Session: Ethnographic Approaches to Causal Explanation in Social Work (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Social work research is fundamentally concerned with understanding the causes of inequity and injustice and how and to what extent our interventions cause their improvement. Some have argued that causal inference can only be approached through the use of certain quantitative research designs, such as the randomized controlled trial, that control for confounding variables (e.g., McNeece & Thyer, 2004.) Yet, social work practice itself—from community organizing to mental health treatment—always occurs in complex and uncontrollable social settings (Fook, 2002). Ethnographic research methods seek to analyze and understand the complexity of social life beyond the laboratory. While some social work authors have described ethnography as purely exploratory and limited its role to developing testable hypotheses, anthropologists and sociologists value its ability to identify complex causal processes. This symposium uses data from four ethnographic studies of social work to investigate the question: What can ethnography reveal about the causes of social problems and the processes of their treatment?

In exploring how ethnography can be used for causal explanation in social work, the presenters draw on a range of alternatives to positivist conceptions of causal determination. For example, critical realists such as Bhaskar (1975) and Archer (1995) have argued that causal explanation should describe the multiform, non-deterministic mechanisms that drive social events. Similarly, anthropologists and psychologists have used the concept of “affordance” to describe how material conditions contribute to social action without determining it in lawlike ways (Gibson, 1979; Keane, 2016), and actor-network theorists have expanded the notion of agency to trace causal chains in which no link is determined by any other (e.g., Latour, 2005). Some have suggested that the thick causal terminology characteristic of ethnographic narratives is needed for capturing the complexity of irregular, non-deterministic causal processes (Porpora, 2015; Cartwright, 1999). The panelists in this symposium argue that this may be particularly true of causal explanation in social work, in which any intervention must contend with an indefinite number of often subtle factors, the particularity of historical events, and looping effects generated by the intervention itself.

These presentations demonstrate ethnography's contributions to a broadly defined “science of social work” (Brekke, 2012). Smith and Lucera's study of violence in residential treatment centers uses ethnography to identify local causal theories about staff turnover. Building on this point, Doering-White's study of aid shelters for Central American migrants in Mexico shows how ethnographic fieldwork can reveal contestation over local theories, allowing researchers to simultaneously track unfolding causal processes and the politics of causal explanation. Hardesty's study of the politics of causal explanation among child welfare workers finds that overly narrow definitions of science can obscure crucial evidence about causal processes, while also illustrating how ethnography can overcome such erasure. Finally, Mathias' study of community organizing in southern India demonstrates the power of ethnography to integrate diverse kinds of causal influence in a single explanation. Together, the panelists demonstrate that ethnography may legitimately generate causal explanation in multiple ways and at multiple points in the process of scientific inquiry in social work.