Challenging Perceptions of Academic Research as Bias Free: Promoting a Social Justice Framework in Social Work Research Methods Courses

Abstract

The required research courses in social work education are, perhaps, one of the more difficult content areas in which to infuse direct teaching and knowledge acquisition of multiculturalism. The study presented in this article examines the outcomes of systematically addressing social justice within a required master's level social work research methods course. The study tests the efficacy of a two-part teaching module that seeks to increase student abilities for critical consumption of academic research (n = 88) as it relates to the notion of bias neutrality. Results suggest that students decreased in their belief that academic research is necessarily bias free over the course of the class, and that students from marginalized groups showed a significantly larger decrease than did other students.

KEYWORDS:

• social justice
• research methods
• social work research
• social work education

Notes

1. While gender could have been a third identity category to be included in our “traditionally oppressed groups” categorization, a number of issues prohibited us from doing so. In the final sample only eight of the students were male, and of those eight, only four identified as heterosexual, White males.

2. For all t tests conducted in this study, homogeneity of variances were examined using an F test, Levene's (1960) test which has been shown to be more robust under conditions of nonnormality, and Brown and Forsythe's (1974) two alternative formulations (median, trimmed mean) of Levene's test statistic. No instances were detected that required the use of t-test formulation for groups with unequal variances.