Practice Wisdom: The Neglected Source of Practice Research

Practitioners continue to draw heavily on experiential knowledge, yet “practice wisdom,” or clinical judgment, generally has been ignored in social work practice research. Practice wisdom may seem to be based on intuition, since practitioners often find it difficult to explain the principles underlying their practice. However, practice wisdom probably is better understood as a process of incipient induction. The concept of cognitive schema, qualitative research methods, and clinical supervision focused on case comparison may all be useful for describing and con-ceptualizing practice wisdom. Practitioners' implicit principles, or rules of thumb, that can be stated as testable propositions will require integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods and developing a new epistemology of practice research.