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The Social Work Research Center is an innovative university-community partnership within the School of Social Work in the College of Applied Human Sciences at Colorado State University. The center is focused on working with county and state child welfare agencies to generate applied research that translates into evidence-based practice for serving children and families. The history, structure, resources, and funding of the center are described, as are the ongoing and current research projects, lessons learned, and future plans. This article is the latest in a series of reports of social work research centers published in Research on Social Work Practice.

Despite a strong history of social justice–based social work professional education in Canada, there has not been an intentional integration of direct critical clinical mental health practice with social justice–based theory. Progressive social work has tended to view clinical work as focusing on the individual and failing to contribute to social change. In this article, I elaborate upon a critical clinical social work approach influenced by postmodern critique, and feminist-, narrative-, and collaborative-based practice rooted in critical theory. Critical clinical practice disrupts the individual/social binary through counterviewing unhelpful dominant social discourses and producing counterstories that participate in social resistance. I explore the constraints of neoliberalism on social work mental health practice and its influence on the ability of social workers to practice social justice–based social work. Neoliberalism constrains social workers' ability to address the social and structural determinants of mental health through its focus on economic rationalization, biomedicalization, and individual responsibilization, alongside rationalized practices that emphasize evidence-based and short-term efficiency-based models. I argue that social work is facing a crisis as a disempowered profession, as it attempts to reconcile its commitment to social justice and the importance of addressing inequity, marginalization, and oppression while often working in settings that demand the subordination of social work knowledge to neoliberal biomedicalism. Under these conditions, a critical clinical approach to mental health practice is needed now more than ever.

Sharing data publicly can provide numerous benefits to the data owner, data user, as well as the social work research community as a whole. Given the time and resources required to collect data in randomized controlled trials, gleaning the maximum amount of information from this data is highly desirable. Data sets considered to be exhausted by the primary research team often have valuable information that can be used by researchers with different research interests or analytic skill sets. Sharing these data allows other researchers to use these data to answer their research questions without duplicating the data collection efforts. Sharing data can also increase attention to the work of the primary research team, with papers with open data receiving more citations than those without public data. Engaging in open science practices such as data sharing can lead research to be seen as more trustworthy and reliable.

There has been a call for cross-cultural research in the understanding of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of ethnicity and culture on the understanding of NSSI among social work students in the United States, Greece/Cyprus, and Jordan. A convenience sample of 438 social work students was used. Participants completed a 60-item questionnaire. Results revealed statistically significant differences in students' knowledge and cultural beliefs about NSSI by country. This study makes a novel contribution to the exploration of cultural aspects of NSSI and has implications for international social work practice and education.

The purpose of this article is to develop guidelines to assist practitioners and researchers in evaluating and developing rigorous case studies. The main concern in evaluating a case study is to accurately assess its quality and ultimately to offer clients social work interventions informed by the best available evidence. To assess the quality of a case study, we propose criteria, including transferability/external validity, credibility/internal validity, confirmability/construct validity, and dependability/reliability. Guidelines are presented in a phase-oriented framework: research design, data collection, and data analysis. Finally, several dimensions to enhance the quality at each phase of the guidelines in evaluating the case study are discussed.

AbstractWithin Northern Europe, gendered roles and responsibilities within the family have been challenged through an emergence of different family forms, increasing cultural diversity, and progressive developments in welfare policies. To varying degrees, welfare policies in different countries support a dual‐earner model and encourage men to be more active as fathers by reinforcing statutory rights and responsibilities. In child welfare practice, there has traditionally been a strong emphasis on the mother as primary carer for the child; the father has been less visible. This paper explores, in four national welfare contexts, how child welfare social workers include fathers in practice decisions. Data were collected using focus group interviews with social workers from England, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. Similarities and differences emerge in relation to services and the focus of social work assessments. However, overall, the research suggests that despite gains in policy and legislation that promote gender equality, fathers remain largely absent in child welfare practice decisions about the parenting of their children. From the research, we raise questions for social work practice and the development of welfare policies.

This article briefly chronicles the development of mixed methods research and its use in social work. We then move onto a discussion of terms and designs, reasons for (and for not) using mixed methods. Drawing upon exemplars, we address how to write up a mixed methods study when (1) the sample is single; single for one part, with a subset for the other; or, there is more than one sample; (2) the timing is concurrent or sequential; and (3) the priority or weighting is equal or weighted toward one method or the other (qualitative or quantitative). In addition we address the Discussion section of a mixed-methods article as an opportunity to integrate the qualitative and quantitative data for readers.