Negotiating Practice Research

The complexity of carrying out practice research in social service organizations is often matched by the complexity of teaching future social work practitioners to use and engage in practice research. The evidence of this complexity is clearly reflected in the articles featured in this special issue. To appreciate the scope of the teaching challenge, it is important to reflect on the evolving definition of practice research and issues involved in negotiating practice research activities with multiple stakeholders. According to the Salisbury Statement on Practice Research (Salisbury Forum Group, 2011, p. 5),

Practice research involves curiosity about practice. It is about identifying effective and promising ways in which to help people; and it is about challenging troubling practice through the critical examination of practice and the development of new ideas in the light of experience. It recognizes that this is best done by practitioners in partnership with researchers, where [researchers] have as much, if not more, to learn from practitioners as practitioners have to learn from researchers. It is an inclusive approach to professional knowledge that is concerned with understanding the complexity of practice alongside the commitment to empower and address social justice issues, through practice. Practice research involves the generation of knowledge of direct relevance to professional practice and therefore will normally involve knowledge generated directly from practice itself in a grounded way.

This statement on defining practice research was expanded in the Helsinki Statement (Helsinki Forum Group, 2014) with a specific focus on the principles and values of establishing partnerships and relationships between research and practice. The participatory process of practice research therefore reflects and emphasizes the relationships and interactions between researchers, practitioners, and service users. Practice research includes the following goals: (a) research that critically describes, analyzes, and develops practice; (b) a process in which curiosity, critical reflection, and critical thinking need to be reflected by researchers, practitioners, and service users; (c) a commitment to locally based collaboration between researchers/research settings and practitioner/practice settings in the planning, generating, and disseminating of research; and (d) a participatory and dialogue-based research process designed to develop practice while validating different types of expertise within the partnership.

The methodological dimensions of practice research include a reliance on academic research standards; an in-depth understanding of the concrete and pragmatic issues of social work practice, along with the capacity to challenge practice in new ways (empirical, exploratory, emancipatory, and theoretical); and the interpretation and dissemination of findings through dialogue with service users and practitioners that reflect a learning process. The Helsinki Statement also highlighted the importance of the negotiation between the various partners as being a specific element of the practice research process where partners are equal but different and may share separate interests within the collaborative process.

In essence, practice research is a meeting point between service users, practitioners, and researchers where persons with common understandings, different interests, and powerful positions are engaged in a collaborative process. The establishing of knowledge-based social work through collaboration is enriched by the cultural and professional diversity among the participants that acknowledges the different perceptions of what knowledge is and how it is established. These sometimes divergent positions should not be overlooked or hidden but rather clarified through a negotiation process among the participants that makes it possible to receive and share knowledge.

Practice research in social work is a question of studying not only how things have evolved (or how they work) but also how they can be improved. Such a research perspective also looks at conditions, in relationship to the impact and relevance for practice, as well as knowledge promotion in practice. As a result, it is important to include the political dimensions of social work practice when participating in practice research. Although these dimensions can make the negotiations even more complicated, they can be addressed by strengthening the relational and organizational linkage between research and practice as a way of promoting research relevance, thereby becoming more than a process of simply generalizing and disseminating research findings.

We tend to forget that translating practice into research, and research issues into practice, is not a static process but involves significant shifts in how participants interpret, construe, and relate to each other. Bringing different partners together in a practice research process sets expectations on the identification, definition, and distribution of roles. During the period of negotiation in the research process, partners need to hold on to their central interests while demonstrating interest in learning from the others. In this way, all partners may find their traditional understandings disrupted and challenged, as they exchange perspectives (and recognize as well as accept others) as an integral part of a positive and challenging dimension of collaboration. Moving out of one’s comfort zone challenges conventional thinking and often leads to the identification of possible conflicts among the different stakeholders. To build a more unified understanding of the focus of practice research, the collaborative or co-productive knowledge production processes require a process of managed communication among different stakeholders (Nowotny, 2003). Here we need to think out of the box. By inviting key stakeholders and engaging challenges of how issues and problems are viewed by different actors, it is possible (from the very beginning of the process) to significantly improve the way that a study is designed, and may also have an impact on the pattern of alliances that emerges throughout the process (Boelens, 2010). Practice research therefore may help participants move beyond the familiar and convenient contexts by including persons not often consulted or engaged as participants (e.g., service users).

The knowledge emerging from negotiated practice research thus can challenge traditions and understandings within practice and research communities. Findings also often challenge the collaboration skills of participating partners who operate with different interests, understandings, and goals. For example, in identifying opposing and shared interests related to studying youth issues at the Mathilda Wrede Institute on Practice Research in Helsinki, Finland, the study began with an initial analysis of the perspectives/worries/problems that different actors experienced when dealing with troubled youth, including the youth themselves. This process provided data on how to explore several ways of changing practice and how separate interests could be understood, studied, and addressed. This accomplishment would not have been possible without the different types of negotiations and the adjustments that accompanied them. This observation also emphasizes that this procedure is more than a research protocol, namely, a combined research and learning process. It can indeed be a major challenge for researchers to step outside the ivory tower in order to engage in a more equal partnership when conducting practice research. It may be a similar challenge for practitioners to become increasingly research minded by stepping inside the ivory tower culture of practice researchers. This process takes place in public spheres and involves an interaction among many actors, each of whom represents different institutions and interests that contribute a variety of attitudes and competences. Therefore, the process is demanding of all partners and may challenge long-treasured traditions. This way of understanding negotiation could be seen as parallel to what has been defined as “disturbing feedback” in learning processes and as “constructive disruption” by Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009). The negotiation process can be disrupting when it includes criticism of everyday practice, as well as traditional research paradigms.

As a result, negotiations in practice research frequently reflect disturbance and disruption as opposed to consensus.

To reach the point of respecting and understanding others, partners often are called upon to negotiate and struggle with seemingly contradictory issues that may impact collaboration. In this context, it is helpful to explore the concept of “othering,” where researchers are looked upon as “the other” by the practitioners and the practitioner is looked upon as “the other” by the researcher (Uggerhøj, 2014). The process of being “othered” calls for partners to manage the difficult aspects of the negotiating process by addressing the central issues, sometimes through disturbing dialogue, toward increasing the shared understandings that are needed for effective collaboration. In this way, collaboration needs to be built upon open but constructive critiques, quite common in a research environment but less common in the practice community. For example, practice research findings may reveal conundrums with how practice has evolved, as well as problems with the research design, implementation, and/or interpretation of findings that may require new rounds of negotiation.

Conclusion

Although the practice research collaboration can be conceptualized as disturbing, disrupting, complex, and difficult, a well-managed negotiating process should make it possible to explore the origins of disturbing, disrupting, complex, and difficult issues. This understanding makes it possible for partners to work on the inclusion of the “different” issues into the common project or collaboration. The dialogue or negotiation is not to be developed during the process of practice research. It starts and defines the processes by recognizing the importance of relationships related to promoting respect and understanding among the several partners as part of a negotiated and shared endeavor. To be able to establish negotiation processes throughout a practice research project, each partner needs to be open to critical assessment regarding the traditions associated with doing research and/or social work practice.

If practice research is going to have a real impact on social work practice, it needs to become an integral part of social work education programs. While learning how to integrate research and practice skills, students need learning opportunities that refine their skills related to reflexive dialogue, managing negotiation processes, deconstructing “otherness,” and dealing with disturbing and complex issues. Besides knowledge about practice research methodology and philosophy of science, many of these capacities call for experiential learning through the process of engaging in practice research projects. As noted in the recent New York Statement on practice research (Epstein et al., 2015), the future of practice research calls for (a) expanding stakeholder involvement and dialogical methods—from an earlier focus on practitioners and researchers to multiple stakeholders including service users, educators, agency managers, and policymakers; (b) addressing the complex issues of practice research dissemination to and utilization by various stakeholders by addressing aspects related to language, technology, organizational supports, and policy relevance; (c) supporting the learning process in which social workers become both users of practice research and producers of practice research and thereby contribute to new forms of social work practice; (d) identifying the organizational and financial supports for practice research among managers and policymakers as a way to institutionalize this form of knowledge development within the service delivery environment; and (e) educating future generations of practitioners, practice researchers, and service users about partnership building. The learning environment of social work students often needs to be expanded in order to include the skills associated with negotiation processes that involve different stakeholders, combining research and learning processes; understanding the impact of organizational, economic, and political forces; and establishing new forms of partnerships.

Although practice research is not a new idea in social work education, it does represent a more comprehensive approach to knowledge production. The teaching and learning environment can serve as a laboratory for establishing partnership-based knowledge production where all the stakeholders share in the learning process, the findings, and the research outcomes.