A Practitioner-Friendly Empirical Way to Evaluate Practice

Social work practitioners and the agencies that employ them have long been concerned with how best to evaluate whether the interventions that they adopt are being provided appropriately or with desired outcomes. The realities of practice in everyday service provision settings, however, make it difficult to use well-controlled research designs for evaluation purposes in such settings—especially designs involving the use of control groups. The purpose of this article is to provide practitioners in those settings with a new, feasible way to evaluate practice and yield approximate empirical findings that can inform practice decisions despite the absence of a control group. The key feature of this new approach involves the use of within-group effect size benchmarks.