Examining Social Workers' Behaviors: Randomized Factorial Surveys As Methodology

Background and Purpose: Examining social workers’ interactions with clients is inherently challenging: the act of observing a behavior changes the behavior. Randomized factorial surveys (RFS) offer an alternative to direct observation that allow researchers to investigate underlying motivations, values, beliefs, and perceptions contributing to social workers’ behavior and decision-making processes. RFS employs case vignettes whereby the characteristics (factors) are randomly assigned to the vignettes. This paper identifies the underutilization of RFS in social work research methodology and provides justification for increased use.

Methods: RFS approximate real world situations and interactions through the use of vignettes and provide low-cost, feasible strategies for social work research that resolves challenges of ethics and feasibility that prevent direct observation of phenomena. RFS control and standardize environmental stimuli, standardize processes of data collection and interpretation, and enable access to previously unavailable activities and setting. RFS can further identify the relative contributions of a complex array of factors that may be difficult to observe in practice settings. Authors review the literature on RFS and assess its application to social work research including appropriate applications, construction, and analytical considerations. Two examples from the presenters’ research will be shared utilizing RFS for data collection.

Results: Detailed methods for incorporating RFS into social work research are presented. The authors share personal experience of the process of implementing vignettes employing a randomized factorial design in research projects to answer research questions and test hypotheses. A brief presentation of findings investigating the likelihood of social workers’ endorsement of shared decision-making and recovery-oriented services will illustrate how data collected using vignettes can approximate real world situations. Strengths and limitations of vignettes in lieu of observation will be discussed.

Conclusions and Implications: RFS are an inexpensive strategy to investigate complex problems facing social work researchers. Recommendations will be made for inclusion of RFS into research methodology to understand the processes social workers use in practice to make decisions as well as to understand social problems relevant to the grand challenges in social work.