Bridging the Gap: Designing an MSW Curriculum that Integrates Research and Practice

ABSTRACT

Systematic inquiry is an inherent part of social work practice. Despite this fact, social work students and practitioners continue to view research as difficult, intimidating and irrelevant. This disconnect is compounded by a lack of rigorous study on how best to teach research concepts to social work students. One way to bridge this gap is to provide a more robust integration of research principles and practices into the MSW curriculum through practice-based research specializations. Yet, a systematic evaluation of the number and character of these specializations is still lacking. To address this reality, we first review the ways that social workers engage in research as a function of their everyday practice, and discuss how social work curricula can better integrate research as a part of practice. We then provide data on research curricula delivery collected in 2017 from 227 accredited two-year MSW programs in the U.S. that include the number of research specializations and research courses each graduate program offers. Based on these findings we suggest a model that bridges the research-practice divide, and conclude with an illustrative case example.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching research
• social work education
• specializations
• practice-based research
• experiential learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).