Rethinking the Epistemological Foundations of Social Work: An Inquiry into Its Artistic or Social Scientific Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research paper explores the ongoing discourse surrounding the professional identity of social work within the realm of social science disciplines. It posits the idea that social work may be more aptly classified as an art form, challenging established paradigms. Through a critical examination of various approaches in practice, ethics, and professionalism, the study highlights the absence of mandated educational seminars, a departure from norms observed in similar professions. Insights gleaned from the literature review shed light on the intricacies of social work practice, ethical dilemmas, and challenges in maintaining professionalism, and the limited use of evidence-based practices, leading many critics of the discipline to suggest that social work is needed but is not based on a robust scientific foundation, proposing it may be better characterized as an art than a science. Employing Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) model for scoping reviews, the paper conducts a comprehensive search for both published and unpublished research spanning the last 25 years. Findings reveal existential challenges facing social work, such as funding cutbacks, increasing demands for mental health services, and inadequate initiatives for field practitioner support. These challenges, coupled with the lack of employment security, affect prospective students’ interest, thereby compromising education quality and service delivery. As a result, criticisms challenging the conventional categorization of social work as a social science gain momentum, suggesting that social work is more similar to an art form that relies heavily on practitioners’ intuition, empathy, and creative problem-solving abilities. This perspective contributes to disparities in funding, empirical research, and the scarcity of scientific rebuttals to practitioners’ narratives, which are often rich with anecdotal experiences and subjective interpretations.
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 | 0.081 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.199 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".