Thanks for revitalizing this. I wasn't at QI2008 this year because of graduation at UW-Madison and missed it last year because I was in Mexico. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to connect and participate.
I am very surprised to hear that social workers feel there is little qualitative training in social work, since as a non-social worker, it seems that the profession is fundamentally a qualitatively oriented (meaning, highly interpretive) endeavor. As social workers develop their own model of qualitative research, I would recommend looking at community based research in sociology and nursing. The CBR work in sociology is heavily influenced by practice. So is nursing, but I would say the quality of the qualitative research publications that I have read in nursing is not good--alot of it is too descriptive of obvious practices, which in my book is "not good qual research." However, it appears that nursing has made created a legitimate niche for qual research.
Look forward to hearing what others are thinking!
Lynet Uttal
Univ of Wisconsin Madison
Human Development & Family Studies, Asian American Studies, Chican@ & Latin@ Studies, Women's Studies (not social work!)
1 comment:
Hi, Lynne. Nice to hear from you. Yes, we are as you describe us, but the gatekeepers and those who voices dominate in the research arena are not interpretive.
Last night at the meeting Beth Kita from Smith said that after getting a master's in social work she did not think getting a PhD in social work would be very interesting because her training did not fit her interpretive professional experience. Only when she found the Smith PhD program did she find a good fit with her interpretive self.
She said that many practitioners do not find that PhD programs in social work are not relevant to what they experience.
Thanks for the suggestion to look at nursing and public health. I also think some anthropologists are doing the types of research that social workers could do quite naturally.
Jane Gilgun
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