The purpose of this article is to place evidence-based practice within its wider scholarly contexts and draw lessons from the experiences of other professions that are engaged in implementing it. The analysis is based primarily on evidence-based medicine, the parent discipline of evidence-based practice, but the author also draws on evidence-based nursing and evidence-based social work in the United Kingdom. It was found that the experiences of other practice professions have a great deal to offer social work practice. Similar to medicine, nursing, and our British colleagues, U.S. social work practice will benefit from increased research activity, more widespread availability of reviews of research, on-line resources, and many more training opportunities. Similar to nursing administrators, social work administrators have the responsibility to allow social work practitioners the time and training to become familiar with research relevant to their practice.

Qualitative approaches have much to offer family psychology. Among the uses for qualitative methods are theory building, model and hypothesis testing, descriptions of lived experiences, typologies, items for surveys and measurement tools, and case examples that answer questions that surveys cannot. Despite the usefulness of these products, issues related to generalizability, subjectivity, and language, among others, block some researchers from appreciating the contributions that qualitative methods can make. This article provides descriptions of procedures that lead to these useful products and discusses alternative ways of understanding aspects of qualitative approaches that some researchers view as problematic.

Qualitative approaches have much to offer family psychology. They are useful for theory construction and testing, for the development of descriptions of lived experiences, model and concept development, the delineation of social processes, the development of typologies, and the creation of items for surveys, assessment instruments, and evaluation tools among many others. These approaches are particularly useful for understanding meanings that human beings attribute to events in their lives and, through discourse analysis, can aid in understanding the intersections of cultural themes and practices and individual lives. Qualitative methods can be used in basic, applied, and evaluation research.Qualitative approaches are not useful for establishing prevalence and incidence. Although they can inform researchers about the contexts of experiments and quasi-experiments, how and what treatments were implemented, and subjects' responses to the treatment, they will not yield an effect size or any other quantified outcome. Because of the volume of data generated, they are difficult to use in large-scale surveys. They will not show a mathematical relationship between variables, but they can provide the model to be tested, the hypotheses that compose the model, and the items of instruments that represent the hypotheses.Despite the usefulness of the products of qualitative research to social science, many researchers steeped in logico-deductive, mathematical approaches are wary. Several issues block a serious consideration of qualitative approaches. Among these are questions about rigor, generalizability, and subjectivity.The purposes of this chapter are to describe uses for qualitative methods and to examine common concerns that block some researchers from doing qualitative research. The intended audience is other researchers trained in logico-deductive methods and who are interested in exploring whether qualitative approaches can help them answer their research questions. This chapter provides descriptions of procedures that lead to these products and discusses alternative ways of understanding aspects of qualitative The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Family Psychology Edited by James H. Bray and Mark Stanton