‘Social Work Research as Knowledge/Power in Practice’

Abstract

Traditionally, social research is represented as a neutral (objective) search for knowledge as an entity, for which claims of ‘reliability’, ‘validity’ and ‘credibility’ may be made if the researcher follows prescribed techniques of inquiry. From this perspective, techniques of inquiry may cause harm to informants who are subjected to the process of inquiry. Therefore, ethical research is about the legal and moral protection of subjects from the researcher's techniques of inquiry. The research relationship is constituted as one between ‘powerful researcher’ and ‘powerless researched’. Alternative views which foreground the researcher (and informants’) subjectivities as positioned sites of power challenge the unitary identities of ‘more powerful researcher’ and ‘less powerful researched’. In this paper I show through reflection on my PhD research, how the identities of ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’ are fluid, dynamic relations of power, by which ‘knowledge’ is achieved through processes of negotiation and access to ‘sites of knowledge/power’. From this perspective, knowledge is not an entity for which definitive claims of ‘reliability’, ‘validity’ and ‘credibility’ can be made. Nor are ‘research ethics’ simply the responsibility of the researcher but instead are complex and shifting micropractices of power/knowledge between ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’.