Theoryweb & Practiceweb: Using Network Science to Build an Online Bridge Between Theory and Practice

Background: Within the profession of social work, there has been a continuing conversation on the gap between the evidence based interventions that researchers develop and promote, and those interventions that social workers are using in their daily practice. The time between the development of an effective intervention and its widespread adoption by practitioners is seen as lagging.  This project was borne from a desire to create a virtual bridge between theory and practice; one that was useful to both social work researchers and social work practitioners.

The idea of TheoryWeb and PracticeWeb is to create an online, open sourced, navigable, interactive network of evidence based social work interventions linked directly to the theory and ideas that support them. Upon completion of a functional site, social work practitioners, researchers, and students would be able to both search and explore interventions and their supporting theory in a user-friendly and accessible way. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of social work theory and practice, this network would support transcending disciplinary boundaries and instead allow for the utility of theory to guide their inclusion, rather than the disciplinary origin of the theory.

Methods: A limited version of the TheoryWeb/PracticeWeb was created to test the viability of this method and its practicability. A qualitative content analysis was done on highly influential theoretical papers on the subject of social capital across disciplines. Because a mere citation count for these papers may not represent true influence of an idea, it was necessary to analyze the papers for theoretical influence. A network was created from this inquiry, which showed the direction of influence between the multiple theories on social capital. This constitutes the sample TheoryWeb for social capital.

A search for “social work” + “intervention” + each of the social capital theories included in TheoryWeb was conducted. The resulting papers were analyzed both for impact and theoretical influence, and only those papers with demonstrated theoretical influence included. These papers were reviewed for their relationships with each other, and a network for social capital interventions was created – the sample PracticeWeb.

A final step was to link the PracticeWeb network's nodes representing interventions across to the TheoryWeb network's nodes on the specific theory (or theories) of social capital that influenced the intervention. 

Results: The resulting weighted, directed network created through this process is able to connect interventions with their supporting theory/theories. Interventions with similar supporting theory were not necessarily similar, however. Additionally, certain theories of social capital had more influence in social work interventions than others.

Implications: The case of social capital and this sample TheoryWeb and PracticeWeb is a first step towards a usable network for researchers and practitioners. Further expansion of this idea with multiple areas of theory and their related interventions has the potential to create a network that could enhance swift diffusion between evidence based intervention research and widespread practice.