MSW Student Satisfaction With Using Single-System-Design Computer Software to Evaluate Social Work Practice

Abstract

Objective: A computer program for social work practice research was created and then tested. This program was designed specifically for computer tasks of data entry, data analysis, and graphic presentations of single-system-design research in social work practice. Method: An evaluation of this program was conducted with 136 students at one master's of social work (MSW) program in the spring of 1996. Results: More than 95% of the students surveyed found the program added a valuable component to research, and 81.9% reported the program helpful in evaluating practice. Conclusions: Computer software programs that are research design specific may encourage more social workers to do practice evaluation studies, but further development and testing of these types of specialized programs is called for.

From the Editor

“…Carr and Burkholder (1998) provide simple instructions for creating graphs such as those described above using Microsoft Excel. Conboy, Auerbach, Beckerman, Schnall and LaPorte (2000) describe some inexpensive software specifically created for this purpose, and Mattaini (1993) provides numerous examples of properly constructed graphs.…”