Editorial

A group of social work professionals and researchers from different countries came together in Salisbury, United Kingdom, in 2008 to discuss how professional practice could be researched better by and for practitioners to provide a basis for improved practice. The group formulated an international statement on practice research, which is popularly known in social work circles as the ‘Salisbury Statement’ (Salisbury Forum Group, 2011). By tracing the contours of practice research, the ‘Salisbury Statement’ started a movement in the international social work community to bridge gaps between research and practice. Building on the ‘Salisbury Statement’, four other international statements on social work practice research were promulgated in subsequent years to document its evolving conception and concerns, namely, the ‘Helsinki Statement’ in 2012, the ‘New York Statement’ in 2014, the ‘Hong Kong Statement’ in 2017, and the ‘Melbourne Statement’ in 2021. Over years of discussion in successive international conferences on practice research, the social work community has had a consensus on furthering collaboration and partnership between social work practice and research in order to tackle difficult practice issues in an age of complexity and unpredictability.

The ‘Salisbury Statement’ identified practice research as ‘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’ (Salisbury Forum Group, 2011, p. 5). In order to answer practice-based questions on the ground, practitioners are called to have direct involvement in generating and conducting practice research. However, the ‘Hong Kong Statement’ in 2017 notes that practice research in the Far East is still primarily led by academics with a limited role played by practitioners (Sim et al., 2019). Against such background, this special issue of the journal on practice research is meant to increase the visibility of practice research projects in which practitioners have taken part, with a view to encouraging similar initiatives whilst disseminating the generated knowledge to audiences in the academic circle.

The article by Chua and colleagues in this volume is an example of such projects initiated by research-minded practitioners. As medical social workers in Singapore, Chua and colleagues recognised the need to draw on research evidence and lived experience of the service users as alternative forms of knowledge to collective practice wisdom and professional expertise, and adjusted their intervention focus and strategies in accordance with the results of their research (Chua et al., 2023). Given the daily demands of social work practice that often deprive practitioners of the needed time and energy for engaging in research endeavours (Sim et al., 2019), sustaining the efforts of research-minded practitioners like Chua and colleagues to further the development of social work practice research will require attention to how an organisational space can be created to make practitioners available for answering research-based questions on the ground.

Aligning with the inclusive principle of social work practice, social work practice research is recognised as a collaborative endeavour not only between researchers and practitioners but also with the service users. The 2014 ‘New York Statement’ highlights the significance of multiple stakeholder dialogue in practice research, and calls for recognising the important role of service users in the practice research process (Epstein et al., 2015). In this volume, Henley and colleagues reports a participatory action research that involved not only the practitioners but also community members to examine harm prevention programmes in Cambodian villages. Informed by the participatory action research strategy, the study supported the involvement of community members in the research process, placing control directly into the hands of those impacted by the research to identify risks and then to develop and implement a relevant harm prevention approach for the communities (Henley et al., 2023). Through a process of action reflection and active learning by the practitioners and with the community members, Henley and colleagues unpacked preconceptions in established understandings of risk, which did not match with the risks as perceived by community members (Henley et al., 2023). Whilst recognising community members as experts in participatory action research, the authors recognise that the study may not have met the standard of scientific rigour required of pure academic studies (Henley et al., 2023). If practice research is destined to be an inclusive approach to knowledge building for understanding the complexity of practice alongside the commitment to empower (Salisbury Forum Group, 2011), we may need a renewed definition of research rigour for practice research, so that the ‘standard of scientific rigor’ does not discourage the participation of practitioners and service users who may not possess formal knowledge on conducting scientific research.

The ‘Helsinki Statement’ in 2012 introduces the idea of ‘socially robust research’ that ‘parallels and augments the rigor and practice utility of other more academically-based models of social work research’ (Julkunen et al., 2014, p. 12). Achieving social robustness in practice research would require multiple actors with differing interests and a variety of competences and attitudes to develop negotiated understandings through a dialogic and collaborative process of knowledge production (Julkunen et al., 2014). Ostensibly, realising participation, collaboration and critical reflection between researchers, practitioners and service users in an inclusive inquiry and knowledge production process to capture differences is more easily said than done. Three articles in this volume address issues in this difficult collaborative process. The two articles by Liu and colleagues and Müller and colleagues discuss the challenges and opportunities of stakeholder collaboration in practice research. In the Asian context, Liu and colleagues draw from completed practice research projects in Singapore to explore challenges in collaboration between in-house researchers and practitioners. In the European context, Müller and colleagues identify barriers and possibilities in practice research by analysing empirical PhD studies involving Danish researchers, social workers and service users. Amidst mainstream assumptions that research leads practice, both articles call for attention to the power dynamics between researchers and practitioners in negotiating their different concerns, and advocate for a communicative, power-relational, dialogic and democratic process to develop negotiated understandings (Liu et al., 2023; Müller et al., 2023). Meanwhile, Dong documents in her article the reflexive knowledge co-construction process between researcher and practitioner in a community-based home visiting programme in China. It is by embracing the alternative subjectivities as collaborators and co-learners that the researcher and the practitioner unsettled the taken-for-granted knowledge power in parent education and in working with families (Dong, 2023). The authors’ critical reflection in these three articles contributes to the building of experiential knowledge on developing negotiated understandings among multiple actors in research endeavours, which is vital if social work practice research is to be socially robust.

Feldman (2010) identifies that a ‘determinant factor in the development of meaningful practice research is the extent to which critical infrastructures are created to promote and sustain the research enterprise over the long run’ (Feldman, 2010, p. 13). Apart from a democratic and dialogic culture, facilitative structures within organisational spaces are indicative of organisational support to practice research, and are important for taking social work practice research to a new level. The article by Teo and colleagues in this volume brings our attention to the role that structural set up within organisations can play to tackle challenges in practitioner-researcher collaboration. Teo and colleagues document the benefits and challenges that an internal social work intermediary of a social work organisation in Singapore had in bridging practitioners and researchers in practice research. Defined as a department or group of individuals within a social work organisation that engages in shaping relationships, building capacity and facilitating practitioner-researcher knowledge creation and transfer, internal social work intermediaries can help creating and opening up a practice-research space, in which research-minded practitioners are motivated and their interest in research retained despite time and resource constraints (Teo et al., 2023). Unfortunately, as Teo and colleagues note from cases in Singapore, funding for administrative overheads is not always available to enable structural arrangements like internal social work intermediaries to support practice research initiatives.

With successive international statements on social work practice research, the social work community has built up a consensus on the benefits of practice research in generating knowledge of direct relevance to the complexity of practice. The question now is how the challenges of practice-research partnership can be better dealt with to enable negotiated understandings and co-learning among practitioners, researchers and service users. Despite all the challenges, we resonate with the 2021 Melbourne Statement in the prospect of practice research in social work.

There are grounds of optimism in the shift in the practice research discourse away from the gaps between research and practice, to the shared space that both researchers and practitioners inhabit. This shared space promotes conversations, collaboration, and innovation. It is in this shared space that practice meets research and the promising future for practice research in social work lies (Joubert et al., 2023, p. 373).