From the Guest Editors: Introduction to Evidence-Based Group Work in Community Settings

From the Guest Editors: Introduction to Evidence-Based Group Work in Community Settings

Integrating evidence-based practice in social work in general, and in group work in particular, is an old and recent movement. Identifying client-level outcomes and examining the effectiveness of our practice models dates back to the beginning of professional social work. Nowhere has this been more evident than in group work. Robust clinical research on the effectiveness of specific group models has played a central role in social work research, so much so that a review of intervention trials found that more than half of the trials conducted by social work researchers were group based (Fortune & Reid, 1999). Well before the current movement in social work education toward evidence-based practice, there was a yearly meeting focused on empirical group work that met yearly for almost two decades.

In spite of the acceptance by the rest of the field of social work of the importance of developing evidence-based interventions and educating our future practitioners in incorporating evidence into practice, there have been roadblocks that have detracted from the dissemination of evidence-based practices into community settings. First, there is the now well-accepted problem that many of our best practices developed by researchers through traditional efficacy/effectiveness-focused approaches do not translate well into the “real world” of practice. This has led to the “translational research” movement, which emphasizes partnerships between researchers and practitioners in developing evidence-based treatments for the real world of practice. Again, this is not a new endeavor in group work; there are good examples of collaborative research-practice efforts in group work written well over 15 years ago (Galinsky, Turnbull, Meglin, & Wilner, 1993).

Second, although the need to educate practitioners in how to do evidence-based practice has led to several texts on how to teach evidence-based practice (including one by the co-editor, Macgowan, 2008), this has led to neither a clear pedagogy (or andragogy, as we argue subsequently) nor evidence that this approach is more effective than traditional approaches. In effect, we are touting a new paradigm—as Howard, McMillen, and Pollio (2003) did in the first Social Work publication on this topic—without submitting it to the same rigor that we urge in espousing evidence-based practices. We have not subjected the model to the test, in part because educationally it remains relatively ill defined. The Emperor simply does not have any clothes!

When the Editor-in-Chief Andrew Malekoff of Social Work with Groups approached us with the idea of guest editing this volume on evidence-based group work in community settings, we became very excited by the possibilities. Rather than continuing to contribute to the academic discussion, we could use the journal's focus on practice and its commitment to providing information that is useful in real-world settings to facilitate a discussion that might be useful and scientifically valid to community group workers and educators. We were also hoping to provide material that would help remove some of the material forming the two roadblocks detailed above. If the material would not be sufficient to remove the roadblocks completely, we were hoping that the discussions might help reduce them, or at least help us to go around them. If you allow us to stretch our metaphors, we were not trying to clothe the Emperor in ermine, but perhaps allow him some options in foundation garments.

This volume includes 10 articles that we think are scientifically interesting and useful to practitioners and to educators. We begin with a series of articles that detail group models developed through collaborations between researchers and community agencies. The first article by Marsiglia and colleagues presents their REAL groups for Latino children, a small-group intervention for at-risk children in their keepin' it REAL program. Next, Smith and Hall present a discussion of challenges to implementing their strength-oriented family therapy (SOFT) multifamily group model for adolescent substance users in a community setting. Mishna, Muskat and Wiener present a thorough review and discussion of the development and implementation of their school-based groups for students with learning disabilities, which includes preliminary evaluation data. Their discussion complements Smith and Hall's, as well as echoing many of the same themes. Next, Bidgood and colleagues present their Supporting Tempers, Emotions and Anger Management (STEAM) program for children conducted in a community agency setting. Finally, Duncan and Klinger present a review of evidence-based programs in group, school, and community settings for children with autism-spectrum disorders.

These articles share common features. Beyond a proclivity for catchy names, each details efforts to implement, research, or review programs in community settings. Although it was not our intention, these articles also focus on some level on issues involving children and/or adolescents. All include some attention to the challenges of conducting standardized (mostly manualized) interventions within their community–academic partnership. All articles pay attention to the various systems that affect the child's behaviors, such as families and schools, and on the context in which the issue of clinical plays out, such as in ethnic minority populations. Rather than controlling for these differences (as would be the case in efficacy/effectiveness-focused research) or translating the interventions into their settings, these articles either incorporate context within the model or spend considerable attention exploring the way context affects the interventions. We also believe that the groups or programs detailed in this first set of articles will be of interest to readers working with populations with these problems.

The second set of articles deal with issues around instruction and dissemination of evidence-based group work into practice settings. To begin, we include two pieces written by the co-editors focusing on instruction in evidence-based group work. The first details an integrated educational model on evidence-based group work. This model includes attention to how evidence-based group work principles integrate with skill development in the classroom, and how both can facilitate improved practice behavior. We deliberately choose the term andragogy over the more traditional pedagogy in that the model incorporates an adult-learner approach. We follow this presentation with an example of how the evidence-based practice model developed by Macgowan is incorporated in a master's level group-work practicum experience. Following this, we present two discussions of challenges around implementing evidence-based practice in community settings. This includes a second article by Muskat, Mishna, and colleagues that uses the experience detailed in their earlier article on developing their manualized group as a means to develop practice principles for enlisting agency staff in providing evidence-based group work. We also include an article by Krauss and Levin on a group-based intervention developed at Washington University in St. Louis to educate administrators on implementation of evidence-based practice.

We conclude with an article by Sheldon Rose and Hee-suk Chang on motivating clients in treatment groups. Using—as he has across his career—the best available evidence, Rose discusses this important issue in a practical, applied manner. We have included this article for two reasons. First, it provides recognition that despite the importance of manuals, “evidence” includes much beyond randomized clinical trials and quasi-experimental designs. Group work has had a long tradition of attending to issues around group dynamics, and this article reminds us that we need to attend to factors not often captured in standard scientific models. It echoes the writings on the importance of group work instruction beyond manualized practices.

Of equal importance, this article again reminds us that the evidence-based practice movement in social group work predates our current attention, and that the level of sophistication provided by the previous generations of empirical group work researchers in many ways remains of greater applicability than the current focus on manualized interventions. For pioneers such as Sheldon Rose, Charles Garvin, and Maeda Galinsky (to name only a few who have influenced the guest editors), the issues raised across the articles included here are very familiar to readers. We owe them a debt for beginning and sustaining the process of understanding how evidence-based practice is very much a central historical feature of group work. Although we think this volume makes a contribution to the discussion, the limitations and challenges outlined in each article remind us that there is much work to be done before we have a clear pathway to fully realized evidence-based group work in community settings.