Evaluation as a Tool in the Development of Social Work Discourse

Abstract

This article reports reflections from an international conference on evaluation as a tool in the development of social work discourse. The conference was organized with the purpose of presenting the state of the art to the Swedish social work research community. In this article, a number of major issues that were discussed at the conference are reported, including evaluation paradigms and preoccupations, the relationship between the social research community and practitioners, and some of the methods of evaluation research. The authors assess their understanding of the outcomes of the conference from national perspectives, and attempt to discuss similarities and differences between Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.