QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SOCIAL WORK

This book exposes social workers, practitioners, and researchers to research methods that can be alternative or complementary to the largely quantitative methods that have dominated social work research for the last fifty years. Drawing together leading scholars of the profession with a wide diversity of viewpoints, the book addresses the need for qualitative research approaches that can better capture the context, complexity, and change processes that characterize actual practice.

The volume is organized into five parts that explain basic qualitative methods, practice evaluation, applications to types of practice, settings and client populations, integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, and epistemological issues. The exemplars of actual qualitative studies and the glossary of terms are especially helpful for classroom use.

Edmund Sherman is Professor at the School Welfare and Faculty Research Associate in the Ringel Institute of Gerontology at SUNY Albany.

William J. Reid is Professor at the School of Social Welfare at SUNY Albany and author of Research in Social Work and Task Strategies: An Empirical Approach to Clinical Social Work, both published by Columbia University Press.