Book Chapters

Outcome-Informed Evidence-Based Practice is designed to equip you to evaluate your social work practice. However, by evaluation we do not mean a one-time assessment of the effectiveness of your intervention (though sometimes that is called for). Rather, this book will prepare you to monitor your client’s progress throughout intervention, interpret that progress, and decide if and when you need to modify your intervention.

Evidence-based practice has become the ideal way of practicing social work. Who can argue that it is not a good idea to select interventions that have been tested and found to be effective? However, the fact that an intervention demonstrates effectiveness in multiple clinical trials does not automatically mean that it will help your client achieve his or her goals. And that should be your goal–not to demonstrate the effectiveness of an intervention, but to help your client achieve his or her goals. If that is not occurring you need to know sooner, rather than later, so that you can modify the intervention if needed.

This website contains a core set of elements for each chapter: PowerPoint slides; chapter tables and figures in Microsoft Word so readers can open, explore, and use these documents for their own purposes (e.g., forms for behavioral observation and self-monitoring); and additional resources (recent relevant articles, books, and internet resources). Also, this website contains material specific to particular chapters.

Nearly every chapter in this book is built around a case with the complexity and nuances of real-life social work practice. We follow the cases through each session with details about the session and graphs constructed using the methods in the book. (You can use the graphing templates to follow along and construct your own graphs to see if they look like the ones in the book.) To see the introduction to each case go to the chapter links you see on the right.

Let us hear from you. What resources would you like to see on these pages? What questions do you have?

Thanks for your interest.

Terri Combs-Orme (tcombs-orme@utk.edu) and John G. Orme (jorme@utk.edu)