What Good Is Soft Evidence?(Report‪)‬

Current trends in the helping professions emphasize the basing of all "clinical," or direct practice, decisions on "hard" evidence of proven efficacy (Cournoyer & Powers, 2002; Gambrill, 1999; Pace, 2008) to properly guide all treatment and service interventions. There are compelling reasons for this stance. First, clients deserve the best treatment possible. Second, although practitioners in all social work methods deal with a great variety of data for decision making, only direct service practitioners are required to make clinical predictions about client conditions and outcomes of interventions (Murdach, 1994). Therefore, it is essential that social workers involved in direct practice use the best information available to provide maximum benefit to clients. Although the current emphasis on using hard data for decision making provides an important goal for direct practitioners to focus on, it is a goal that presents some difficulties (Witkin & Harrison, 2001). Had data is typically defined as evidence that is measurable, quantifiable, and subject to verification by test or recognized standards of scientific inquiry (Graziano & Raulin, 1997). Although evidence-based practice methods are desirable, the requirement of such methods for solid scientific data is not currently realizable in many types of direct practice in social work (Reid, 1995). For this reason, most direct service practitioners must still attempt to provide quality service to their clients by relying on less than scientific evidence for most of their clinical decision making (Aisenberg, 2008).