Creating and applying knowledge for critical social work practice: Reflections on epistemology, research, and evidence-based practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we explore knowledge creation for critical social work practice. We examine critical realism as a complementary epistemology for research with populations who experience structural inequality. The growing literature on critical realism offers helpful commentary for strengthening anti-oppressive approaches to practice. The site of clinical practice is explored as an underdeveloped location for creating case-specific knowledge that includes consideration of the structural forces that constrain people’s lives. Finally, as advocates for, yet critical commentators on, evidence-based practice (EBP), we promote expanding EBP to address the external hardships and inequalities that individuals and communities routinely face.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.271 | 0.161 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.266 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.053 | 0.068 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.037 |
| Research integrity | 0.030 | 0.047 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".