How Much Social Work Research Is in Social Work’s Grand Challenges?: A Critical Review of the Evidence for the 12 Challenges

ABSTRACT

Purpose: In 2012, leading social work scholars gathered to discuss the formation of a Grand Challenges initiative for the field of social work. The Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative (GCSWI) claims to offer an agenda for social workers that want to solve major social problems, e.g., poverty, environmental issues, and violence. GCSWI researchers utilized 21 GCSWI papers to identify innovative ways in which social workers could resolve these problems within 10 years. This paper examines the quality of the evidence for each paper, as well as exploring how much of the research was conducted by social workers.

Methods: This paper uses a directed content analysis approach to explore the evidence of each of the original GCSWI papers. All 21 GC papers were independently coded by two members of the team, and after getting to acceptable inter-rater reliability, data from the coding were analyzed to assess the quality of evidence and degree of social work research involvement in the specific GCSWI paper.

Results: Data from this study indicate that few GCSWI papers presented compelling evidence to support the goals of the specific GC, and few of the papers prioritized the work of social work researchers and publication in social work journals.

Conclusion: Implications for the GCSWI are discussed, as well as suggestions from the analysis on how the GCSWI project can be more fully situated within the science of social work if it wishes to accomplish its ambitious goals of improving the outcomes for major social problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Grand challenge
• implementation science
• evidence-informed practice
• content analysis