Intervention Research

This cross-national Handbook frames 21st century social work in ethical, resarch-informed and progressive terms. Situated against the backdrop of economic globalisation, this path-breaking volume offers innovative approaches to shared challenges involving practice, policy and research. This Handbook (808 pages) is the world’s first generic major reference work to provide an authoritative guide to the theory, method and values of social work in one volume. Split into seven parts, the book investigates: policy, practice, theory, values, context, research and future challenges.
This chapter outlines developments in intervention research on whether social work interventions work in practice, including sections on types of research design, studying mediating factors, and the hierarchy of research design for studies of effectiveness. The chapter highlights challenges for social work intervention research such as defining the intervention, defining outcome measures, internal and external validity, eliminating confounding factors, and ethical challenges in using randomised controlled trial designs.