We begin this chapter by developing several ways in which social work can be understood as being concerned with applying what we know. I will aim to show that the question of ‘application’ is more difficult than we often realise. We then will work through recent discussions of the meaning and importance of the ‘impact’ of research. Moving on from there we will take as a social work example the question of doing ‘practitioner research’. We will learn more about the nature of practitioner research in the next chapter. In this chapter, the emphasis will be on what we know about the experience of doing practitioner research. The opening part of the chapter is the most difficult so it may help to jump to the section on the impact of research and come back to this opening part after finishing the rest of the chapter.

In a very broad sense, social work research is the application of research methods to solve problems that social workers confront in the practice of social work. It provides information that can be taken into consideration by social workers prior to making decisions that affect their clients, programmes or agencies such as use of alternative intervention techniques or change or modification of programme/client/objectives and so forth.