Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 41

Much of what we come to believe is supported by our own logical examination of the information we encounter in our daily lives. We ask ourselves if it makes sense to us. If we believe that homework was helpful to our learning in high school, then maybe we will believe that it makes sense for our clients to have homework between therapy sessions.

Sometimes we are convinced of a certain practice in social work because we were convinced of the logic of a service activity by someone. Perhaps it makes sense that we should involve the parents in the treatment of children because (a) we can learn more about the causes of the child’s behavior, (b) we can convey some knowledge to the parents that will help them improve the behavior of the child, and (c) the parents must be involved in the improvement of the child’s behavior for the service activities to work.

This basis for forming opinions is not founded on science, although any of them could be subjected to scientific inquiry. Instead, they are based on a particular logic that we embrace. But what if this logic is flawed? For many years, it was popularly believed in psychology that schizophrenia was caused by a form of parenting where the father was distant and the mother was controlling. This was the dominant belief among psychologists for a period of time, even though this theory was not supported by science. Finally, there were enough scientific studies to disclaim this idea and conclude that the brain of the schizophrenic is different. In other words, schizophrenics are the way they are because of genetics, not parenting.

Many new programs or services are sold on the basis that their practices make sense as a treatment for a given condition. But they do not become listed as evidence-based practices until they have been subjected to a sufficient amount of scientific studies. An example of a service that proved to make things worse was a program called Scared Straight. The idea of this program was that if at-risk youth were required to visit a prison where prisoners would tell them how bad prison life was, they would be scared enough to avoid a life of crime. This made a lot of sense to a lot of people, some of them important enough to ensure a good deal of funding for this program for a period of time before it was subjected to scientific study.

As you will see in a later part of this chapter, the evidence on the outcomes from this program suggested that at-risk youth who encountered this program were more likely to engage in criminal behavior than those who did not. So it was worse than being ineffective; it was making things worse.