Research Methods for Social Workers (4th Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Impractical Viewpoint
Review: A very unoriginal, simplistic book, written by an academic who perhaps never spent time with real clients. Yegidis imagines seminars and reading can substitute for direct experience with real people with problems. The author does not mention any personal experience doing social work. She only observes others who do the work. Life in a university is very isolated. She'd be surprised at what happens to social workers in the field.

Also much knowledge in "social work" is mostly pseudo-science. Yegidis should read F.A. Hayek's "The Counter Revolution in Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason" (1979). It explains the subtle flaws and bias in her ideas. (Hayek won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974). He'd call Yegidis' work "scientism" which is a false subjective method.

Social Work theory is NOT in the avant-garde of research methods. It is very atavistic and backward. Social work ideology combines a hodgepodge of theories from other fields. This makes it inclusive but incoherent. Nothing great has come out of social work research in the last 100 years. All the innovators are in psychology or communications.