Developing intervention research programs in social work

Research productivity in social work continues to log behind that of other helping professions and social and behavioral disciplines. The author offers his vision for how social work researchers and practitioners con work together to advance intervention science. An expanded definition of intervention research leads to a discussion of the kinds of inquiry that merit attention from intervention researchers in social work. Intervention research is presented as a sequence of activities, in general moving from the qualitative to the quantitative. Front-end inquiry-design and development-uses methods that are comfortable for social workers in agency settings and require modest budgets. Although beck-end endeavors-clinical trials and the protocols therein-require considerable resources, some longitudinal studies con be carried out even without a large budget or complex research infrastructure. Academic researchers and health and human services institutions could advance intervention research by taking steps to improve researcher-agency collaboration and by re-examining existing ways of training, hiring, and developing early-career researchers.