Can Research and Practice be Integrated in Social Work Education?

Preparing social workers to engage in empirically based practice has become a major trend in social work education. This article reports some of the findings from a study of the integration of research and practice in a graduate social work curriculum. Although students' scores on knowledge of research and statistics increased during their first graduate year, their scores on attitudes toward research became less positive. The author discusses possible explanations for this, including sources of response bias and limitations of the idea of empirically based practice.