Uncovering what is inside the black box of social work interventions: a (critical) realist evaluation of ‘Integrated Rights-Practices’
Social work and non-profit organizations are increasingly pressured to demonstrate their impact, effectiveness, and efficiency. Although this ascribes an important role to evaluation research, there is a lack of clear methods and guidelines to adequately capture the complexity of social work interventions. Today, research on social work is predominantly organized from either a positivist or constructivist perspective, respectively measuring the outcomes of interventions through (quasi) experimental designs or using qualitative methods to reconstruct the lived experiences of service users. Critical realism provides a needed middle-ground between these approaches by combining a realist ontology with a relativist epistemology, proposing a generative conception of causation, and shifting the focus to the underlying causes, structures and mechanisms that give rise to particular events.
In this seminar, I provide an overview of how we have adopted critical realism and realist evaluation in our research on ‘Integrated Rights-Practices’. These pilot-projects aimed to overcome the non-take-up of social rights through interorganizational collaboration.
