham Flexner, concluded
decisively that “social work is hardly eligible” for the status of a profession
(Flexner :).1
One reason for the notoriety of Flexner’s claim was his
reputation as a mover and shaker in professional education. He had just
spearheaded an effort to reform medical education in the United States by
■ chapter one
Knowledge, Science, and the
Profession of Social Work
1
Abraham Flexner was followed to the podium by a professor of law from Harvard Uni-
versity, Felix Frankfurter, who reinforced Flexner’s conclusion by focusing on how the major
professions had gravitated into universities, where there were both entrance and exit require-
ments and multiple-year graduate curricula. He argued that the tasks of an applied social sci-
ence were likely to be no less demanding than those of law or medicine and urged the social
work training schools to follow those professions’model of university affiliation (Frankfurter
).
22. purging many commercial, nonuniversity-affiliated schools. Medical edu-
cation had been moving for decades from a diverse array of hundreds of
proprietary schools with few if any admission or graduation requirements
and only a brief curriculum to a smaller number of university-based pro-
grams, such as those at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Even those two
renowned institutions were asserting control over their autonomous med-
ical schools and developing longer programs with more rigorous require-
ments. Johns Hopkins, for example, which had just opened its medical
school in , made two radical innovations: students had to have a college
degree to enroll, and medical education would take an additional four years
of study (Starr ). Furthermore, the Hopkins program, which provided
the new blueprint for medical education nationally, joined science and
research more firmly to clinical practice.
The American Medical Association was attempting to gain control over
the numerous commercial medical schools through such mechanisms as
state licensing boards and educational standards. In , the AMA estab-
lished a Council on Medical Education, which formulated minimum stan-
dards for medical education; when the Council began grading medical
schools, it found many of them severely wanting in quality (Starr :–
). Fearing conflict among medical schools and professional organizations,
the Council did not share its ratings outside of the medical fraternity.Instead,
theAMA invited an outside group,the Carnegie Foundation for theAdvance-
ment of Teaching, to conduct an investigation of medical education. The
Foundation in turn asked Flexner, whose brother was president of the Rock-
efeller Institute for Medical Research and who himself held a bachelor’s
degree from Hopkins, to lead the effort.
The results of his investigation, based on personal visits to each of the
nation’s medical schools, were released in and exposed many of the
weaker proprietary schools to public embarrassment for grossly inadequate
laboratories, libraries, faculty, and admission standards. In the words of
medical historian Paul Starr, “As Flexner saw it, a great discrepancy had
opened up between medical science and medical education. While science
had progressed, education had lagged behind” (:). The Flexner
report hastened the decline in the number of medical schools and the
number of medical doctors graduated each year, allowing the AMA to gain
much greater control over education and practice. Flexner’s report also
directed the major foundations to invest heavily in a few leading research-
oriented medical schools that had been assimilated into universities. As a
consequence, medical education became dominated by scientists and
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
23. researchers rather than by practitioners. This young reformer, not even a
physician himself, had transformed medical education and practice in ways
that are readily apparent to this day.
Flexner spoke before an audience of people interested in charities, set-
tlement houses, corrections, and social work in , and his reputation as a
powerful figure in reforming professional education and professional prac-
tice was unquestioned. That is why his conclusion that social work was not
yet a profession was given so much credibility. Although it has haunted the
field for many decades, his reasons for reaching it are less well understood.
Flexner’s Challenge
Flexner’s conclusions about social work were not the results of any care-
ful study, visits to social agencies, or interviews with faculty of the training
schools; they were not based on a systematic review of the literature on pro-
fessions or on any careful comparative methods. As his opening sentences
indicate, he was aware that he knew relatively little about social work. His
conclusions were derived from his consideration of what criteria (“certain
objective standards”) must be met for any occupation to rightfully claim
professional status.
He begins by mentioning those occupations that were admitted to be
professions—law, medicine, engineering, and preaching (and adds others,
such as architecture and university teaching, in the course of his exposi-
tion). Then, by induction, he tries to identify the criteria for that designa-
tion. The first is:
that the activities involved are essentially intellectual in character . . . the
real character of the activity is the thinking process. A free, resourceful,
and unhampered intelligence applied to problems and seeking to under-
stand and master them. ()
Since professions are intellectual, the professional“thinker takes upon him-
self a risk” and a responsibility to exercise discretion (). Mere routine
instrumental or mechanical activity does not constitute a profession,
because “some one back of the routineer has done the thinking and there-
fore bears the responsibility” ().
The second criterion is that professions must be “learned,” not largely
employ knowledge “that is generally accessible” to everyone. Practitioners
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
24. “need to resort to the laboratory and the seminar for a constantly fresh sup-
ply” of facts and ideas that keep professions from degenerating into mere
routine and “losing their intellectual and responsible character” ().
Third, professions must have some practical purpose. “No profession
can be merely academic and theoretic”; rather, it must have “an absolutely
definite and practical object.”While professions may draw on the basic sci-
ences, they “strive towards objects capable of clear, unambiguous, and
concrete formulation” (). Fourth, professions must be teachable in a
curriculum, they must possess “a technique capable of communication
through an orderly and highly specialized educational discipline” ().
Fifth, professions are“brotherhoods”of individuals who are selected based
on their qualifications and who devote their lives to their work. Finally,
Flexner argues that professions increasingly are organized for the achieve-
ment of social (not personal) ends, “the advancement of the common
social interest” and the “devotion to well-doing” (). He summarizes:
Professions involve essentially intellectual operations with large individ-
ual responsibility; they derive their raw material from science and learn-
ing; this material they work up to a practical and definite end; they pos-
sess an educationally communicable technique; they tend to self-organ-
ization; they are becoming increasingly altruistic in motivation. ()
Flexner then uses these criteria to consider the professional status of var-
ious occupations, as a way to prove the validity of the criteria. For example,
he concludes that plumbing is merely a handicraft because it is instrumen-
tal, not intellectually derived from science, and its purpose is profit, not
social betterment. He faults banking as an insufficient application of “eco-
nomic science”too focused on profit.He finds pharmacy and nursing want-
ing: both are not predominantly intellectual in character and the primary
responsibility lies with the physician:
It is the physician who observes, reflects, and decides. The trained nurse
plays into his hands; carries out his orders; summons him like a sentinel
in fresh emergencies; subordinates loyally her intelligence to his theory,
to his policy, and is effective in precise proportion to her ability thus to
second his efforts. ()
As if his argument is self-evidently valid, he rallies with this provocative
statement:
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
25. With medicine, law, engineering, literature, painting, music, we emerge
from all clouds of doubt into the unmistakable professions. Without
exception, these callings involve personally responsible intellectual
activity; they derive their material immediately from learning and sci-
ence; they possess an organized and educationally communicable tech-
nique; they have evolved into definite status, social and professional, and
they tend to become, more and more clearly, organs for the achievement
of large social ends. I need not establish this position separately in refer-
ence to each of them. ()
Indeed, this is the only mention Flexner makes of literature, painting, or
music. He picks the example most familiar to his recent reform efforts,
medicine, and easily elaborates on how it meets his criteria.
He then turns his attention to social work,opening with a quote from the
bulletin of the New York School of Philanthropy defining the field. He
immediately concedes that social work appears to meet some of his criteria:
the need for analysis, sound judgment, and skill “are assuredly of intellec-
tual quality”; social workers derive their material from science and learn-
ing; they have a rapidly evolving professional self-consciousness; and they
pursue broader social good, not personal profit.
Flexner fails social work on three other points. First, he suggests that
social workers don’t so much take final responsibility for the solution of a
case (his requirement that “the thinker takes upon himself a risk”) as per-
form a “mediating” function that brings other professions and institutions
together to help but does not divide labor among equals—a conclusion
similar to his criticism of pharmacy and nursing.
Second, he claims that social work lacks “definite and specific ends” and
“appears not so much a definite field as an aspect of work in many fields.”
Its broad aims and diverse activities produce “a certain superficiality of
attainment, a certain lack of practical ability,” suggesting that it is “in touch
with many professions rather than as a profession in and by itself” ().
Social work doesn’t meet fully his third criterion of being directed toward
an unambiguous objective.
Finally, he argues that with unspecific aims, social work has trouble pro-
viding a “compact, purposefully organized educational discipline” (),
thus failing to meet his fourth criterion. Social work requires resourceful,
judicious, well-balanced people trained broadly in the “realms of civic and
social interest” rather than in some “technically professional” program.
At the end,Flexner says that social work is“too self-confident,”and along
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
26. with journalism,suffers from excessive facility in speech and in action.Here
he appears to be criticizing social workers for their zealous efforts at social
reform. He then segues into a recommendation that social work not rely so
heavily on newspapers for “news-propaganda and agitation,” but consider
developing a “dignified and critical means of expressing itself in the form
of a periodical which shall describe in careful terms whatever work is in
progress. . . . To some extent the evolution of social work towards the pro-
fessional status can be measured by the quality of publications put forth in
its name” ().
His final comment emphasizes that the most important criterion is an
unselfish devotion to making the world a better place. “In the long run, the
first, main and indispensable criterion of a profession will be the possession of
professional spirit, and that test social work may, if it will, fully satisfy”().
Although the customary summary of Flexner’s article is that he faults
social work for not having a body of scientific knowledge (see, for example,
Thyer ), that is not precisely the case. In fact, he readily concludes that
social work meets the criterion of having an intellectual quality based on sci-
ence and learning. He is more troubled by the mediating role and broad, dif-
fuse aims of social work, by its general efforts to do good and its limited
autonomy, and by its primitive curriculum.An occupation’s ambiguous aims
might complicate the identification of the intellectual basis for action, but it
is important to recognize how Flexner defines social work’s primary problem.
The challenge that Flexner made to the developing profession—to clar-
ify autonomous responsibility, refine aims, and develop training—might
have been easy to address through legislation, licensing, and a more coher-
ent professional purpose and curriculum, had it not been overshadowed by
the charge that social work lacked a specific, separate scientific body of
knowledge. It was this lack that became social work’s accepted failing, the
budding profession’s Achilles heel.
Defining Professions
Flexner’s criteria became one conventional and popular way of under-
standing the evolution of professions. A checklist of traits is derived induc-
tively by comparing established professions, typically medicine, with other
trades and inferring their distinguishing characteristics from apparent differ-
ences. That list of traits is then used to measure the extent to which various
occupations over time progress in a linear fashion into full professional status.
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
27. But there are radically different approaches to understanding the evolu-
tion of professions, most notably an alternative theory offered by Andrew
Abbott (, ), who suggests that professions must compete for juris-
diction in competitive and conflict-ridden arenas, not simply meet several
objective criteria. Professions emerge as their members discover, create,
mark, and maintain boundaries over occupational turf, sometimes left
unattended or neglected by others and sometimes actively defended. For
example, psychiatrists had to wrestle control of some human problems
from the clergy and the law, and then later fend off encroachments by social
workers, psychologists, and family counselors. Other budding profes-
sions—psychological medium and railroad dispatcher, for example—died
when their tasks were assumed by others (Abbott ).
In contested territory, according to Abbott, abstract knowledge plays a
somewhat different function.
The ability of a profession to sustain its jurisdiction lies partly in the
power and prestige of its academic knowledge. This prestige reflects the
public’s mistaken belief that abstract professional knowledge is continu-
ous with practical professional knowledge, and hence that prestigious
abstract knowledge implies effective professional work. In fact, the true
use of academic professional knowledge is less practical than symbolic.
Academic knowledge legitimizes professional work by clarifying its foun-
dations and tracing them to major cultural values. In most modern pro-
fessions, these have been the values of rationality, logic, and science.
(:–)
Although Flexner and others assume that knowledge gained from the sci-
ences and higher learning will be directly applied by skilled practitioners to
clients’ practical problems, thus giving a scientific aura to professional
work, this assumption serves an important symbolic function by appearing
to anchor professional activity in rationality rather than in tradition or leg-
islative politics. This may be why the developers of the social work profes-
sion tended to focus more on the need to identify a “body of scientific
knowledge” than on some of Flexner’s other concerns.
Flexner’s attempt to define professions via checklists has been duplicated
many times over the years as the number of professions has grown and their
influence in society has expanded. In “Attributes of a Profession” ()—
perhaps the most-cited article about social work’s professional status since
Flexner—Ernest Greenwood, a Berkeley professor of social welfare, also
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
28. outlines criteria for professional status. But unlike Flexner, he concludes
that social work is a profession. By inductively reviewing those occupations
that seem clearly to have achieved professional status, Greenwood enumer-
ates and discusses what he considers to be the essential attributes of profes-
sions. Unlike Flexner, however, he does not then subject various striving
occupations to his test; he doesn’t even assess social work systematically by
reviewing how and to what extent it meets each of his criteria. He merely
concludes that it meets them all.
Greenwood’s criteria overlap with Flexner’s, although he uses different
terms and develops each idea more systematically, as one would expect of a
scholar who has had the benefit of sociological literature to draw on. Green-
wood discusses the importance of systematic theory, professional authority
derived from that specialized knowledge, the approval of the community to
have a monopoly on practice, a regulatory code of ethics to govern relations
with clients and colleagues, and a professional culture consisting of organi-
zations, institutions, values, norms, and symbols. The first criterion—pos-
session of a systematic body of theory—merits comment because he uses it
to introduce the ongoing role of science and research in profession building.
Greenwood dismisses the argument that professionals are distinguished
by superior skills and claims that the crucial distinction is whether practice
skills “flow from and are supported by a fund of knowledge that has been
organized into an internally consistent system, called a body of theory”(;
emphasis in original). “Theory serves as a base in terms of which the pro-
fessional rationalizes his operations in concrete situations,” so the student
is required to master simultaneously both the theory and the skill derived
from it (). Preparation for a profession, then, entails“intellectual as well
as a practical experience” (). But the requirement of theory introduces
an additional component:
The importance of theory precipitates a form of activity normally not
encountered in a nonprofessional occupation, viz., theory construction
via systematic research. To generate valid theory that will provide a solid
base for professional techniques requires that application of the scientific
method to the service-related problems of the profession. Continued
employment of the scientific method is nurtured by and in turn rein-
forces the element of rationality. As an orientation, rationality is the
antithesis of traditionalism. The spirit of rationality in a profession
encourages a critical,as opposed to a reverential,attitude toward the the-
oretical system. (, emphasis in original)
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
29. We need to recall that at the time (the s), social work was largely
conviction, tradition, and untested practice theory. Greenwood was making
a case for requiring that social work submit its “professional techniques” to
the ongoing scrutiny of research and rationality. He argues that research is
fundamental to theory and both are necessary for professional status.
One of the consequences of the need for systematic research, Greenwood
suggests, is a division of labor “between the theory-oriented and the prac-
tice-oriented person” (), for example, between the medical researcher
and the private medical practitioner. At this time, social work had a very
small cohort of theoreticians/researchers who were sheltered in a few elite
universities, and although Greenwood concludes that social work had
already gained the status of a profession, the resources dedicated to devel-
oping social work’s body of theory were meager indeed compared to the
rapidly developing medical research establishment.Despite Flexner’s forty-
year-old recommendation, the profession still had few, if any, journals
devoted to research, few research-oriented doctoral programs, and virtually
no research establishment.
In sum, across the vast literature that developed about professionaliza-
tion, we can detect two umbrellalike themes (see also Wilensky ). The
first, the one that isn’t especially problematic, is the ideal of service (Goode
). This consists of a commitment on the part of professionals not to
abuse their knowledge and skill, to serve and not to exploit their clients,
and to work for the greater community good. This commitment is often
embodied in a code of ethics; belief in it allows the community to grant the
profession a monopoly on practice, the right to govern itself, and the
authority to develop and regulate the content and format of professional
education. Social work appears to have achieved this ideal.
Both Flexner and Greenwood—and even Abbott from a different per-
spective—understand that to gain community sanction, a profession needs
a second broad attribute, a body of knowledge not available to laypersons,
that confers authority, guides service to clients, and forms the content of
professional education. Since professions claim unique status as the over-
seers of an abstract body of knowledge, they must ensure that the material
taught in professional schools is sufficiently esoteric and sufficiently com-
plex that their claims will be respected. Recall that prior to the last century,
professional practice remained relatively primitive. Medicine consisted of
prayer and placebo; law involved the management of small quarrels; the
ministry identified and purged minor sins; and social work offered moral
uplift to the wayward.
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
30. The mastery of a body of abstract knowledge and theory, rather than
of practice skills per se, is viewed as the criterion that distinguishes pro-
fessions from other occupations. That is why professional training is no
longer solely practical, gained in apprenticeships, but has shifted from the
field to professional schools affiliated with universities. Many occupations
require the mastery of substantial knowledge and the development of
certain skills, but only professions claim that their new members can
appreciate, understand, and participate in the broad knowledge-building
process underlying practice. The image of the professional presented to
the public is that of a scholar-servant immersed in learning but dedicated
to service.
As professional education migrated into universities, a division arose
between theoretical and practical learning and between those who were pri-
marily involved in the development and refinement of professional knowl-
edge and those who were practitioners. While the introduction of science
and scholarship into education helped validate social work’s claim to pro-
fessional status, it also ushered in a new structural problem, namely, how to
connect the methodology of science and the abstract world of theory to the
practitioner’s helping specific clients with their idiosyncratic human trou-
bles. The struggle to make this connection and to overcome the division of
labor between researchers and practitioners is the focus of this book.
Social work educators know that developing and disseminating knowl-
edge to trainees is not an assembly-line series of tasks. The enterprise is full
of ambiguities and uncertainties. There are many complexities to culling
usable knowledge from other scientific disciplines; developing, testing, and
refining specific knowledge components using scientific methods; and
transmitting this knowledge to students who are supposed to not only
learn it but also remember and use it as they begin practice. Moreover, once
in the world of practice, professionals are expected to stay current with
developments in their specialties, continuously updating their knowledge
and skills so that their clients benefit from the latest professional and scien-
tific advances. This implies that professionals must have the requisite
research skills to critically assess scientific reports and new knowledge
claims and the motivation to do so.
All this is, of course, highly idealistic. Borrowing knowledge from other
disciplines can be time-consuming and difficult, even for professors
engaged in such work full time; developing usable knowledge and testing it
for applicability and effectiveness is fraught with methodological problems;
teaching professional knowledge and skill is closer at times to art than sci-
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
31. ence; and devising effective methods of keeping practitioners abreast of the
latest information is a constant challenge. In later chapters we review some
of these efforts.
Despite Greenwood’s assurances in that social work had become a
profession, there were continuing disputes about whether social work
indeed had an identifiable knowledge base. And as if this were not enough,
some social work scholars raised epistemological questions about whether
the profession was using appropriate forms of scientific inquiry.
The Problematic Knowledge Base of Social Work
Ironically, a few years after Greenwood declared that social work was
indeed a profession,the newly founded NationalAssociation of SocialWork-
ers (NASW) organized a three-day conference for a highly selective group of
practitioners and scholars to consider the topic of “social work knowledge.”
Among them were Harriett Barlett, William Gordon, Alfred Kahn, Alfred
Kadushin, Henry Maas, Edwin Thomas, Bertram Beck, Chauncey Alexan-
der, Genevieve Carter, and Katherine Kendall—all prominent leaders who
continued in important roles in the profession for many years. The people
invited to that working conference, which was held in November in
Princeton, New Jersey, had all been actively concerned with the conceptual-
ization of social work knowledge. They were asked to consider (in their
background papers and discussion) how that knowledge could be identified,
selected, assembled, and organized for the profession. This was one of sev-
eral efforts that NASW undertook to define the purpose and nature of social
work practice.
The report of the conference, published two years later (NASW ),
opens with a startling sentence:“Social work has not produced a systematic
body of knowledge, although it exhibits many of the characteristics of a
profession” (iii). It recognizes that social work practice and education had
until recently been fragmented into specialties and different organizations
and lacked “frames of reference and systematically organized theoretical
propositions for bringing order into its thinking” (iii). Although creative
scholars were making individual contributions, they were not collectively
producing a cumulative body of knowledge.
The reasons were several: social work addressed a vast array of human
problems; the profession was more concerned with“doing and feeling”than
with “analyzing”; and research had remained separate from practice—and
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
32. researchers separate from practitioners (iv). Social work had focused more
on identifying its values than on building its knowledge; it rested too much
on “conviction” and not enough on a theoretically organized body of
research results and practice experience (v). The conferees state that “the
need for building social work knowledge becomes increasing urgent” (vi)
and that“the urgency of action is increased by the need to develop research
in social work practice. Theory-building in social work will require con-
stant testing and validation in practice”(v). Thus, in their view, professional
status required a knowledge base as a foundation for interventive skills.2
And increasingly, “knowledge” referred to principles derived from some
form of scientific inquiry, not merely based on conviction and values. Thus,
using scientific methods became integral to the profession-building efforts
of social work. The need for more research on and about practice and for
encouraging connections between researchers and practitioners became a
mantra that would be heard for the next half century.
Although the simple question of whether social work was a profession
disappeared slowly as credentialing and licensing boards acknowledged
individuals’ expertise, issues about the appropriate methods for developing
social work knowledge unexpectedly erupted in a contentious debate in the
s (for a helpful review, see Reamer []). The field’s reliance on tra-
ditional social science as a means of advancing its knowledge has always
been a subject of controversy (see chapter ); however, this new debate
involved the philosophical foundations of the social sciences and social
work research.
The Epistemological Controversy
A number of critics began to question those foundations (Haworth ;
Heineman ; Tyson ; Witkin ), based on the inadequacy of the
epistemological paradigm commonly taught, used, and accepted by social
work researchers. This paradigm, they said, was based on the tenets of a
school of philosophy—logical positivism—that no longer had any credibil-
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
2
This point was made fifty years earlier by Porter Lee from the New York School of Phil-
anthropy, who spoke just after Flexner and Frankfurter. Lee argued that professional status
implied expertness based on scientific understanding and that social work needed to estab-
lish the technical foundations and processes of casework and social investigation upon which
professional skills would rest.
33. ity among philosophers of science. More specifically, conventional research
methodology placed undue value on quantitative approaches, experimental
designs, objective measurement, and statistical analysis, borrowing from the
physical sciences methodologies often ill suited for study of the ever-chang-
ing and elusive complexities of social phenomena. Similar criticisms were
expressed about research in related professions (Fishman, Rotgers, and
Franks ; Gergen ; Guba ). In social work, the critics proposed
new paradigms, including constructionism (Witkin ) and the heuristic
approach (Heineman-Pieper ), which, they contended, provided more
suitable frameworks for the development of social work knowledge.
These criticisms and proposals were challenged by a number of
researchers (Fraser, Taylor, Jackson, and O’Jack ; Geismar ; Hudson
b; Schuerman ). Counterarguments by these and other authors
rejected the notions that social work research was an offspring of logical
positivism and that it applied the methods of hard science inappropriately.
Moreover, they pointed out, the proposed new paradigms had not yet
resulted in any appreciable knowledge development.
During the s, the debate took a different form. Although radically
different views about the epistemological bases of social work knowledge
continued to be expressed, there were fewer acrimonious exchanges in the
scholarly journals. Efforts were made to create a “selective integration of
epistemological perspectives,” as Reamer () put it (e.g., Harrison ;
Peile ), but they have remained in the wings while two opposing con-
federations have emerged. One is a collection of epistemologies referred to
under the umbrella term of “postmodernism.” The other is a group of per-
spectives sometimes referred to as “postpositivism” (Phillips ).
Social constructionism has emerged as the dominant epistemology in
postmodern thought in social work (Witkin , ). A central tenet of
this position is that knowledge of reality is constructed through language
and human discourse. As Dewees has put it, “Realities, or beliefs, are con-
stituted through language that creates or perpetuates shared meanings . . .
there are no objective or essential truths” (:). Furthermore,“There is
no intrinsic reason, apart from the interests of particular groups, to privi-
lege one form of writing and speaking or to limit knowledge claims to cer-
tain criteria” (Witkin :). Since there is no way to determine ultimate
truths about reality, “scientific beliefs are products of their times”
(McQuaide :). The goal of progressively building a scientific knowl-
edge base is therefore rejected.
It is helpful in this discussion to distinguish between two forms of con-
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
34. tructionism, which Gross and Levitt () have labeled “weak” and
“strong.” The weak form refers to how people construe reality—concepts,
perspectives, and world views are all constructions, which are of consider-
able interest in the social sciences as well as in the human services and have
long been studied through traditional (mainstream) research methods. The
strong (or “radical”) form consists of the position advanced by Dewees,
Witkin, and McQuaide quoted above: what passes for truth or objective
reality are simply constructions produced by human language. Construc-
tionism in this form downgrades the importance of mainstream research in
social work and related fields: it may be of interest in presenting a certain
kind of discourse but is no longer the ultimate means of acquiring the best
knowledge possible. Gross and Levitt have expressed well how science is
viewed in this form of constructionism: it
is not . . . a body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the
“real” world. It is a discourse devised by and for one “interpretative com-
munity.” . . . Thus orthodox science is but one discursive community
among the many that now exist. . . . Consequently its truth claims are
irreducibly self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to
the standards that define the “scientific community” and distinguish it
from other social foundations. (:)
Not surprisingly, most of the social work practice literature using the
constructionist framework pretty much ignores empirical research. Con-
structionist research itself, which calls for qualitative inquiry, has been
quite limited. It remains to be seen what might be stimulated by recent
methodological work, including a “constructivist” text on qualitative
research methods (Rodwell ). (The terms “constructionist” and “con-
structivist,” while having somewhat different meanings according to some
writers, tend to be used more or less interchangeably in the social work lit-
erature; we use the former term and its variants.) It also remains to be seen
what distinctions emerge between constructionist research and other kinds
of qualitative research carried out within mainstream frameworks.
Much of the burgeoning clinical literature that labels itself construc-
tionist can be viewed as relying essentially on the weaker form of the
notion, even though it may use the language of the strong form (usually in
the opening paragraphs). For example, in introducing their “two-story
technique” for helping clients “open space,” Hill and Scanlon make the
(strong form) constructionist point that “there exists no valid and reliable
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
35. way to determine the truth or accuracy or‘realness’ of one person’s descrip-
tions of ‘reality’ over another’s” (:). However, their technique simply
involves helping clients give descriptive names to their experiences and
then discuss them in ways that enable them to gain awareness of other
aspects of their realities. It could be fitted into any number of intervention
approaches and into virtually any epistemology. The technique could, of
course, be seen as “constructionist,” but not in any meaningful epistemo-
logical sense.
We use the term “postpositivist” to refer to developments in the philoso-
phy of science supportive of mainstream research since the decline of logical
positivism,including the work of such philosophers as Bhaskar (); Bunge
), Dewey (), Kitchner (), Lakatos (), Nagel (), Phillips
(, ), Popper (), and Siegel (). In contrast to constructionism,
this body of work has posited the existence of an objective reality that is
knowable, however imperfectly, to outside observers. (Postpostivists, as we
use the term, are epistemological realists.) Science is humankind’s most
powerful means of attaining the best knowledge possible about this reality,
which does not deny the validity of other forms of knowledge. Criteria can
be developed to determine what constitutes a valid claim to truth. Scientific
knowledge is cumulative and progressive—we have more useful knowledge
today than we did a generation ago and will know more a generation hence.
Such principles form the framework used in our appraisals of developments
in social work research and knowledge,which make up much of this volume.
In the section to follow we focus upon a core component of this frame-
work—considerations in appraising knowledge—and try to show how these
considerations are used in both social work research and practice.
appraising knowledge
How is the profession of social work to evaluate the truth claims of
knowledge? In our everyday lives, we are constantly sorting out streams of
information into what we regard as true, probably true, probably false,
false, and uncertain. In this process we inevitably employ evaluative crite-
ria. To be sure, these criteria are not fixed; they are fallible, correctable, and
variously interpreted.
If a multi-epistemological perspective is adopted (Harrison ;
Reamer ), standards are needed to evaluate knowledge claims emanat-
ing from diverse and conflicting epistemologies. Although it is not possible
to devise criteria that would be universally endorsed, it may be possible to
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
36. propose some that the majority of social work practitioners, scholars, and
researchers would find acceptable. A basis for the development of such
shared standards may be found in the notions of truth, corroboration, bias,
theory testing, and generalization.
Truth. The idea of truth, however it is expressed, is central to the appraisal
of knowledge. From a realist point of view, truth involves the relation
between assertions about reality and the characteristics of that reality
(Aronson, Harre, and Way ). In research, concern with truth is
expressed in the notion of “validity.” If instruments or results lack validity,
we assume they do not capture reality and we do not take them seriously.
As we all know, truth is neither readily defined nor always readily dis-
cerned. We agree with Phillips () that is it is best seen as a “regulative
ideal,” a goal that we strive for but do not always attain. We must often set-
tle for likely, approximate, or partial truths.
Although standards of truth are difficult to articulate and open to criti-
cism, they are very much a part of professional life. For example, consider a
principle of practice for working with families of delinquents formulated by
Wood: “Family relationships are supported, not eroded—unless there is
clear evidence that these relationships are fundamentally destructive”
(Wood :; emphasis in the original). Although values are involved in
saying that destructive relationships are bad, such a statement assumes that
destructiveness in family relationships can be adequately defined and that
evidence about its occurrence can be obtained. Wood’s principle assumes
that this evidence will be objective in the sense of being free of such biases
as the practitioner’s dislike of the family.
How does such “objective evidence” fit into a constructionist position?
According to Dewees (:), “common understandings or beliefs about
the nature of the world and social relationships are not based on empirical
or objective evidence; that is, the common agreements about how the world
‘is’are generated, negotiated, and re-negotiated through social interchanges
over time.” Or as Guba and Lincoln have commented,“Phenomena do not
converge into a single form, a single ‘truth’ but diverge into many forms,
multiple ‘truths’” (:).
Few would quarrel with the idea that multiple perspectives on a situation
are always possible and differences among them can certainly be negoti-
ated. If they cannot, we are left with conflicting truth claims, only one of
which can be valid (Haack ). In the illustrative case, the social worker
would assume there is some single truth that objectively describes the
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
37. nature of the family’s interaction and can be judged against some standard
of “destructiveness.” He or she would normally gather evidence for a sub-
stantially true picture of the interaction. Subsequently this evidence might
be presented to a judge who would expect it to be objective and reveal the
truth.
The notion of objective truth, at least as a goal to strive for, appears to
guide practical decisions in the world of social work. Practitioners gather
data to determine the extent of a client’s depression or of street crime in a
neighborhood. Educators gather data on students’ performance in the field
and use it as the basis for presumably unbiased evaluations. The practition-
ers and educators in these examples assume that their purpose is to arrive
at some approximation of the truth.Although much is written about schol-
ars’ epistemologies, we know comparatively little about notions of bias,
error, mistakes, and truth—the actual epistemologies used—in the ordi-
nary practice of social work. These might provide an interesting challenge
to formal epistemologies that eschew such notions as truth and objectivity.
Corroboration. How then do we determine if a presumed knowledge claim
is in fact true? One of our most common means is through corroboration.
Pepper () distinguishes between two types of corroborative evidence.
“Multiplicative corroboration” involves person-to-person agreement, what
is sometimes referred to as intersubjectivity. Do observers concur that a
belief is warranted by the evidence? Do they concur that it has, in Dewey’s
() terms,“warranted assertibility?”“Structural corroboration” requires
a logical convergence of factual evidence. For example, accepting as knowl-
edge the assertion that prenatal cocaine exposure can lead to behavior prob-
lems in children might require consistent agreement among clinicians and
researchers that the evidence points in this direction. It might also demand
evidence, or“background knowledge”(Bunge ), delineating the mech-
anisms by which prenatal cocaine exposure might lead to behavior prob-
lems.
An important extension of the nature of corroboration is the principle
of “multiplism” (Cook ), which makes use of multiple methods and
perspectives in knowledge building. Within a given study, several measures
and modes of analysis are used to cross-validate findings. Similarly, multi-
ple studies can be focused on the same research question. No single design,
method of measurement, or analytic technique is seen as inherently supe-
rior. For example, experiments and quantitative analysis have their
strengths and limitations and are better suited to certain questions than
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
38. others. What is needed is less reliance on any particular methodology and
more use of methods in combination so that the weaknesses of one are off-
set by the strengths of another.
But all of these forms of corroboration assume real-world referents, that
is, that different observers are evaluating what is actually there and not
simply comparing “constructions.” Moreover, standards exist indicating
what kind of evidence may be more credible than other kinds. Thus there
may be a high degree of intersubjective agreement among prosecutors, wit-
nesses, and the jury that a defendant is guilty of murder, but the verdict may
be reversed in the light of DNA evidence proving that someone else com-
mitted the crime. Such evidence is regarded as providing an incontrovert-
ible depiction of a critical piece of reality relating to unique characteristics
of the perpetrator and thus overrides other evidence, even eyewitness testi-
mony, more likely to be off the mark.
Bias. Bias refers to factors that can interfere with the appraisal of the truth
claims of knowledge. Because standards for appraising truth are seldom
clear, the presence of bias is difficult to determine. Yet the importance
attached to it has been traditionally based on the assumption that there is
an objective truth to be striven for. Bias’s threat to the validity of social work
knowledge has always been recognized, along with the desirability of iden-
tifying and controlling it. For example, in Social Diagnosis (), Rich-
mond discusses the importance of recognizing and correcting numerous
sources of bias, such as false analogy, that might interfere with drawing
valid inferences from case evidence. In more recent times, practitioners
have been taught the importance of awareness of misperceptions of clients
from countertransference or from racial, ethnic, gender, or cultural stereo-
typing. “Bias” used in a broad sense includes not only perceptual bias but
also bias in sampling, measurement, interpretation, and so on. Bias
becomes virtually tantamount to error. Thus control of it is necessary in
efforts to reveal the truth.
Theory Testing. Much social work knowledge is organized into theories—
systems of concepts and hypotheses designed to explain and predict phe-
nomena. Thus we have assessment theories that attempt to explain depres-
sion, delinquency, and other human problems and practice theories that
attempt to show that certain interventions will change them. Theories are
systematically evaluated in research through tests that either confirm or
refute their hypotheses. The latter is especially important. As Popper ()
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
39. has argued, a proposition that is truly scientific is one that can refuted or
falsified. The tests themselves, and their interpretations, follow procedures
carefully designed to separate truth from error. For example, to have confi-
dence that he or she has demonstrated that two variables are related in a
predicted way, the researcher must examine and rule out various sources of
possible error—chance factors, instrument bias, and so on.
Although a theory may survive a number of failed tests, it cannot prevail
indefinitely if empirical support is lacking. This notion has been well devel-
oped by Lakatos (), who has suggested specific criteria for appraising
the long-term success of a theory over a course of repeated testing.
Although it may still be difficult to refute a theory (Hesse ), it is quite
possible to decide between a theory and its rival. For example, suppose a
theory repeatedly predicts x but x does not occur. Furthermore, the theory
is not capable of predicting y and z. A new theory proves capable of pre-
dicting not only x but also y and z,and at the same time can explain the suc-
cessful predictions of the older theory. With such an outcome, the newer
theory presents itself as a rational choice.The process takes time.As Lakatos
() has said, there is no “instant rationality”; no “crucial experiments”
can decide the issue right now and once and for all.
A good example of the application of these ideas to social work knowl-
edge can be found in the rise and fall of the“double-bind”theory of schizo-
phrenia, originally proposed by Bateson, Jackson, Haley, and Weakland
().To put it simply,the double-bind theory posited that paradoxical and
confusing communication sequences between parents and offspring were
influential in the subsequent development of schizophrenia in the offspring.
The theory attracted considerable interest, and a substantial literature on
double-bind communication soon developed (Watzlawick, Beavin, and
Jackson ). Hypotheses generated by the theory were tested in a number
of studies and generally failed; moreover, serious difficulties were encoun-
tered in operationalizing key concepts (Olson ). As a result, the theory
gradually“lost ground,”as Lakatos () would put it, to rival explanations
of the etiology of schizophrenia. This process took more than a decade.
A rival theory with greater empirical support posited biological origins
for schizophrenia but also hypothesized that the course of the disease could
be affected by family factors, such as parental expressions of criticism and
hostility toward the schizophrenic (Anderson, Reiss, and Hogarty ).
This theory and related intervention approaches have received considerable
support from research conducted over the past decade (for reviews, see
Penn and Meuser ).However,like any set of ideas based on research,the
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
40. theory may be eventually displaced by rivals that have not yet appeared on
the horizon. We should in fact hope this will be the case. The rival will win
out by better accounting for the empirical realities discovered by its prede-
cessor and adding new ones. Regardless, the realities about schizophrenia
discovered up to this point represent additions to prior knowledge and lay
the groundwork for further knowledge. Thus, the knowledge produced by
science is accumulative and progressive (Kitchner ), not simply the
product of its time.
Generalization. Knowledge development for the profession emphasizes
propositions that are generally applicable, despite the importance of case-
specific and other forms of ideographic knowledge. Indeed, general knowl-
edge pertaining to such matters as the dynamics of human development,
the nature of psychosocial problems, or the principles of intervention pro-
vides guidance for work with specific situations. In common language, we
may say that a proposition is generally true. In research, we may say that it
has“external validity”: it is likely to hold true beyond the limits of the study
at hand.
Social work practitioners and researchers usually build generalizations
through a logical process (Fortune and Reid ), by extending what has
been learned from a given situation to others similar to it while keeping in
mind how the situations differ. Generalizations are extended through con-
vergence of findings from repeated studies, following the principles of mul-
tiplism discussed earlier. The process yields at best tentative propositions—
working hypotheses, not conclusions (Cronbach ). Such hypotheses
suggest what is likely or possible in a given situation, but whether it occurs
must be determined in the new situation itself.
This view of generalization is not out of keeping with certain construc-
tionist notions. For example, most social work researchers would be com-
fortable with Lincoln and Guba’s principle that the“transferability [of find-
ings] is a direct function of the similarity between . . . contexts. If Context
A and Context B are sufficiently congruent then the working hypotheses
from the sending or originating context may be applicable in the receiving
context” (:). Few propositions hold across all situations. To say that
a program has been found to be “effective” is to say very little without spec-
ifying what the program consisted of, for whom it made a difference, under
what conditions, and so on.
The knowledge base of social work is ill defined and difficult to identify,
delimit, or organize. Moreover, most of it is not the product of rigorous sci-
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
41. entific testing. Although there are different views about the appropriate
forms of scientific inquiry in social work and the standards that should be
applied in assessing knowledge claims,“fuzzy” notions of truth, corrobora-
tion, bias, theory validity, and generalization contain useful criteria for eval-
uating knowledge.We may disagree on how particular criteria are to be con-
ceptualized, defined, or applied in given cases, but they provide the basis for
appraising knowledge claims in social work. As Rorty (:) has said,
“The dominating notion of epistemology is that to be rational . . . we need
to find agreement with other human beings. To construct an epistemology
is to find the maximum amount of common ground with others.” Disputes
at the grand epistemological level are likely to have few practical conse-
quences, and for social work it is the practical consequences that matter.
Overview of This Book
At least since Flexner’s proclamation that social work had not yet achieved
professional status, there has been continuing discussion about the proper
role of knowledge, science, and research in the practice of social work. This
book is an examination of significant elements in the evolution of that dis-
cussion. From the days of scientific charity, the profession has struggled to
find a comfortable, practical, and effective method of using systematic
inquiry to develop, direct, improve, and evaluate practice. Over the years,
social workers and scholars have embraced and promoted many different
methods of bringing science to bear on practice.
Two different, overarching methods or strategies can be discerned. One
has been to make practice itself more like research, to have it mimic scien-
tific inquiry by emphasizing systematic gathering of information, careful
study of individual clients, and decision making about intervention based
on the analysis of case data. There is a common thread between using
research techniques as guides for practice in scientific charity to using sin-
gle-subject designs emphasized by advocates of the scientist-practitioner
model. A second general strategy has emphasized practitioners’ use of the
results of scientific inquiry in their work with clients. This can be seen in
social workers’attempts to harness the findings of large-scale social surveys
or social experiments, the rapidly expanding general social science knowl-
edge (primarily from psychology and sociology), and the burgeoning med-
ical sciences. From the early attempts to forge links between social science
and social work to the promotion of research utilization to the more recent
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
42. emphasis on empirically supported practice, there is a common emphasis
on practitioners not doing research but instead being guided in their prac-
tice by the fruits of others’ research.
Each of these two general strategies has repeatedly found expression in
particular sociohistorical circumstances that framed the problems of
clients and the externalities of the developing profession. These organized
attempts to connect science and social work have often been controversial
and have had opponents who questioned their philosophy, practicality, or
politics.
In this book, we offer a critical appraisal of the strategies and methods
that have been used to develop knowledge for social work practice. Our
method will be to identify the major approaches, placing each one in his-
torical perspective by explaining the nature of the problems that it
attempted to solve. We offer a balanced appraisal of the promises, accom-
plishments, and limits of these efforts. Although our emphasis is on face-
to-face work with individuals, families, and groups, the ideas we advance
may have relevance to less direct forms of practice, such as administration
and community organization.
In chapter we have indicated the central role that knowledge plays in the
world of professions and tracked how concerns about social work’s profes-
sional status led to concerns about its knowledge base. Systematic inquiry is
fundamental in developing, refining, and testing practice knowledge, so
concerns about knowledge generated concerns about the research enter-
prise. Those have been enlivened by epistemological issues regarding the
proper validation of knowledge claims. We have suggested one approach to
assessing such claims.
In chapter , we provide a broad historical overview of the attempts to
create a role for science in the profession up to the mid-twentieth century.
Science served as both a model and a source of knowledge for practice. The
chapter begins with a description of the early uses of the scientific method
as a model for casework practice, from Mary Richmond to the psychoana-
lytic movement. We discuss two types of knowledge—assessment and
intervention—in both their case-specific and general forms. With regard to
the latter, we review the history of studies that addressed the effectiveness
of social work and those that focused on the process of intervention.
Finally, we review the slow development of a research infrastructure. The
failure of early experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of interven-
tion and the rise of demands for accountability within social welfare pro-
grams produced a crisis in casework in the early s that reverberated
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
43. throughout the profession, particularly in academic settings. At the same
time, a broad alteration in the infrastructure and context of research in
social work was taking place, involving an explosion in the growth of doc-
toral programs and the training of a new cadre of social work researchers
who abandoned the “soft” science of psychoanalytic inquiry to embrace
more behaviorally oriented theories, experimental designs, and quantita-
tive techniques. Social work research moved from its traditional base in the
agency to the academy.
In chapter,wereviewthemutualinterestsof practitionersandresearchers
in organizing practice knowledge in terms of clients’problems.We revisit how
problem diagnosis and classification have evolved and how current classifica-
tion systems have departed from earlier traditions. We then evaluate a con-
temporary attempt to de-emphasize problems as the organizing foci of inter-
vention knowledge.
In chapter , we examine a major change in scientifically based practice
that began in the s. As it evolved, the effort called for practice to be sci-
entific in the sense of being a rational, systematic, problem-solving activity.
The promotion of the scientist-practitioner, who would be trained to use
single-system designs and a handful of research techniques, was a response
both to the call for accountability and to the recognition that practitioners
were not reading research reports. Borrowing from clinical psychology, an
influential group of research-oriented professors set out to revise not only
the nature of practice education but the nature of social work practice itself.
This chapter reviews the history of the scientist-practitioner movement,
describing its origins, characteristics, and promise. Although unsuccessful
in its most ambitious objectives, it nevertheless stimulated wide-ranging
changes in the structure of graduate programs and vigorous debates about
the merits of making practitioners into clinical researchers.
There is no simple method of connecting science to practice, although
we witness obvious links when we use airplanes, computers, TVs, or med-
ications. We are surrounded by commercial products that originated in sci-
entific labs but through engineering and marketing have made their way
into our hands and homes. In industry, the process of turning basic scien-
tific discoveries into usable products involves the work of intermediaries—
engineers, product designers, marketing specialists—and a series of
research and development processes. This observation prompted several
social work scholars (most prominently, Jack Rothman and Edwin
Thomas) to examine whether it was possible to develop R&D procedures
for social intervention and thus to solve both the problem of ineffective
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
44. methods and the problem of dissemination and utilization. In chapter , we
review these attempts to link research and practice in a complex, sequential
process and explore why, given their promise, they have not yet enjoyed the
success of industrial R&D.
It is hardly surprising that social work researchers looked to industry
and engineering for a way to forge links between the research and practice
worlds. Equally predictable was that they would look to computer technol-
ogy for assistance with professional tasks. Both research and practice
involve collecting and manipulating complex sets of information. Com-
puters have made this increasingly simple and efficient. In chapter , we
examine how the developments in technology over the last fifty years were
envisioned to assist practitioners and improve the delivery of social services.
Early applications such as management information systems and expert
systems were viewed as new methods of linking science and practice. Many
more such links are emerging, each with its own promise.
Recently, scientific knowledge has been brought to practitioners in
research-supported practice. Social workers use methods whose effective-
ness has been demonstrated through empirical research, developing inter-
vention protocols from successful experiments. In theory at least, practi-
tioners use such protocols, written treatment instructions, or guidelines in
implementing the interventions. Major initiatives to identify effective
methods and put them in the hands of practitioners are taking place in psy-
chology and medicine. Similar efforts have also appeared in social work
and are likely to intensify. Although it may be an important means of put-
ting social work on firmer scientific ground, empirical practice raises a
number of issues. What criteria should be used to determine which inter-
ventions are efficacious? Is there enough research of sufficient rigor on
which to base an adequate repertory of interventions? How do we deal with
threats to effectiveness when practitioners depart from established guide-
lines or apply procedures to populations other than those used to validate
the interventions? In chapter , we discuss the origin and character of
empirically based practice, its goals, the issues to be resolved, and whether
it is likely to succeed in social work.
In chapter , we review one of the ways in which social work has tried to
incorporate knowledge into practice—through the dissemination and uti-
lization of research by practitioners. After tracing the rise of such concerns,
we examine how the profession attempted to prepare students to consume
research. It soon became apparent that practitioners, in both social work
and other professions,did not necessarily pay attention to the research jour-
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
45. nals. Knowledge generation did not automatically or efficiently lead to
knowledge dissemination or utilization, and some scholars at first tried to
pin this on practitioners’ negative attitudes and agencies’ self-protective
nature. The Council on Social Work Education and the National Associa-
tion of Social Workers joined scholars from other disciplines in discussing
what could be done to enhance the utilization of research. This chapter
reviews the emergence of these concerns and their evolution from the sim-
ple notion that practitioners should be taught to “consume” research to the
recognition that the dissemination and use of knowledge takes place in a
much more diffuse, uncertain, and multilayered manner.
In the final chapter, we reflect on what we can learn from the various
attempts to develop knowledge for social work practice. We recognize how
difficult it has been to bring science to practice,but argue that we have made
progress—hesitantly and unevenly to be sure—in understanding how to
improve the knowledge base and in recognizing the kind of sustained
efforts that will continue to be needed. Future progress will require more
realistic expectations about what is practical and better efforts to develop
considerably more robust collaborative structures that bridge the gaps
between practice and research. This will remain a serious challenge,
because the “soft” nature of social work knowledge impedes cumulative
knowledge-building efforts. The graduate schools of social work in major
research universities are likely to bear the burden of creating these struc-
tures, for there are no other institutions available to fully address the con-
cerns first raised by Flexner and Greenwood.
knowledge, science, and the profession of social work
46. T
here are two major ways in which professions have made
use of science. One is by following a scientific model in
conducting professional activities. The other is by using
scientific knowledge to inform those activities. This depends on the devel-
opment of an infrastructure for generating such knowledge—a cadre of
researchers, financial resources, training programs, methodological texts,
organizational settings, and so forth. In this chapter we shall trace the evo-
lution of these uses of science in social work and the development of a sup-
porting infrastructure, beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury and continuing somewhat beyond the midpoint of the twentieth cen-
tury.
Science as a Model for Practice
In the early decades of its development, social work used science mainly
as a model for practice, beginning toward the end of the nineteenth century
with the Charity Organization Society (COS) movement, which had begun
in London in . By the s almost a hundred COSs were operating in
American cities (Watson ). Their purpose was twofold: to coordinate
the work of existing relief agencies by registering the poor in need of assis-
tance, evaluating their needs, and making appropriate referrals; and to pro-
vide guidance to the poor through the “friendly visiting” of volunteers and
■ chapter two
Science and Social Work:
A Historical Perspective
47. paid agents. The COS was not designed to give tangible assistance itself but
rather to systematize relief giving and, through education and moral uplift,
work with the poor to obviate the need for material help.
Leaders of COSs, as well as educated people generally, were impressed by
the triumphs of science in such fields as medicine, biology, and engineer-
ing. The leaders were quick to claim that the scientific method could be
applied to their work. Josephine Shaw Lowell, one of the founders of the
New York Charity Organization Society, minced no words: “The task of
dealing with the poor and degraded has become a science and has its well
defined principles recognized and conformed to closely by all who really
give time and thought to the subject” (:Preface). In remarks at a meet-
ing of the American Social Science Association in , D. O. Kellogg, direc-
tor of the Baltimore Charity Organization Society, declared, “Charity is a
science, a science of social therapeutics, and has its laws like any science”
(Germain :).As Charles S. Loch, director of the London Charity Orga-
nization Society, succinctly observed, charity work is “not antagonistic to
science: it is science” (:).
Lowell, Kellogg, and Loch were advocates of what would be called the
“scientific charity movement.” Charity was to be, like science, an orderly,
systematic process in which practitioners gathered facts, made hypotheses,
and revised them in the light of additional facts from the case (Evans ).
The volunteer “friendly visitor” or paid agent of a charity organization was
to gather relevant facts bearing upon the plight of the individual or family
seeking assistance and develop them into hypotheses that might provide
causal explanations. For example, what might be the causes of the person’s
indigence? Inability to work because of poor health? Failure to keep jobs
because of drinking? The hypotheses could then be “tested” with further
evidence from the case. Suppose drinking on the job appeared to be the
problem. Perhaps this could be confirmed through a contact with the
employer. Well-tested hypotheses could explain the problem and suggest
possible remedies. The methodical and systematic approach of the physi-
cian applying the scientific art of medical diagnosis was taken as a model.
This was, of course, a borrowing of the methods of science. The scientific
knowledge that might have informed charity efforts was just beginning to
appear in the form of studies of the poor.
The notion of using a scientific approach in work with the indigent fit
well into the larger rationale of the emerging charity organizations. They
wanted to give material assistance and guidance to the poor in an efficient,
businesslike manner. Only in this way, the argument went, could the organ-
science and social work: a historical perspective
48. izations cope effectively with the growing problem of urban poverty. As the
epitome of rational problem solving, a scientific approach could help ensure
that methods of dealing with the poor would be systematic and effective.
Also, to claim that activities constituted a “science” was a way to estab-
lish credibility and to assert that the activities demanded special knowledge
and skills. As social work functions became more the province of paid
agents, this claim became a way of achieving professional status. This was
especially important to social workers, who wanted to differentiate them-
selves from informal helpers who gave material assistance and guidance to
the needy (Robinson ).
How well this scientific paradigm was carried out in practice is open to
conjecture. The case records of the time were not written to gauge the
charity worker’s adherence to a scientific practice model, and to our
knowledge they have not been systematically studied for that purpose. In
all likelihood there was a large gap between the rhetoric of the scientific
charity movement and actual charity work. As Lubove () has com-
mented, “scientific social work remained an elusive ideal rather remote
from reality” (). Even if the model were applied, it would suffer from
lack of scientific theory and concepts. Little had been developed in the way
of an implementing methodology. For example, although Lowell ()
wrote of the “well-defined principles” of the new science of charity in the
preface to her book, the book itself contains no references to any such prin-
ciples—or to scarcely anything else, for that matter, that could be identi-
fied as scientific.
Although its influence on actual practice may have been limited, the sci-
entific charity movement established the potential utility of the scientific
method as a framework for individualized social work practice. It set forth a
rough design that successors would elaborate upon and ultimately imple-
ment. Moreover, as Bremner () has pointed out, the individualized inves-
tigative approach of the visitors and agents helped develop a more objective
view of the poor and their circumstances. Stereotypes of them as “shiftless”
or“depraved”were challenged by factual and detailed descriptions. Scientific
charity also helped establish the case record as an instrument for guiding
practice and a method of collecting data for future research.
The scientific charity movement also provoked a reaction against the use
of science in social work. The movement was derided by John Boyle
O’Reilly, who referred to offering charity in the name of a “cold statistical
Christ” (cited in Sheffield :). Skepticism about the utility of science
took many forms, from disbelief that the results of casework could ever be
science and social work: a historical perspective
49. measured (Rich ) to rejection of the notion of a scientific base for prac-
tice (Taft ). As we have noted in chapter , the theme is still very much
with us.
The application of the scientific method to the study and treatment of
individual cases was extended by Mary Richmond () in Social Diagno-
sis. The profession had begun to form. From its nineteenth-century roots in
work with the indigent and dependent children, social work had become
established in general hospitals, psychiatric facilities, juvenile court set-
tings, and the schools. Professional training of social workers had started.
Although most were employed as caseworkers working directly with indi-
viduals and families, a definitive text on casework practice had not yet
appeared. In Social Diagnosis, Richmond sought to meet part of this need.
As the title suggests,she concentrated on the diagnostic or assessment phase
of practice. Although she did not draw explicitly upon the writings of the
scientific philanthropists, she constructed a model that preserved the
essence of their approach: the thorough gathering of relevant facts then
used to form and test hypotheses about the case. As Germain () has
noted, Richmond basically applied a medical model to the client’s social
difficulties and to social evidence bearing upon them. As she developed her
model, especially in relation to obtaining and evaluating evidence, she drew
upon other disciplines, notably law, history, and logic.
Richmond did not explicitly present Social Diagnosis as a “scientific”
approach to practice. Nevertheless, it provided a detailed protocol for apply-
ing the logic and thoroughness of the scientific method to social assess-
ment. How evidence is to be acquired, assimilated, and evaluated; the rules
to follow in making inferences; the use and evaluation of collateral sources;
the employment of detailed questionnaires in interviews with particular
client groups; and attention to the fluctuation of symptoms over time could
all be seen as part of a scientific approach to diagnosis and would not be out
of place in a modern text on empirical practice. To provide a graphic illus-
tration, one chapter presents a thirty-eight-item questionnaire for supervi-
sors to use in reviewing case records. Most of the questions would apply as
well to data collected for research purposes. “Have any marked personal
prejudices of the caseworker been allowed to warp the account?” “Have
leading questions been asked without full knowledge of their danger?”
“Have statements been sought at first hand and not through intermedi-
aries?” And, of central importance to the scientific paradigm, “What
hypotheses and inferences of the worker and or others have been accepted
without the necessary testing?”
science and social work: a historical perspective
50. Although Richmond did not present Social Diagnosis as“science,”others
did. A few years after its publication, she was granted an honorary master’s
degree by Smith College for “establishing the scientific base of a new pro-
fession” (Colcord and Mann :). Later, Klein referred to Social Diag-
nosis similarly as the “formulation of a new science” (:). As with the
writings on scientific charity, we lack information about the actual use of
the methods of Social Diagnosis in practice at the time. It was, however,
widely used as a primary text in training caseworkers until the late s
(Dore ) and presumably did have an impact on practice.
The paradigm presented in Social Diagnosis raises another, more pro-
found issue. Richmond’s formulations called for practice to be scientific in
the sense of science as a rational, systematic, problem-solving activity
involving thorough methods of data collection, attention to the quality of
evidence, effort to be objective and unbiased, hypotheses tested against
facts, and so on. These are the actions of a good scientist at work, but they
also describe the actions of a good lawyer, a good journalist, a good detec-
tive, or for that matter a good plumber.
The question is when a rational, systematic, problem-solving activity
becomes a use of the scientific method. As Dewey once put it, “Scientific
subject-matter and procedures grow out of the direct problems and meth-
ods of common sense—but enormously refine, expand, and liberate the
contents and the agencies at the disposal of common sense” (:). If
good problem solving can be seen as common sense, how much refinement
and expansion is necessary to make it “scientific?” Perhaps what we find in
Social Diagnosis is a “proto-science” or “advanced common sense,” a mode
of problem solving that is shared by science and a number of disciplines and
activities. It is part way on a continuum toward a more clearly scientific
form of practice. Thus in social work the addition of certain conceptual and
methodological refinements, such as the collection of baseline data, the use
of research instruments in initial assessment and in measuring case
progress and outcome, and the employment of research-based interven-
tions defines contemporary forms of scientifically based practice, which are
farther along the continuum.
Certainly Richmond was the first to fully articulate an assessment
model for social work consistent with a scientific approach. She gave prac-
tice a strong push in a direction compatible with a scientific point of view.
Moreover, she established a benchmark along the “common sense-to-sci-
ence” continuum. Subsequent practice models can be compared with hers
to determine if they are indeed “more scientific.”
science and social work: a historical perspective
51. Even as Social Diagnosis reigned as the dominant text for caseworkers, an
alternative view of practice was beginning to emerge. The psychoanalytic
movement began to be seen by some social workers as an advance over
Richmond’s fact-gathering approach. Born in the s, psychoanalytically
oriented casework became the dominant form of practice by mid-century
and continues to be a major force. Its emphasisis on the client’s subjective
experiences and hidden thoughts and feelings posed difficulties for practi-
tioners who wished to be scientifically oriented. The client’s inner life did
not lend itself to precise definitions and hypothesis testing. But in funda-
mental ways the psychoanalytic approach reinforced the notion that prac-
tice should follow a scientific model. Freud probably saw himself as more a
scientist than a therapist. Psychoanalysis was presented to the world as a sci-
ence built by the case studies of Freud and his followers (Pumpian-Mindlin
). A good psychoanalytic practitioner was to search for the facts and to
test his or her hypotheses about them as assiduously as any follower of
Mary Richmond. Hollis, a leader of the psychoanalytic movement in social
work, commented, “Certainly since the days of Mary Richmond we have
been committed to objective examination of the facts of each case.We draw
inferences from those facts. We constantly alert ourselves to sources of
error” (:). The problem was, of course, that the facts were likely to be
elusive, fuzzy, inordinately complex, and often difficult to distinguish from
fiction. Tensions were created by an obligation to be scientific on the one
hand and obstacles to being so on the other. Many psychoanalytic practi-
tioners resolved the tensions by setting aside their scientific obligations.
Others were inspired by the commitment to science to search for forms of
practice more compatible with it.
Science as a Source of Knowledge
The use of the scientific method as a model for practice is a precondition
for a more critical use of science—applying knowledge derived from
research. In the development of a scientific art, modeling practice after sci-
ence generally comes first. The model is readily available, easy to grasp, and
can be implemented without delay, whereas developing a useful base of
knowledge relevant to practice takes time. Conversely, although a scientific
manner may be a sensible way to practice, its results may be quite limited in
the absence of knowledge. For example, physicians may have carefully
gathered facts and tested hypotheses about patients with inexplicable
science and social work: a historical perspective
52. symptoms of fever and chills, but it was not until the discovery that the
anopheles mosquito was the carrier of the disease that real progress was
made in diagnosis and control of malaria.
types of scientific knowledge
In discussing the development of the knowledge base of social work, it
is useful to distinguish between different kinds of knowledge. One distinc-
tion is between knowledge that is general in form as opposed to that which
is case specific. Another has to do with whether the knowledge pertains to
assessment or intervention processes (Fischer ).
Table . shows the four categories of knowledge yielded by this two-way
classification. The cells contain illustrations of each type of knowledge; of
course, they all interact. For example, knowledge of typical early warning
(prodromal) signs of a relapse would guide inquiry with a disturbed schiz-
ophrenic client.As this and the earlier malaria example illustrate,valid gen-
eral knowledge may be essential in determining what case-specific infor-
mation should be collected.
table . Types of Knowledge
assessment intervention
Case-specific Facts and hypotheses Information about interventions
(Case may be system about case at hand used and apparent outcomes
of any size, individual, in case at hand
group, community)
General General concepts, Generalizations about inter-
propositions, vention and their effectiveness
about problems,
human behavior,
communities, etc.
Case-Specific Assessment Knowledge: The Social Survey Movement. Almost
all of the empirically based knowledge used by early social workers was
case specific, and almost all related to assessment. Social Diagnosis could be
seen as a protocol for generating knowledge of this kind for work with indi-
viduals and families. The most ambitious and complex use of case-specific
science and social work: a historical perspective
53. assessment knowledge emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century
in what has been referred to as the social survey movement. The movement
began in with the launching of the Pittsburgh Survey, which grew out
of a concern about the impact of the combination of industrialization and
urbanization on the lives of city dwellers. It was an ambitious, citywide
attempt to investigate actual and potential problem areas, such as working
conditions in the steel industry, industrial accidents, typhoid fever, trades
employing women, and child-helping institutions. As its prospectus stated,
the survey’s purpose was“to supply unbiased reports in each field as a basis
for local action” (Kellogg :). It was assumed that exposing the
shocking facts of various urban ills would goad the citizenry into programs
of reform. The Pittsburgh Survey was quickly followed by many others as
the movement swept across the nation. Hundreds were eventually carried
out as the survey became the dominant form of research related to social
work concerns. As an indicator of their importance, the leading social wel-
fare journal of the time, Charities and the Commons, changed its name to
Survey.
The kind of knowledge generated by surveys was clearly to be assess-
ment oriented and case specific.As Zimbalist has commented,“the primary
emphasis was on ‘diagnosing’ a given community as it was ‘today’ in a
major, one-shot operation. The findings and conclusions might have no
bearing on any other community or indeed on the same community five
years hence” (:).
By the s, large-scale surveys of the Pittsburgh type had begun to give
way to more circumscribed, special-purpose community surveys carried
out by councils and other planning bodies. There is general agreement that
the surveys fell well short of achieving their objectives of bringing about
significant social change (MacDonald ; Polansky ; Zimbalist ).
Polansky delivered one of the harsher judgments: “Most community sur-
veys were initiated in the hope that once the facts were compiled and art-
fully presented, the local leadership would be inspired to act.” But “Experi-
ence in this country, alas, was that knowledge of needs did not guarantee
incentive to meet them” (:). In terms of our framework, the city-
wide surveys were restricted to assessment knowledge, which may have
been flawed by the biases of the data gatherers as well as their insensitivity
to local conditions (many were outside experts) but still revealed problems
that might have warranted action. What was lacking, however, was the nec-
essary intervention knowledge to use the exposure of these problems as a
basis for reform. Relevant knowledge might have included ways to organ-
science and social work: a historical perspective
54. ize key players in the community to develop appropriate reform agendas.
However, this criticism must be tempered, given the extraordinary difficul-
ties in developing effective intervention follow-through for surveys, diffi-
culties that are still very much with us today.
But like other “failures” in social work research, the omnibus survey was
eventually transformed into a very useful tool. It became more specialized
and more focused,more methodologically sophisticated and more sensitive
to the politics of implementation. Community surveys and needs assess-
ments of today can be traced back to the survey movement.
From another perspective, it is not surprising that the large-scale surveys
fell short of the mark. The surveys were new research technology. Some of
their faults—ambitiousness, diffuseness, ignorance of local conditions, lack
of methodological refinement—may be attributed to the initial use of a
new research paradigm. As we shall see, quite similar faults characterized a
first-generation trial of another research paradigm—the field experiment.
General Assessment Knowledge. Knowledge relating to assessment in social
work covers a vast, not well-charted terrain. One type concerns the various
systems social workers deal with. These can be thought of as a hierarchy of
open systems (Tomm ); like a set of Russian dolls,they can be fitted into
one another in an ascending scale of complexity. For example, neurologi-
cal, circulatory, and other systems make up the individual, who in turn can
be part of a family system, which is a part of a community, and so on.
Another type concerns target conditions—the problems or disorders that
social workers try to affect. Knowledge of a target condition subsumes
knowledge of one or more constituent systems and hence is at a higher inte-
grative level. Thus, a target condition involving a family with an alcoholic
member would involve knowledge of individuals and families as well as of
alcoholism.
The empirical foundations of this body of knowledge have evolved
slowly since the beginnings of social work. In an effort to provide under-
pinnings for the scientific charity movement, ambitious studies were
undertaken to determine the causes of poverty.Although these studies used
data from particular cities, their purpose was to lay the groundwork for an
explanation of urban poverty in general. Perhaps the best known was con-
ducted by Amos Warner, an economist. Warner () surveyed ,
cases of relief applicants investigated by a number of COSs that used a com-
mon form. Essentially, each investigator’s own attributions of causes were
entered on these forms. In one sense the study was a collection of the indi-
science and social work: a historical perspective
60. This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Pictures Don't Lie
Author: Katherine MacLean
Illustrator: Martin Schneider
Release date: February 12, 2016 [eBook #51193]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PICTURES DON'T
LIE ***
62. Pictures Don't Lie
By KATHERINE MacLEAN
Illustrated by MARTIN SCHNEIDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction August 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
63. ... Pictures, that is, that one can test and
measure.
And these pictures positively, absolutely could
not lie!
The man from the News asked, "What do you think of the aliens,
Mister Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?"
"Very human," said the thin young man.
Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady faint
drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where they
would arrive. On the concrete runways, the puddles were
pockmarked with rain, and the grass growing untouched between
the runways of the unused field glistened wetly, bending before
gusts of wind.
64. Back at a respectful distance from where the huge spaceship would
land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews
huddled inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the
deserted sandy landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery was
ringed in a great circle, and in the distance across the horizon,
bombers stood ready at airfields, guarding the world against possible
treachery from the first alien ship ever to land from space.
"Do you know anything about their home planet?" asked the man
from Herald.
The Times man stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of
questions, but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young
man with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was
being treated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on
edge, and they did not want to harry him with too many questions
to answer at once. They wanted to keep his good will. Tomorrow he
would be one of the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines.
"No, nothing directly."
"Any ideas or deductions?" Herald persisted.
"Their world must be Earth-like to them," the weary-looking young
man answered uncertainly. "The environment evolves the animal.
But only in relative terms, of course." He looked at them with a
quick glance and then looked away evasively, his lank black hair
beginning to cling to his forehead with sweat. "That doesn't
necessarily mean anything."
"Earth-like," muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed
nothing more in the reply.
The Times man glanced at the Herald, wondering if he had noticed,
and received a quick glance in exchange.
The Herald asked Nathen, "You think they are dangerous, then?"
It was the kind of question, assuming much, which usually broke
reticence and brought forth quick facts—when it hit the mark. They
65. all knew of the military precautions, although they were not
supposed to know.
The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. "No, I
wouldn't say so."
"You think they are friendly, then?" said the Herald, equally positive
on the opposite tack.
A fleeting smile touched Nathen's lips. "Those I know are."
There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic
facts of the story before the ship came. The Times asked, "What led
up to your contacting them?"
Nathen answered after a hesitation. "Static. Radio static. The Army
told you my job, didn't they?"
The Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had
conducted them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if
he objected by instinct to telling anything to the public.
Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. "My job is radio decoder for the
Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune
in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear,
and build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic
scramble patterns."
The officer cleared his throat, but said nothing.
The reporters smiled, noting that down.
Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been
legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public
security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to
seem a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public
relations to admit to it.
66. Nathen continued, "I started directing the pickup at stars in my
spare time. There's radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that
sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have
been listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work
out why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged
bursts. It didn't seem natural."
He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he
would say was the thing that would make him famous—an idea that
had come to him while he listened—an idea as simple and as perfect
as the one that came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.
"I decided it wasn't natural. I tried decoding it."
Hurriedly he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. "You
see, there's an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a
record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and
then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I'd heard that kind of
screech before."
"You mean they broadcast at us in code?" asked the News.
"It's not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it
down. They're not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets,
inhabited planets, and there is broadcasting between them, they
would send it on a tight beam to save power." He looked for
comprehension. "You know, like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight
beam can go on forever without losing power. But aiming would be
difficult from planet to planet. You can't expect a beam to stay on
target, over such distances, more than a few seconds at a time. So
they'd naturally compress each message into a short half-second or
one-second-length package and send it a few hundred times in one
long blast to make sure it is picked up during the instant the beam
swings across the target."
He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this
explanation was for the newspapers. "When a stray beam swings
through our section of space, there's a sharp peak in noise level
from that direction. The beams are swinging to follow their own
67. planets at home, and the distance between there and here
exaggerates the speed of swing tremendously, so we wouldn't pick
up more than a bip as it passes."
"How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?" the
Times asked. "Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?"
It was a private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and
excitement.
The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face
for a moment. "Maybe we're intercepting everybody's telephone
calls, and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all
day yacking at each other over the radio. Maybe the human type is
standard model."
"It would take something like that," the Times agreed. They smiled
at each other.
The News asked, "How did you happen to pick up television instead
of voices?"
"Not by accident," Nathen explained patiently. "I'd recognized a
scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are
understandable in any language."
Near the interviewers, a Senator paced back and forth, muttering his
memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide
streaming windows into the gray sleeting rain.
Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform
flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on
booms, and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the
Senator to make his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world.
A shabby radio sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal
its parts, two cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side
and the speaker humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and
68. knobs jutted up before them and a small hand-mike sat ready on the
table before the panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively
cased piece of equipment with "Radio Lab, U.S. Property" stenciled
on it.
"I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and
began working on them," Nathen added. "It took a couple of months
to find the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough
to the right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern
to the Department, they gave me full time to work on it, and an
assistant to help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands,
and assign them the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the
screen."
The shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver
that they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting
to reduce the maddening rippling plaids of unsynchronized color
scanners to some kind of sane picture.
"Trial and error," said Nathen, "but it came out all right. The wide
band-spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the
beginning."
He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly
and the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The
set was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great
interstellar spaceship which now circled the atmosphere.
"We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the
set working, and started recording and playing everything that came
in, we found we'd tapped something like a lending library line. It was
all fiction, plays."
Between the pauses in Nathen's voice, the Times found himself
unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching
rocket jets.
69. The Post asked, "How did you contact the spaceship?"
"I scanned and recorded a film copy of Rite of Spring, the Disney-
Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we
were receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn't get there for a good
number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please
the library to get a new record in.
"Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of
recordings, we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It
was a flash of the Disney being played to a large audience, and then
the audience sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal
was very clear and loud. We'd intercepted a spaceship. They were
asking for an encore, you see. They liked the film and wanted
more...."
He smiled at them in sudden thought. "You can see them for
yourself. It's all right down the hall where the linguists are working
on the automatic translator."
The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin
young man turned to him quickly. "No security reason why they
should not see the broadcasts, is there? Perhaps you should show
them." He said to the reporters reassuringly, "It's right down the
hall. You will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches."
The interview was very definitely over. The lank-haired, nervous
young man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while
the officer swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down
the hall to a closed door.
They opened it and fumbled into a darkened room crowded with
empty folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The
door closed behind them, bringing total darkness.
There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats
around him, but the Times man remained standing, aware of an
enormous surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find
himself in the wrong country.
70. The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real thing in
the darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that
the action was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right.
He was looking at aliens.
The impression was of two humans disguised, humans moving
oddly, half-dancing, half-crippled. Carefully, afraid the images would
go away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized
glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other and put them
on.
Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid,
and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which
he watched them.
They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room,
discussing something with restrained excitement. The large man in
the green tunic closed his purple eyes for an instant at something
the other said, and grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if
shoving something away from him.
Mellerdrammer.
The second, smaller, with yellowish-green eyes, stepped closer,
talking more rapidly in a lower voice. The first stood very still, not
trying to interrupt.
Obviously, the proposal was some advantageous treachery, and he
wanted to be persuaded. The Times groped for a chair and sat
down.
Perhaps gesture is universal; desire and aversion, a leaning forward
or a leaning back, tension, relaxation. Perhaps these actors were
masters. The scenes changed, a corridor, a parklike place in what he
began to realize was a spaceship, a lecture room. There were others
71. talking and working, speaking to the man in the green tunic, and
never was it unclear what was happening or how they felt.
They talked a flowing language with many short vowels and shifts of
pitch, and they gestured in the heat of talk, their hands moving with
an odd lagging difference of motion, not slow, but somehow drifting.
He ignored the language, but after a time the difference in motion
began to arouse his interest. Something in the way they walked....
With an effort he pulled his mind from the plot and forced his
attention to the physical difference. Brown hair in short silky crew
cuts, varied eye colors, the colors showing clearly because their
irises were very large, their round eyes set very widely apart in
tapering light-brown faces. Their necks and shoulders were thick in a
way that would indicate unusual strength for a human, but their
wrists were narrow and their fingers long and thin and delicate.
There seemed to be more than the usual number of fingers.
Since he came in, a machine had been whirring and a voice
muttering beside him. He called his attention from counting their
fingers and looked around. Beside him sat an alert-looking man
wearing earphones, watching and listening with hawklike
concentration. Beside him was a tall streamlined box. From the
screen came the sound of the alien language. The man abruptly
flipped a switch on the box, muttered a word into a small hand-
microphone and flipped the switch back with nervous rapidity.
He reminded the Times man of the earphoned interpreters at the
UN. The machine was probably a vocal translator and the mutterer a
linguist adding to its vocabulary. Near the screen were two other
linguists taking notes.
The Times remembered the Senator pacing in the observatory room,
rehearsing his speech of welcome. The speech would not be just the
72. empty pompous gesture he had expected. It would be translated
mechanically and understood by the aliens.
On the other side of the glowing window that was the stereo screen,
the large protagonist in the green tunic was speaking to a pilot in a
gray uniform. They stood in a brightly lit canary-yellow control room
in a spaceship.
The Times tried to pick up the thread of the plot. Already he was
interested in the fate of the hero, and liked him. That was the effect
of good acting, probably, for part of the art of acting is to win
affection from the audience, and this actor might be the matinee idol
of whole solar systems.
Controlled tension, betraying itself by a jerk of the hands, a too-
quick answer to a question. The uniformed one, not suspicious,
turned his back, busying himself at some task involving a map lit
with glowing red points, his motions sharing the same fluid dragging
grace of the others, as if they were underwater, or on a slow motion
film. The other was watching a switch, a switch set into a panel,
moving closer to it, talking casually—background music coming and
rising in thin chords of tension.
There was a closeup of the alien's face watching the switch, and the
Times noted that his ears were symmetrically half-circles, almost
perfect with no earholes visible. The voice of the uniformed one
answered, a brief word in a preoccupied deep voice. His back was
still turned. The other glanced at the switch, moving closer to it,
talking casually, the switch coming closer and closer stereoscopically.
It was in reach, filling the screen. His hand came into view, darting
out, closed over the switch—
There was a sharp clap of sound and his hand opened in a frozen
shape of pain. Beyond him, as his gaze swung up, stood the figure
of the uniformed officer, unmoving, a weapon rigid in his hand, in
the startled position in which he had turned and fired, watching with
widening eyes as the man in the green tunic swayed and fell.
73. The tableau held, the uniformed one drooping, looking down at his
hand holding the weapon which had killed, and music began to build
in from the background. Just for an instant, the room and the things
within it flashed into one of those bewildering color changes which
were the bane of color television, and switched to a color negative of
itself, a green man standing in a violet control room, looking down at
the body of a green man in a red tunic. It held for less than a
second; then the color band alternator fell back into phase and the
colors reversed to normal.
Another uniformed man came and took the weapon from the limp
hand of the other, who began to explain dejectedly in a low voice
while the music mounted and covered his words and the screen
slowly went blank, like a window that slowly filmed over with gray
fog.
The music faded.
In the dark, someone clapped appreciatively.
The earphoned man beside the Times shifted his earphones back
from his ears and spoke briskly. "I can't get any more. Either of you
want a replay?"
There was a short silence until the linguist nearest the set said, "I
guess we've squeezed that one dry. Let's run the tape where Nathen
and that ship radio boy are kidding around CQing and tuning their
beams in closer. I have a hunch the boy is talking routine ham talk
and giving the old radio count—one-two-three-testing."
There was some fumbling in the semi-dark and then the screen
came to life again.
It showed a flash of an audience sitting before a screen and gave a
clipped chord of some familiar symphony. "Crazy about Stravinsky
and Mozart," remarked the earphoned linguist to the Times,
74. resettling his earphones. "Can't stand Gershwin. Can you beat that?"
He turned his attention back to the screen as the right sequence
came on.
The Post, who was sitting just in front of him, turned to the Times
and said, "Funny how much they look like people." He was writing,
making notes to telephone his report. "What color hair did that
character have?"
"I didn't notice." He wondered if he should remind the reporter that
Nathen had said he assigned the color bands on guess, choosing the
colors that gave the most plausible images. The guests, when they
arrived, could turn out to be bright green with blue hair. Only the
gradations of color in the picture were sure, only the similarities and
contrasts, the relationship of one color to another.
From the screen came the sound of the alien language again. This
race averaged deeper voices than human. He liked deep voices.
Could he write that?
No, there was something wrong with that, too. How had Nathen
established the right sound-track pitch? Was it a matter of taking the
modulation as it came in, or some sort of hetrodyning up and down
by trial and error? Probably.
It might be safer to assume that Nathen had simply preferred deep
voices.
As he sat there, doubting, an uneasiness he had seen in Nathen
came back to add to his own uncertainty, and he remembered just
how close that uneasiness had come to something that looked like
restrained fear.
"What I don't get is why he went to all the trouble of picking up TV
shows instead of just contacting them," the News complained.
"They're good shows, but what's the point?"
"Maybe so we'd get to learn their language too," said the Herald.
On the screen now was the obviously unstaged and genuine scene
of a young alien working over a bank of apparatus. He turned and
75. waved and opened his mouth in the comical O shape which the
Times was beginning to recognize as their equivalent of a smile,
then went back to trying to explain something about the equipment,
in elaborate awkward gestures and carefully mouthed words.
The Times got up quietly, went out into the bright white stone
corridor and walked back the way he had come, thoughtfully folding
his stereo glasses and putting them away.
No one stopped him. Secrecy restrictions were ambiguous here. The
reticence of the Army seemed more a matter of habit, mere reflex,
from the fact that it had all originated in the Intelligence
Department, than any reasoned policy of keeping the landing a
secret.
The main room was more crowded than he had left it. The TV
camera and sound crew stood near their apparatus, the Senator had
found a chair and was reading, and at the far end of the room eight
men were grouped in a circle of chairs, arguing something with
impassioned concentration. The Times recognized a few he knew
personally, eminent names in science, workers in field theory.
A stray phrase reached him: "—reference to the universal constants
as ratio—" It was probably a discussion of ways of converting
formulas from one mathematics to another for a rapid exchange of
information.
They had reason to be intent, aware of the flood of insights that
novel viewpoints could bring, if they could grasp them. He would
have liked to go over and listen, but there was too little time left
before the spaceship was due, and he had a question to ask.
The hand-rigged transceiver was still humming, tuned to the sending
band of the circling ship, and the young man who had started it all
was sitting on the edge of the TV platform with his chin resting in
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