Rigor & Relevance

Balancing rigor and relevance is one of the tensions inherent in social work research...the two are not mutually exclusive.  It is important in a dissertation to carry out rigorous systematic research underpinned by an appropriate epistemology or theory.  This does not mean that your dissertation cannot address a practical problem.  It does mean that you have to have to have a theoretical framework to explain your theory of change.

All questions have behind them theoretical foundations without the exploration of which the questions are impossible to answer...the purpose of research as theory building and testing.

The Dissertation: From Beginning to End
Peter Lyons & Howard J. Douek

Dissertations & Theory

Theories have several basic functions; they are used to describe, to explain, and to predict. 

The role of theory in your dissertation is to provide an organizing framework through which you conduct your study. 

In addition, your dissertation research can make a contribution to the confidence we have in a particular theory or to our understanding of the conditions under which the theory coheres.

The basic purpose of scientific research is theory.

A research question is of little consequence without a theoretical framework to help conceptualize why this should be so.

One of the contexts that your review of the literature provides for your research is the theoretical connection between variables of interest.  This connection allows you to make tentative predictions and test how robust the theory may be.

The Dissertation:  From Beginning to End
Peter Lyons & Howard J. Douek

Combining Open and Closed

In social study, you open your eyes and look, in diagnosis, you close them and think.

Mary Richmond, 1917

Family Therapy Notes...

If people are really going to get deeply into therapy, they need to know that they can escape easily. So at the end of every hour we implicitly give the family the option of not making another appointment.

If the family situation is very difficult, it may even be necessary for the therapists to grow personally in order to respond adequately to the crisis.

Confrontation can lead to disaster in relationships, as well as to renewed caring, with so much of the balance held by the unconscious intent of the people involved.

The Family Crucible
Napier & Whitaker, 1978

Fathers in Family Therapy

Fathers usually are the outsiders in the modern family, and often they find coming into family therapy very uncomfortable.

The Family Crucible
Napier & Whitaker, 1978

Believe

For God has not given us a spirit of fear but the power of love and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1:7

Individual vs. Family Therapy

"Claudia...was very sensitive to pressure from adults.  She felt pressured by her parents, and the therapy felt like more pressure.  She began to see the therapist as a special kind of policeman who had been hired by her parents to 'shape her up.'"

"By trying to treat her in isolation from the real source of her problems, the psychiatrist was unknowingly collaborating with the scapegoating process in the family."

The Family Crucible
Napier & Whitaker