Clinical Social Workers and Courts: Toward an Understanding of the Experience of Becoming

and Being an “Expert”

Dana E. Prescott

Submitted to the Faculty of the Simmons College School of Social Workin partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Copyright by Dana E. Prescott2014

All Rights Reserved

i

Acknowledgements

There is the inevitable risk of failing to thank those individuals who contributed so much

to this experience or mentioning those who may otherwise prefer anonymity. I intend to ignore

both possibilities and just do my best. The Simmons College School of Social Work generously

opened its doors to me and I am grateful for all that I have learned from the administration,

faculty, and staff about the profession of social work and academia. This project could never

have occurred with any measurable success without those experiences. I am purposefully leaving

out judges and lawyers who influenced this work over many years; though few knew of it. The

participants who volunteered must also go unnamed but that should not diminish my

appreciation for their generosity and candor.

There is no means for me to repay Dr. Hugo Kamya who supported my admission, served

as my advisor, and agreed to chair the committee. I deeply appreciate his willingness to share

insights, time, and experience with me as mentor. Rev. Dr. Michael Melendez agreed to be on

my committee and then took his talents from Simmons to government. While our communities

will greatly benefit by this transfer of skill, academia is the less for it. Of no small matter, Dr.

Melendez allowed me to teach policy in the Simmons MSW program a few years back. Without

that gift I would not have learned from the incredible students with whom I have had the

privilege of collaborating. More than anything, those students’ reflections were the catalyst for

the questions and concepts which underlie this project.

Dr. Walter E. Kisthardt generously lent his wisdom as he, for many professional and

personal reasons, knows more than most about how the social work and legal systems do so

much positive and negative while trying to do justice. His knowledge of organizational

methodology caused me to think much more deeply about those relationships in ways apart from

ii

my experience and beliefs. I am especially grateful that these three scholars collaborated with

each other and me because I know that is not true for everyone who works on a dissertation.

The underpinnings for this project began with a course in qualitative research with Dr.

Johnnie Hamilton-Mason, who manages to overcome initial resistance with patience and

encouragement. PhD classes do not occur in a vacuum of one teacher and one student, however.

For several years, I sat and listened to an extraordinary group of clinical social workers. As my

cohort shared their feelings and professional experiences, I began to reflect on what I thought I

knew (but did not) about many things concerning power and authority. Heather Howard, Mary

Lecloux, Katherine Walbam-Churchill, and Stephanie Mancini represent the very best of social

work. With the passage of time, this group expanded to include Erina White, Shuei Audrey

Kozu, Stephanie Wladkowski, Wilfred Labiosa, and Janet Suleski, who so generously taught me

much through their insights and collaboration.

I would be especially remiss, however, if I failed to thank Dean Stefan Krug. The culture

of any organization reflects the integrity and graciousness of its leadership. He supports the

freedom to learn and, in particular, gave me the chance to complete this task. Dr. Michelle

Putman provided me with a framework for understanding and applying evidence-informed

policy to teaching and then charitably shared her ideas so I could refine mine. April Tavares and

Suzanne Mullarkey provided a sense of humor and much support during my tenure at Simmons

for which I am grateful. From outside Simmons, Timothy Fadgen, PhD was kind enough to read

what I wrote and offer his learned perspective as lawyer and political scientist. My cousin Jackie

took the time to help me with graphics. The concepts are mine but the elegance is hers.

Before I finish, I have special thanks to extend to Dr. Peter Maramaldi. Every once in a

while life tosses a real regret that sticks with you. In my case, I will always regret that I did not

iii

meet him much earlier in my career. I would have enjoyed the collaboration and been the better

lawyer for that experience. Because Dr. Maramaldi chairs the PhD program and has to maintain a

certain modest distance, we have generally stuck to business and the stories that faculty and

student can share. He is an extraordinary person and professional.

Finally, my family has for many years patiently watched me try to make up for lost time

in my academics. With a little luck, I will soon be able to clear off piles of papers and move onto

other projects which require less space. I had hoped to finish in time to give my Dad, Donald

Prescott, this degree. He always wanted one for himself but duty to family, work, and other

barriers impeded that accomplishment for him. After fighting through an extended illness, he

passed away on June 21, 2012, so I did not succeed in finishing on time. With my Mom, Lois

Prescott, who though very supportive of my various endeavors would still prefer me to get more

sleep rather than writing or running around the country, we will deliver this degree to Waterboro,

Maine in the Spring.

iv

Clinical Social Workers and Courts: Toward an Understanding of the Experience of Becoming and Being an “Expert”

Dana E. Prescott, JD, MSW

Simmons School of Social Work

Dissertation Committee

Hugo Kamya, PhD, Chairperson

Rev. Michael Paul Melendez, PhD, LICSW

Walter E. Kisthardt, MSW, PhD

Abstract

This study explores the experiences of licensed clinical social workers (LICSWs) who act as

experts, forensically, in court. A deeper and more thorough understanding of these experiences

matters because graduate school standards of accreditation, professional trainings, and

integration of evidence-informed research cannot effectively occur if reform or improvement is

based upon anecdote or folk wisdom. Examining the meaning of “becoming” and “being” an

expert across the domains of social work education, practice, and research, therefore, may more

precisely inform social work scholarship and practice. Utilizing the philosophical and

methodological framework of hermeneutic phenomenology, 20 LICSWs were interviewed by the

researcher, who has been a lawyer for three decades and holds a Masters in Social Work (MSW)

as well. To explore and explain these experiences, major themes were organized within three

general domains (From Becoming to Being an LICSW; Power, Ethics, Self-Care, Poverty; and

Dimensions of the Host Environment) and one emergent domain. The historical framework for

this research derives from the evolution, now a century old, of social work from community

advocacy to proffering descriptive and diagnostic opinions. This privileged status, previously

v

reserved to psychiatry and psychology, transpired when state-empowered licensure boards

granted social workers the power to categorize and label individuals. Such power is not exercised

in a vacuum but explicitly equips social workers to translate and transform social work

knowledge as a means of judgment (both reward and punishment) by an institution about an

individual or group. From the conceptual framework and research questions which guide this

study, the essence of these experiences, in the words of the participants, are intended to augment

the body of knowledge about the social work profession so as to enhance the efficacy of social

work education, practice, and research.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i

Abstract iv

Chapter One: Introduction 1Rationale for the Proposed Study 1Phenomenon of Interest 4Choice of Qualitative Research Method 6Assumptions 9Relevance to Social Work 16

Chapter Two: Evolution of the Study 20Historical Context: Social Work and Authority 20CSWE and the Education of “Experts” 26From Social Work Student to Expert 29Employing Evidence-Informed Research 33Specific Mechanisms: Who is an Expert? 36Specific Contexts: Courts as Host Environment 44

Chapter Three: Methods of Inquiry 49Purpose of Research 49A Phenomenological Methodology: Hermeneutics 52RE and PAR as Alternative Methodologies 55Participatory Action Research 56Realistic Evaluation 57Summary 61

Chapter Four: Research Design and Methodology 63Study Design and Research Aim 63Pilot Study 65Sample Recruitment 65Data Collection and Management 69Ethical Considerations 69

Human Subject Review 69Protection against Risks 70Benefits of Participation 70

Data Analysis 71Trustworthiness and Credibility 73Strategies for Rigor 74

Chapter Five: Results 78First Domain: From Becoming to Being an LICSW 83 Theme 1: An MSW Education 83

vii

Theme 2: Knowledge Transfer 88 Theme 3: Training to “Be” an Expert 92 Theme 4: Clinical Licensure as the Final Stage 98 Theme 5: Evidence-Informed Research 102 Summary 115Second Domain: Power, Ethics, Self-Care, Poverty 116 Theme 1: Experience of Power and Authority 116 Theme 2: Values and Ethics in the Host 122 Theme 3: Trauma and Self-Care 134 Theme 4: Poverty and Discrimination 147 Summary 153Third Domain: The Dimensions of the Host Environment 154 Theme 1: The Act of Being an Expert 154 Theme 2: Actually Being the Expert 157 Theme 3: Tensions between Neutrality and Advocacy 168 Theme 4: Judges and Juries Judging 175 Summary 190Fourth Domain: Emergent Themes 191 Theme 1: Interdisciplinary Experiences 191 Theme 2: Evolution of the IPV Experience 195 Theme 3: Changing the World (or at least the System) 200 Summary 204

Chapter Six: Discussion of Findings 205Aim of the Study 205Key Findings of the Study 205Significance of the Study 213Major Limitations of the Study 215Major Strengths of the Study 218Implications of the Study for Social Work 219Implications for Future Research about Social Work 221

Chapter Seven: Conclusion 225

REFERENCES 228

APPENDICES 250Appendix A: Recruitment Letter 250Appendix B: Informed Consent Letter 251Appendix C: Participant Interview Guide 253Appendix D: Study Continuation Approval Letter 262Appendix E: Transcriber Confidentiality Agreement 263Appendix F: Preliminary Conceptual Framework 264Appendix G: Social Worker Knowledge 265Appendix H: Phenomenological Experience and Categories 266

viii

Appendix I: The General Domains 267Appendix J: Emergent Themes 268

TABLESTable 1: State and Gender of Research Participants 67Table 2: Areas of Expert Testimony 68Table 3: Summary of Domains and Themes 79Table 4: First Domain: 207Table 5: Second Domain 208Table 6: Third Domain 210Table 7: The Fourth Domain 212

FIGURESFigure 1: Participatory Action Research 56Figure 2: Realistic Evaluation 59

1

Chapter 1: Introduction

Rationale for the Proposed Study

A licensed independent clinical social worker (LICSW) who acts as a forensic expert in

court may serve as an “excellent guide[s]” (Lewis, 2009, p. 3) for judicial decision making by

sharing specialized knowledge he or she obtained through education, licensure and practice

experience, and evidence-informed research (Luftman, Veltkamp, Clark, Lannacone, & Snooks,

2005; Maschi, Bradley, & Ward, 2009; Rome, 2013). For purposes of this dissertation, the terms

used in this introductory sentence require brief definitions. Although in the United States

different acronyms may be used, LICSW means the licensure status granted to a social worker by

the state, usually with the minimum of a master’s degree in social work (MSW), who may

thereafter legally engage in assessment and diagnosis. The terms evidence-informed practice or

evidence-based practice share common elements; though evidence-informed reflects a broader

form of research-based knowledge pertaining to organizations and social welfare policy rather

than clinical treatment. The term court refers to more than a constitutionally created judicial

system but includes any adversarial or adjudicatory system at the federal or state level of

government. Finally, forensic or forensic social work is broadly defined as a subspecialty which

integrates the knowledge and social justice principles of the profession with populations

impacted by civil or criminal court systems (Maschi & Killian, 2011).

Within that definitional framework, the ethical and intellectual fissure for LICSWs

undertaking forensic roles may occur when that expertise becomes a convenient means, not to

translate social work knowledge, but rather to transform that knowledge to opinion-by-privilege

in order to serve the organizational interests of courts. Although often well intentioned, the

2

power and authority to proffer expert opinion implicates connections and forces between the core

values and ethics of the social work profession and the critical domains which create the expert’s

privilege to act: MSW education, licensure and practice, and utilization and interpretation of

evidence-informed research. What remains surprising is how few researchers have sought to

understand the experience of “becoming” and “being” an expert so as to more precisely inform

and improve the efficacy of social work education, practice trainings, and research.

As a means of capturing this phenomenon from an interpretive-oriented perspective, this

phenomenological study describes and interprets the experiences of social workers who earned

an MSW, obtained clinical licensure in their state, and qualified to act as an expert in court.

Phenomenological perspectives, as a qualitative methodology, give primacy to a person’s own

construction of a phenomenon’s meaning rather than how that phenomenon exists in the world

external to the person (Patton, 2002; Schram, 2006). Because phenomenology describes the lived

experience of individuals who share similar experiences, the underlying assumption is that

conversation may elicit themes common to the worldviews—in this case, of licensed social

workers—through which general, typical, variant, or emergent themes may be identified

(Creswell, 2013; Friedman, Friedlander, & Blustein, 2005; Schram, 2006). The objective of this

methodology, therefore, is to uncover experiences from the perspective of participants rather

than to achieve an empirically correct interpretation of the conversations.

The observations that generated this inquiry were derived from various personal

experiences: working in courtrooms and judicial settings; law school and social work education;

attendance and teaching at law and social work conferences; teaching as an adjunct;

conversations with my committee, faculty, and students; and listening to the voices of colleagues

with LICSWs, who generously shared their experiences. This amalgamation of information

3

gradually enabled me to generate the questions and conceptualizations about whether a graduate

education, practice experience or licensure, and the transformation of evidence-informed

research actually results in the ethical and reliable transfer of social work knowledge to the

courts. Given the coextensive (if not coordinated) efforts of the Council on Social Work

Education (CSWE) and the National Association of Social Work (NASW) to design rigorous

academic and field standards consistent with the core values of the profession, this suggested an

important knowledge gap worthy of inquiry (Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), n.d.,

2001, 2008, 2013; Earls-Larrison & Korr, 2013; Gray, 1990; NASW Code of Ethics, 2008).

A particular concern is that social work values impose a distinct obligation on social

work experts to consider diversity, oppression, poverty, and the influence of socioeconomic

disparities. Other disciplines and host environments may pay homage to those principles but

social work deeply embeds this as a duty in its educational and practice requirements (Marx,

2004; Reamer, 2006). These duties, which are intended to serve the dual interests of the

community and the individual, suggest the need for much deeper reflection about the experiences

of social workers when translating and transferring knowledge from their own discipline or that

of other disciplines (see Appendix G). The possibility that such knowledge transfer and

translation may sacrifice those ethical duties and values to the needs, wants, and demands of an

organization became, over time, an essential part of this conceptualization.

For social work to understand and refine more precisely the connections between the

domains of education, practice, and research, the profession must look inward first. Social work

cannot presume a higher ethical duty to adults and children if the profession does not understand

the experiences of the professionals it alone educates and empowers to testify as experts in

adversarial and adjudicative systems (Mattison, 2000). For these purposes, and as suggested by

4

Creswell (2013), the following preliminary research questions guided this study: What do these

shared experiences reveal about the connection(s) between an MSW, the act of practicing social

work, and the integration of evidence-informed practice? What does exhibiting authority and

power, commensurate with offering expert opinion, mean to the participants? How do licensed

clinical social workers retain professional values and ethics in host environments?

Phenomena of Interest

The significance of this research may be found in the quest for a deeper understanding of

the experiences of social workers across the domains of education, practice, and research. For

decades now, lawyers and judges sought and received the expertise of LICSWs as a means to

assess and categorize vulnerable populations such as parents and children, immigrants and

survivors of torture, criminal defendants facing imprisonment or the death penalty, domestic

violence victims and abusers, and the disabled or elderly (Barker & Branson, 1999; Kisthardt,

2006; Lewis, 2009; Maschi, Bradley, & Ward, 2009; Masson, 2012; Rome, 2013). Without a

more precise understanding of the experiences of social workers as experts, efforts to reform

graduate education and field placement or design licensure requirements and continuing

education courses may be more wishful thinking than intelligent design.

Beginning more than 40 years ago, social workers who obtained an MSW and

successfully completed a state-sponsored examination and mandatory hours of clinical

supervision could provide clinical or agency services (Reamer, 2006; Thyer, 2011). The

enactment of state licensure laws publicly and legally identified the special knowledge and

authority of social workers to engage psychotherapeutic treatment, render diagnostic and

predictive opinions, and receive payment, including government and insurance reimbursement

5

(Compton & Galaway, 1999; Marx, 2004; Roberts, 2008; Wong, 2001). With this state-

sponsored status conferred, LICSWs soon undertook an active role as experts for the state,

private parties, or as independent evaluators and witnesses (Gould, 2010; Hoefer & Jordan, 2008;

Lewis, 2009; Rome, 2013). Concomitantly, material differences between the authority of

LICSWs and licensed psychiatrists and psychologists essentially diminished to prescribing

medications (psychiatry) or performing various projective or objective testing (psychology).

What is true, for many reasons of policy and demographic demand, is that the social work

profession now constitutes, by multiples of two or three or more, the largest number of licensed

mental health professionals providing clinical and organizational services in the United States

(Bellamy, Bledsoe, & Traube, 2006; Specht & Courtney, 1994). Whether psychotherapy

licensing contributed to the abandonment of social work from its “mission to help the poor and

oppressed and to build communality” (Specht & Courtney, 1994, p. 4) is probably an unfair or, at

least, a provocative question. What does matter is that an MSW education explores, in various

foundation and elective courses, the use of its privileged knowledge in clinical settings. In that

setting, a social worker may better (though not absolutely) control the potential exploitation of

expert knowledge by self-identifying values and ethics and by monitoring the intended and

unintended consequences of collaborative engagements.

What these propositions implicate, therefore, is whether there is evidence, from the

experience of LICSWs becoming and being experts, that social work education, practice and

research adequately prepares social workers to protect themselves and clients. Of equal concern

is whether these domains, from the shared perspective of the participants, provide sufficient

knowledge when working in host environments, like courts, which may exploit expert

knowledge for institutional and societal efficiency without regard to social justice (Gumz, &

6

Grant, 2009; Orme, 2002). The reverse problem is also true. Although unexplored in this

research, except for the brief discussion of organizational methodologies in Chapter 3, little

research in the United States has been undertaken to understand whether expert opinions by

social workers actually enhance the efficacy of fact finding and judicial judgments. The absence

of such research raises the specter that social work has not imposed sufficient safeguards to

protect those individuals or groups subject to categorization and judgment within the powerful

forces of institutions (see Lipsky, 1980, for a discussion of “street level” bureaucracies).

Choice of Qualitative Research Method

From social work’s inception as a community-based discipline at the turn of the 20th

century (Hartley & Petrucci, 2004; Thyer, 2011), social work has always been at the forefront of

collaborative approaches through models that “integrate multiple and diverse professional

systems in the design, delivery, and evaluation of effective interventions, in both local and global

contexts” (Aronoff, 2008, p. 533). As a means of slicing through “so-called wicked social

problems” (Bogenschneider & Corbett, 2010, p. 13), therefore, the social work profession

obligates itself to consider theoretical and empirical consequences for the delivery of that

expertise (Grinnell & Unrau, 2009). More specifically, the transfer of expert knowledge to a

government institution like the courts, imbued with the power to use that knowledge to divide

and label, raises a litany of complex ethical and professional dilemmas.

Understanding the consequences of those dilemmas begins with the experiences of those

who become and be those experts. Thus, the selection of a qualitative, rather than quantitative,

methodology to accomplish such a task was predicated upon the preliminary nature of this

inquiry, the lack of similar research, and the desire to explore and understand the meaning and

7

experiences which the participants ascribe to a social or human problem (Creswell, 2009). In

general, the process of qualitative research “involves emerging questions and procedures, data

typically collected in the participant’s setting, data analysis inductively building from particulars

to general themes, and the researcher making interpretations of the meaning of the data” (p. 4).

To accomplish such a task, the researcher should select a philosophical foundation which guides

the assumptions and informs the conceptual framework and research questions as a means to

select a concrete methodology (Creswell, 2013).

Given those parameters, this research adapted the methodological approach of

hermeneutic phenomenology. As more particularly described below, hermeneutic

phenomenology uniquely fits the driving force of human awareness; of consciousness and

cognition; of shared lived awareness between participant and researcher; and the interpretation of

the participants’ “texts” of life (Bradshaw, Armour, & Roseborough, 2007; Creswell, 2013). To

enhance the likelihood of obtaining the essence of those experiences, personal interviews were

conducted in the homes and offices of these experts. If done properly, these interviews afford a

credible means to obtain patterns and relationships meaningful to the participants.

Among some forms of descriptive phenomenology, bracketing, or the careful discarding

of the researcher’s knowledge and experiences, is a precondition for this methodology.

Hermeneutic phenomenology, however, dispenses with bracketing as a means to move beyond

mere description, particularly when the experiences of the researcher may be shared with the

participants or there is no realistic means to segregate or “bracket” those experiences (Creswell,

2013; Wilcke, 2002). Within the methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology, the researcher

instead interprets those experiences as an intimate part of life, which unfolds as narratives people

describe and feel in time (Zeit) and being (Daisen) (Wilcke, 2002). By decentering, or making

8

assumptions or preconceptions explicit, hermeneutic phenomenology engages a data analysis

which is helical rather than linear (Muehlausen, 2010; Munhall, 2011).

When deciding to ground this research in a phenomenological methodology, it was

apparent that my experience in the courts provided access to participants and engaged the active

and iterative transfer of information during the interviews. The participants knew my experience

because a few had requested a resume, searched my background on-line, asked me the question

over the phone, were referred by colleagues who knew my background, or learned of my

background in the contact letter or before the interview. Any effort to pretend that the content of

my questions, or my verbal and nonverbal responses, were from the point of view of a novitiate

would have been rather artificial. Moreover, pretending that there was an absence of shared

experiences may have diluted the quality of the conversation. Participants were experienced

professionals familiar with the art and act of asking and answering questions.

Hermeneutic phenomenology explicitly recognizes that the sharing of these kinds of

experiences between participant and researcher is an appropriate methodological structure for

interviews and analysis (Creswell, 2013). As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer posited, a

“fusion of horizons” means the researcher and the participant come together in order to influence

each other’s perspective and to reach a point of a shared frame of reference (Gadamer, 1997;

Wilcke, 2002). As against the “rationality” of science, reason is “coeval with language,” and it is

that shared experience of reaching agreement about meaning which is the “flux of reality”

(Sullivan, 1989, pp. 89-90). The dilemma for the researcher “is how and in what way his or her

personal understandings will be introduced into the study” (Creswell, 2013, p. 83). In particular,

phenomenology requires the disclosure of personal experiences as assumptions at the outset of

the research so that any influences on the text are revealed to readers (Creswell, 2013).

9

Theory is important and thought experiments useful in developing conceptual

frameworks, but actual experience and its influences provides tangible evidence from which to

build more precise standards and competencies. As described in the findings and discussion

sections, three general and one emergent domain were developed and organized, and within each

domain specific themes were identified from the experiences of the participants. First, however,

and as suggested by the literature, a description of the researcher’s relevant assumptions and

experience is described in the next section.

Assumptions

From a phenomenological point of view generally, researcher assumptions should be

described early in the research rather than as part of the research design. This requirement is

sometimes known as “bracketing” or the self-recognition by the researcher of his or her own

experiences and the influence on that exchange between persons situated similarly. The

philosophy and methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology, however, anticipates the active

exchange of experiences between researcher and participants with similar experiences through

iterative conversation (Creswell, 2013). From a hermeneutic perspective, therefore, bracketing is

not necessary, but that difference does not diminish the obligation to explain, to the extent

relevant to this research, my role based upon my assumptions and experiences.

I have spent much of my life thinking about power and authority. I grew up in an era

when the government (before Viet Nam formally ended) and adults, like teachers and coaches,

were not to be challenged (at least without swift consequences). Authority often meant

submission, but it also imposed a certain personal accountability and responsibility. In my teens,

I also tagged along with my father to meetings when he worked for what was then called the

10

Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation. For years, I listened to him and his colleagues

describe and share the anger and frustration of parents (whom I also met) fighting for

deinstitutionalization and services. In my later teens, I worked in some of those residential

programs with dedicated staff and administrators, learning about medications, Tardif dyskinesia,

and physical restraints, while noticing the stares of passersby, the burden of service plans, and

the voices of NIMBY when residential homes were to be opened.

I could not have articulated the intended and unintended consequences of those social

welfare policies intended to correct years of institutional abuse and neglect. As a teenager I

absorbed (even if I could not articulate the difference at that time) that political will and good

intentions were not a substitute for the delivery of resources and knowledge and that personal

and policy consequences can follow—many of which sadly still resonate today. I also left those

jobs and went to work in retail (furniture and lighting) and bus tables (third shift at a pancake

house) before and during college. I never forgot those experiences but I did walk away.

After a brief and unsuccessful foray into the economics department at college, I

graduated with a degree in psychology in 1980 but headed to law school in Vermont. Three years

later, I had just turned 25 when I passed the Maine and Massachusetts Bars. I had one job offer

in Maine at a well-known trial firm. Eventually, and still to the dismay of some (because I was a

“real” lawyer who handled “real” litigation in federal and state courts) I gravitated toward family

law practice. I began to see women who were victims of horrific abuse early in my career. I

certainly did not really know what I was seeing or why. I understood violence, because the social

rules for boys becoming men were very different in that era, but that was not the same thing. I

also did not connect adult abuse to children as victims.

11

What is sometimes lost, even by professionals who should have better memories, is that

only a few decades ago family violence and abuse was kept a secret and not reported by teachers,

social worker, doctors, hospitals, therapists, judges, family members, or neighbors. All was

private because personal rights were protected by gender or patriarchal prerogatives. This lesson

was made plain early in my career when I went to court as a lawyer for a woman looking for an

order to keep her spouse away during a divorce. (This was before there were laws in place that

made it easier to obtain a restraining order. In those days, the standards for injunctions were the

same as stopping a neighbor from building a fence on your property). The judge that day was

experienced and someone I later in my career came to know as an honorable person and proud

family man. After a colloquy between the judge and the lawyer for the father, he said to me: “My

understanding is that he does not hit the kids so why do you want this order, Attorney Prescott?”

Over many years since that moment I have thought of many answers, but all I did was mumble

some lawyer platitude. The judge granted the order, but not because of me.

Young lawyers were given family law cases because those cases were a part of learning

to be a lawyer-in the court system and a lost-leader for firms. Decades ago, family law was not

yet a specialty but a practice intended to generate collateral business. In the courtroom, however,

and across many domains of the law like personal injury and product liability, I began to work

with and against all kinds of expert witnesses. I kept watching the purchase of opinion across

many disciplines. A raft of literature began to attack “junk science” and the admissibility of

expert evidence beginning in the 1980s and continues in the scholarship to this day. In child

custody and abuse cases, social workers and other mental health professionals began, in the late

1980s and early 1990s, to design and offer expert opinions about the human memory, the

12

truthfulness of children, attachment and bonding, and “syndromes” like parental alienation with

some anecdotal and visceral support and some good intentions, but not much science.

During that era, I also handled a few deeply troubling false allegations of child abuse

cases. For me, these cases and trials were very difficult. I have never had much of a threshold for

tolerating bullies, so I never wanted to be wrong about an abuser or expose adult victims and

children to risk on my watch. The contortion, however, of introducing therapeutic techniques

into forensic evidence was disconcerting, particularly to people risking jail, losing their children,

or having their lives forever harmed by the cruelest of labels: child molester or abusive spouse or

partner. What I knew from my other experiences in complex civil litigation was that what would

never be admitted as expert testimony in “real” courts would regularly be admitted as “reliable”

in family court. The reasons became rather obvious: the volume of cases, fear of an abuser going

free, untrained judges and lawyers, and lack of economic resources for many accused to fund a

response to manufactured “science.” In these cases, wealth too often defined the availability of

science and poverty or just being middle class too often defined outcomes.

What I learned was that bad people win cases; that justice could turn on who had the best

lawyer and the most resources; and that organizations, including courts, can care much more

about global efficiencies than the delivery of individual justice. Yet there were so many judges,

lawyers, and professionals across other disciplines who exercised the highest degree of integrity

and empathy that I kept wondering if there were a better way to get at truth or enhance outcomes

for families. I certainly knew a trial-by-combat was not that way, but that was my training and

my duty, and I did it pretty well as an advocate for that client in that moment. On the side,

however, I began to sit on committees and work with other lawyers in state bar associations, and

to write and testify about legislation and policy.

13

Once again, and contrary to public cynicism, I met legislators and staff and professionals

across disciplines who were dedicated to public service and who wanted to generate worthwhile

change. Irrespective of political party or public persona, they would share their personal stories

privately. Many times these stories were the same ones I heard in my office. I came to

understand much more deeply the masks we share and that our roles can generate more heat than

light if we do not listen patiently to the experiences of others. What I saw in the policy arena

taught me much about people and politics as “always personal and always human”—a lesson I

try to share to this day with newer colleagues and students.

Those collaborations eventually made me wonder if one problem, and its correlative

solution, was in the language and code-words used by various disciplines in the adversarial

environment of the judicial process. What if “we” were talking past and through each other but

not really hearing or understanding; particularly when trained and driven by an adversarial

environment? I had already started writing about these concerns, but this generated more gaps

than answers. Eventually, I entered the MSW program at Boston College after two decades in

legal practice, because I thought that an answer may be found beyond the silo of one discipline.

For three years, this new experience with faculty, field placement, and students renewed my faith

in the possibility that there was a better way to think about solutions if we crossed disciplines.

Nevertheless, there were profoundly complex events that were driving more family court

litigation and family turmoil in the United States. The legal system, overwhelmed by no-fault

divorce, non-married parenting cases, child protection and interpersonal violence petitions, and

the shifting demographics of the American family, sought speed and efficiency. As such,

evidence-informed research was given short shrift if the “language code” (e.g., alienation,

“indicators” of violent tendencies, personality-disordered) provided a seemingly “scientific”

14

rationale for efficient judgments. In that moment, the tripwire criteria for offering and receiving

expert opinion were the existence of degree and license.

After thinking and writing about the dimensions of these social and legal problems, and

graduating with an MSW, I entered a graduate program in public policy, where I learned much

about the economic approach to organizational and human behavior. Similar to my time in

college, I lacked the ability to master much of economic theory and math, but the concepts of

how to think about heuristics and group behavior became more relevant to my understanding of

the interrelationship between individuals and organizations as “markets.” I subsequently applied

to Simmons College in the PhD program, where a couple of things happened on the way to this

research project. First, the philosophy of science, theories of power and authority, and the

approach of faculty to research shifted my thinking toward more basic building blocks for

creating and sharing interdisciplinary knowledge. Second, the class on qualitative research

required me to find a topic, and I chose to interview a guardian ad litem to pass the course.

This experience proved rather transformative. I contacted a social worker I had respected

for many years and she agreed to be interviewed by me about her work in the courts. Her

responses were completely different from my presuppositions and biases. I had one of those

epiphanies that occur when ignorance and arrogance meet. I started thinking about what else I

was sure I knew but did not. From this experience, my research shifted to the notion of being an

expert and what I had seen happen to good people in adversarial environments. The research

questions further evolved as I listened to members of my cohort describe their experiences in

schools and hospitals. By myself, I may still have never arrived at this point but something

fortuitous happened that made me wonder, much more fundamentally, about being an expert.

15

I applied as an adjunct faculty member at Simmons after an email was circulated to PhD

students. I had not really thought of teaching but it seemed like an interesting change from the

grind of practicing law. With the generous consent of the Simmons administration, I taught

social policy and advocacy courses in the MSW program. As I began to refine a syllabus drawn

from experienced faculty, and started teaching from assigned texts and readings, the students

began to teach me. These reflections gave me the chance to read the CSWE competencies and its

Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) from 2008 and later the proposed

revisions for 2015. If social work educators are to serve the profession “through their teaching,

scholarship, and service” then, I began to wonder, how am I accomplishing that task

responsibly? What value do I add to the professional lives of these students and how do I know

what they should know about becoming and being an expert with all the power and privilege

each of them will yield soon enough

None of these thoughts and questions came at once or cohesively, of course. The words

and papers of students each semester became a rich source of self-reflection and self-critique

about my experiences practicing in courts. Unfortunately, some of the student knowledge

reflected a certain naïve expectation about the meaning and consequences of power and privilege

and very little common knowledge about government civics. Most students had the best of

intentions. However, and this is an important clarification, good intentions did not contain the

kind of intellectual rigor about science and history, policy and politics, the philosophical and

practical contours of human good and human bad, or the means to self-protect as LICSWs. No

less important, these students made me ponder the interests of fellow-citizens who enter the court

portal in which social workers, newly minted licenses-in-hand, define another person.

16

The need for more refined intellectual rigor caused me to think about the courtroom, my

own behavior and testimony, the judgments of judges and juries, and the impact of institutional

power and individual powerlessness. I was and am a privileged insider, so my role is complicit at

many levels. This privilege and years of training, however, is also what helped me prepare the

questions and the interview guide and afforded me the ability to maintain enough self-discipline

to retain an open mind to listen and question and listen and question again. I am not naïve or

falsely modest. I know my background is different than most others in social work and that my

questions, body language, and tone of voice may have influenced participant responses.

I have examined many individuals under oath and in my office, so I know the tricks and

flaws of questioning while interpreting the verbal and physical language of others. Eventually,

most trial lawyers even hear the echoes of their own voices as the stenographer types in real

time. My subjectivity will undoubtedly impact the final description and presentation of my

findings as it did my questions. It is foolish to believe that human communication can completely

“bracket” preconceived ideas after thirty years. I had to engage, and continue to try and engage,

in a reflexive and transparent process throughout this research. The results described below are

no more or less than a part of my experience and observations but, most importantly, I wanted to

do justice to the participants’ experiences as a means to link them to the reader, who may then, I

hope, interpret and share those experiences.

Relevance to Social Work

When becoming and being an expert, clinical social workers share common threads of

experience. MSW student and graduate, licensed practitioner, research consumer, and translator

of knowledge all involve hybrid functions for courts. Acting with legally delegated duty and

17

power, social work experts thereby carry out various tasks, including: (a) conducting factual

investigations through interviews, (b) obtaining and evaluating records and evidence from lay

and professional witnesses, (c) recommending psychological and other diagnostic testing, (d)

writing reports with recommendations that may be admitted as substantive evidence of fact or

interpretation of facts, (e) labeling and categorizing certain thoughts and behaviors as deviant or

normal, and (f) testifying to cognitive and emotional capacities that connect the past and present

and predict future thoughts and actions of a person or group of persons.

This research is designed to explore, in a systematic manner, a deeper understanding of

the experience of LICSWs when exercising forms of authority and privilege bounded within,

what Michel Foucault would term, disciplinary institutions (Foucault, 1978). In the most

inclusive sense, judges often rely on the authoritative opinions of mental health professionals

who are biased or use inappropriate procedures and thereby risk serious harm to children and

families (Greenberg, Martindale, Gould, & Gould-Saltman, 2004). The medical profession has

itself struggled with the ethical duty to tell the “truth” and the threat, when performing forensic

duties, that the adversarial nature of the legal system may exacerbate the influence of “attorney

seduction or intimidation” (Brakel, Goldstein, & Wilson, 2004, p. 170).

Unlike more obvious forms of control through the imposition of force by weapon,

professionals may more willingly and rather naively “subjugate themselves to subtle forms of

power” (Gergen, 2009, p. 47). For LICSWs, this “willingness to subjugate” (or to be subjugated)

has particular consequences when a social worker utilizes education, practice, and research to

render determinate opinions that may be used to reward or punish. This does not mean that social

work should abandon the field of forensics to other disciplines. To the contrary, social work

offers a uniquely multi-faceted and generalist capacity to bridge interdisciplinary knowledge and

18

to act as proxy for the voice of individuals otherwise silenced or dimly heard. When forensic

social workers choose to draw on various technical or scientific processes in an attempt to map

hazards to individuals, it may thereby serve the means and ends of social justice better than those

disciplines that do not (Bronstein, 2003; Parton, 2007; Rogers, 1987; Tyson, 1995).

This is not always the case in the universe of evidence-informed policy and the transfer

of knowledge to host environments (Bogenschneider & Corbett, 2010). Indeed, a fair argument

could be made that the potential demise of the traditional values of the social work profession

may, in fact, occur by disguising moral or socially-constructed judgments as pretend science in

the courtroom so as to divide and define good from bad (Gambrill, 1999; Gergen, 2009).

Whether these forms and categories of knowledge are privileged, socially-constructed, or

evidence-informed is of serious consequence to those caught in the legal system, many of whom

are isolated and vulnerable because of poverty, race, literacy, education, culture, language,

psychological impairments, physical disabilities, or other barriers.

All LICSWs remain ethically bound to rely competently upon evidence-informed practice

rather than to espouse mere guesswork as professional knowledge (Mullen, Bledsoe, & Bellamy,

2008; Parton, 2007; Reamer, 2006). The question of whether social workers coming from

graduate school have sufficient critical thinking skills or intellectual gravitas is certainly an

important one. However, the question of whether the act of offering expert testimony should be

so simple, for example, as observing a parent for an hour who sees her child once a week behind

a one-way mirror in a locked room and then testifying that there was no “attachment” so as to

assure parental termination is quite another. Thus, a more nuanced understanding of the social

work expert as a complex multidimensional role that is fluid, adaptive, and powerful is necessary

if the objective is to avoid a silo effect in which social workers, disconnected from their

19

education and available research, impinge “expert” opinion upon others (Chaffin & Friedrich,

2004; Howard, McMillen, & Pollio, 2003; Mullen, Bledsoe, & Bellamy, 2008).

These constructs may seem too abstract or obvious to those who already hold the

privilege; but to consumers, the meaning is quite tangible. Parents whose rights are terminated,

defendants imprisoned wrongfully or unjustly, elderly victims of financial and familial abuse,

and adults and children who are victims of IPV have a vested interest in the education and

training of experts who are ethically and scientifically responsible. The relevance of this research

to social work is, therefore, particularly acute when the reform of educational and practice

standards is needed to assure that the ideology of the profession does not become a liturgy that

fails to engage the capacity of social workers, from the moment of graduate school entry, to

acquire intellectual rigor when becoming and being an expert.

20

Chapter 2: Evolution of the Study

Historical Context: Social Work and Authority

The profession of social work was founded on a fundamental belief in the “perfectibility

of society” (Specht & Courtney, 1994, p. 7). Consistent with this core value, the graduate school

education of social workers requires students to acquire the professional knowledge that permits

social workers to obtain licensure and advocate through expertise and evidence-informed

knowledge (Hoefer, 2012). A natural side effect of any professional discipline that seeks special

status from the state is to view itself as part of a privileged caste with unique insights. The risk to

the public, and particularly the vulnerable, occurs when a shift, often subtle or incremental,

moves from a matrix of shared values to an ideology in which the wants of the discipline blend

with the needs of government-sanctioned institutions (Foucault, 1978; Hoffer, 1951).

From the time of the earliest social workers advocating for the powerless and the

impoverished, the profession studied and challenged the nature and consequences of various

forms of power and, even more importantly, the effects of its manipulation and distribution on

social movements and political change. The modern, graduate school education of social workers

reflects these roots by encouraging sensitivity and respect for the “insidious mechanisms of

structural oppression” (Lichtenwalter & Baker, 2010, p. 305). Oppression is often defined by

historical reference to “who” was oppressed through a lack of access to the corridors of power;

whether corporate, academic, juridical, governmental, or tribal. Whatever the organizational

structure, MSW students are generally taught to recognize the means of control and coercion that

flow from any aggregation of power as it influences cross-cultural competence and social justice.

For more than three decades, the writings of the French historian of ideas, Michel

21

Foucault, have been employed to teach students to connect various theories of social work to the

experience of clients who, by choice or misfortune, find themselves subject to measurement and

labeling (Chambon, Irving, & Epstein, 1999). As Heron (2005) suggested, introducing

Foucauldian “concepts of power” to social work students requires reflection upon the functional

and structural mechanisms of power as described by Foucault’s own words: “I am thinking of its

capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals,

touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning

processes and everyday lives” (p. 347). The objective of such a metaphor is to help “students

embrace uncertainty and complexity” (Irving & Young, 2004, p. 214). This is certainly a worthy

objective which I explored in a recent article and reiterate below (Prescott, 2013).

There is, however, a flaw in the delivery if that objective is the creation of “public

intellectuals” (Howard, 2010, p.131) who can effectively perceive, navigate, and re-thread the

strands of power within the structure of governmental or organizational systems. If graduate

school seeks to “require substantive expertise, analytic acumen, an ability to garner public

attention, and the skills to make effective use of those opportunities in the furtherance of social

justice,” (p. 132) then specific courses should provide more than snippets from the writings of

the “great thinkers” who have influenced social work education, practice, and scholarship. This

matters because the teaching of “analytic acumen” should connect the social worker more

effectively to the role of expert within institutions and the influence of those institutions on the

knowledge, values, and ethics of the profession (Madden, 2000; Madden & Wayne, 2003).

The problem of teaching and transferring intellectual rigor, coupled with the absence of

historical reference points for shared civic knowledge, is disconcerting enough for social work

educators. Truth be told, however, the education of most Americans from elementary school

22

forward during the past fifty years neglects the political rudiments in which social welfare

policies are designed, implemented, and assessed. The notion of a shared civic knowledge, in the

sense of a critical understanding of democracy and the role of citizens in a free society, is rather

barren today. A vacuum of knowledge concerning the interrelationship of history, political

science, and social welfare policy is one of the key reasons that the foundation courses exist

(CSWE, EPAS 2.1.3, 2.1.6, 2008). This is important because educational gaps may not inculcate

social workers against absorption into an organization or help an aspiring forensic social worker

recognize the difference between personal opinion and his or her role in propagating

organizational oppression against vulnerable populations.

The history of the courts and other institutions are filled with stories in which experts,

granted power by the state, are co-opted by the state. In many respects, Foucault was unique in

that his theories on the intersection of organizational power and the oppression of individual

human rights power derived from the observation and analysis of specific organizations in actual

operation, rather than, like Kant or Nietzsche, a universe of thought experiment. As Foucault

well understood, any effort to dissect the intersection of organized authority and individual rights

requires specific knowledge of the institution: its nontransparent purposes, its inherent design,

and the nexus between the organization’s existence and its need to exist for someone (Chambon,

Irving, & Epstein, 1999; Foucault, 1990; Irving & Young, 2004).

The potential hazard of transferring privileged expert knowledge to a government

authority that serves the interests of the institution primarily and the needs of the individual

secondarily has particularly acute application to the nexus between the authority of the judiciary

and the use of LICSWs as experts. The evolutionary and organizational symbiosis between social

work and the judiciary did not occur by historical accident. Indeed, the role of the psychological

23

sciences in the judicial system has deep roots, which the social work profession did not create, but

eventually did accept. Despite many decades of controversy, the judiciary began to accord special

reliance to the expert soothsayer long before social work entered the fray:

The long and rather tortuous history of the psychology-law interface makes it clear that

ignorance has never been acceptable. It is a history characterized by marked fluctuations

in the regard with which the courts have held the role of the expert and in the value

placed on scientific evidence. It is a history of tensions between needs and expectations

of the courts for assistance in understanding and adjudicating very difficult and vexing

human problems, balanced against the scientific knowledge base of a young science that

was limited in the assistance it could provide the courts. (Weissman & Debow, 2003, p.

34)

Of course, the best of the social sciences may laudably generate policies that serve social

justice, but, just as often, a science-of-the-moment serves a desired government policy-of-the-

moment (Bogenschneider & Corbett, 2010; Tyson, 1995). Indeed, this form of science has the

tendency to “foster competitive theories that purport to explain the behavior of the same

phenomena” with the result that each side becomes an “evangelist” for “warring grand concepts”

that lack empirical validation (Sutherland, 1973, p.4). Unfortunately, mere expressions of

authority by a dominant or privileged class, rather than transparent methodologies and assessment

criteria, all too often underpin sexism, racism, or homophobia. What Foucault explicated was that

historical oppression by institutions employing privilege as science too readily meant that

individuals “are robbed of their freedom to configure events” (Dybicz, 2010, p. 349).

A plausible argument can be made that Foucault would have foreseen the potential

consumption of social workers by the judiciary acting as a disciplinary institution. For Foucault,

24

creating and imposing law on a pliable and vulnerable population diminishes the capacity of the

polis to even question this dominant discourse. In a quote worthy of exposition:

From top to bottom, in its over-all decisions and its capillary interventions alike,

whatever the devices or institutions on which it relies, it acts in a uniform and

comprehensive manner; it operates according to the simple and endlessly reproduced

mechanisms of law, taboo, and censorship: from state to family, from prince to father,

from the tribunal to the small change of everyday punishments, from the agencies of

social domination to the structures that constitute the subject himself, one finds a general

form of power, varying in scale alone. This form is the law of transgression and

punishment, with its interplay of licit and illicit. (Foucault, 1990, pp. 84-85)

For Foucault, such a juridical model rests upon “nothing more than the statement of law

and the operation of taboos. All the modes of domination, submission, and subjugation are

ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience” (p. 85). The power of these iterative and ever-

adapting forces, even in the guise of this relatively new monarchy of social work and law, is now

a constant. However, this amalgamation of values and privilege did not occur overnight. Instead,

hundreds of years of experimentation with the intersection of human beings and institutions

influenced, and remain influenced by, the need for the appearance of science to justify forms of

reward or punishment. Integrating the cultures of science, policy, and practice, therefore, remains

the challenge for educators, practitioners, and researchers (Shonkoff, 2000). Integrating the

expertise of social workers to high-volume, high-conflict criminal and family courts in particular,

which really (really) want convenient forms of science, remains a critically acute challenge.

Leonardo da Vinci was purported to have said that “one has no right to love or to hate

anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature” (Freud, 1947, p. 40). The

25

contemporary act of expert is the privileged exercise of power itself. This does not mean that

power in the abstract is something that should be loved or hated as a categorical bad or good.

Power is, by definition, the functional capacity to dominate, coerce, or encourage another when

the other’s resistance is, ultimately, futile or, more cynically, beneficial to the organization or

institution served by that transfer of knowledge. Whether that capacity is premised upon some

form of legitimate knowledge or not should never obscure the consequences of imposing power

on another. Even when society benefits by the imprisonment of those who are dangerous or

violate the safety of victims of domestic violence, for example, institutional power is used to

choose who is rewarded and who is punished. This may be just choice for society but it is a

mistake to assume that is always so.

This is not a haphazard criticism of the professional services and insights that social

workers daily deliver in the midst of chaos to courts and that may mitigate more harm than

would occur if social workers declined to serve as experts. The legal system itself contorts the

best of human thoughts and behavior, including the lawyers and judges who walk through its

portal by providing “legally sanctioned fight clubs” (Rosenbaum, 2004, p. 50). In many ways,

this contortion is intentional. Training-in-the-law to be a lawyer means “focusing almost

exclusively on rule-based inductive, deductive, and categorical reasoning processes and

linguistic precision” (Burton, 2004, p. 15) to the neglect (and even desensitizing) of law students

to narrative and interpersonal reasoning and mindful listening. Acquiring a more thorough

understanding of the structural nature of lawyers and courts and the role of social work expertise

as each influence the other is the reason for examining the experiences of LICSWs. This

understanding begins with the experience of becoming an expert in the MSW classroom.

26

CSWE and the Education of “Experts”

If the goal of a graduate school education for social workers is to create public

intellectuals, then graduates must acquire a critical understanding of what ideology and power

means in the abstract so as to avoid capitulation in the tangible. As Epstein (1999) pointedly

noted, the social work profession has transformed itself into agents, often of government, to help

define “the troubled” and the “normal.” The difference is the hidden trap: the exercise of power

must assure self-determination, consent, and free will. If not careful, the tug of cooperation can

situate the social work profession as an agent to enforce the moral standards of a dominant

organizational ideology. If so, a more comprehensive and deeper knowledge of the acquisition

and imposition of power should be an overarching objective of graduate school education.

From this perspective, the evolution “of the profession of social work into a phalanx in

the psychotherapeutic armies” (Specht & Courtney, 1994, p. 8) coincided, perhaps unfairly, with

the cynical argument that when clinical social work became subject to the privilege granted by

government to obtain insurance reimbursement, the potential transformation from social

reformer to government agent was complete. In fairness, every professional discipline provides

immersion into its ideology: Law, medicine, social work, psychology, military, police, hockey,

or orchestra. No group culture exists without the potential transformation to a shared culture of

“we” and “them.” In a profoundly important way, social work education, from its founding,

sought to shift “we” and “them” to an “our”; a belief that the duty to community, to the

vulnerable and poor, the young and oppressed, required trained professionals who could

understand the linkage between social justice and social advocacy.

The NASW Code of Ethics seeks to embed these aspirations in a core set of ethical and

legal duties that can be taught. CSWE accreditation standards and competencies were (and are)

27

then intended to link the teaching of these ethical standards, binding upon LICSWs, with

intellectual and professional rigor (CSWE, 2008, 2013; Macgowan, 2012). Any model of

education and training requires learning competencies that extend to congruence, information,

and certainty biases that may influence the transfer of social work expertise (see Baron, Beattie,

& Hershey, 1988, for a discussion of an experiment in which students were told of the fictional

disease “globoma”). The potential separation of these two sides of the same coin is that teaching

and measuring these principles from the entry point of an MSW program is quite different than

understanding the complex influences of host environments in practice.

Critical thinking skills should be combined with the rigor necessary to act as an informed

expert and not the mere expounder of privileged opinion to institutions like the courts (Madden,

2000). This burden or duty is consistent with what Foucault characterized so profoundly, as “not

necessarily the institutions but institutional practices not ideology but statements not the subject

but the embodied subject” (Chambon, 1999, p. 56). The responsibility to question the influence

of regimes on social work practices, as Foucault described, makes visible the linkage between

how institutional practices trigger new means for oppression.

The avoidance of such an outcome may occur if, as some research suggests, social work

education serves as a form of professional socialization so as to inculcate values, attitudes, and

skills (Weiss, Gal, & Cnaan, 2004). Inculcation, however, requires a purposeful transfer of

critical thinking knowledge; not merely the mantra of social policy or practice convenience

(Iversen, Gergen, & Fairbanks, 2005). The intentional and knowing employment of privilege by

social workers acting as experts is not, however, the problem-in-itself. The problem, from

education to practice, arises when a professional discipline fails to adequately prepare its

28

LICSWs with sufficient intellectual rigor to distinguish opinion from institutional convenience

and symbiotic cooperation.

Although Felkner (2009) rather pointedly challenged the notion that there is “compelling

evidence” that social work graduates become members of the profession with “low intellectual

abilities” (p. 121), there is a legitimate concern that two or three years of graduate social work

school provides sufficient rigor for exercising power and authority by diagnosis and label. After

all, the modern “entrée” to mental health treatment is concomitant with the means “to legitimize

clients’ claim, obtain insurance coverage, and communicate with professions—and to withhold

diagnosis might mean withholding health” (Probst, 2012, pp. 255-256; see also Probst, 2009).

The problem of rigor, however, arises precisely because medical disease models,

grounded in the most prevalent example which will be used here for that purpose, the Diagnostic

and Statistics Manual (DSM) (APA, 2000), does not fit well within a curriculum without a more

advanced knowledge of biology, neuroscience, chemistry, epidemiology, or even p values. For

example, the DSM may be taught to MSW students without a correlative understanding that the

social worker is the bridge to medicating the vulnerable as part of a well documented connection

between diagnosis and treatment as a financial joint venture (Littell & Lacasse, 2012). Under

those circumstances, the “tensions between conflicting paradigms” may favor the “dominant

medical model based on the concept of the disease process and a deficit-based understanding of

human behavior as exemplified by psychopathology and a DSM” (Graybeal, 2001, p. 233).

What matters here is that courts look for the DSM as the foundation for admissible expert

evidence in almost every form of litigation which requires labeling. Although the NASW has

apparently taken no official position on the most recent DSM controversy (Littrell & Lacasse,

2012), it is these controversies that exemplify the root of the problem for the transfer of social

29

work knowledge-by-expert to the courts. The DSM, with its own embedded notion of science,

professional culture, nomenclature, social constructions, and policy preferences, is now actively

acculturated into the mind and canon of any MSW student aspiring to a clinical license. The

derivative problem is that social work today cannot be viewed merely as a benign player when

employed as a bridge for other disciplines or a rubber stamp that serves the host environments.

This ethical conundrum is a function of what McBeath and Webb (2002) refer to as

“virtue ethics.” This means that social workers should be educated to act not merely as agents

practicing defensively or “routinized by accountability, quality control, and risk management”

(p. 1016), but to acquire the intellectual and reflective capacity to “make subtle discriminations”

(p. 1033). Social work students are shaped and fitted in a few years of graduate school to

perform the ritual of being an expert by learning knowledge and translating that knowledge to

institutions. If social work students should learn more than to merely parrot the knowledge of

other disciplines for the purposes of serving the needs of the host, the challenge is how to teach

students the difference between scientific methodology and scientific liturgy. In a vacuum of

such knowledge, the social worker may become deeply embedded, like a barbed hook, as an ally

for institutions disconnected from social work values and ethics.

From Social Work Student to Expert

Accreditation standards, by their very nature, require a pedagogical structure that is

imposed on the school receiving such a stamp of approval. Every professional discipline

performs that act. The trap may occur when and if fossilized knowledge that lives as myth or

cherished beliefs subsumes new conceptualizations and knowledge available to academia or

practice. Change is rarely easy for human groups with a shared culture; and educational

institutions, just like the courts, are not immune to the comforts of the past or fear of future

30

change. The duty of the social work profession, and the profoundly important task confronting

the CSWE and the NASW, is to engage intellectual and ethical rigor about methodology and

evidence before students become an expert in court. It is, therefore, the experiences of those who

have inhibited and continue to inhibit these roles that form the foundation for this research.

In the United Kingdom, efforts to explore the influence of social work education coincide

with a need to effectively evaluate social workers in the field (Orme et al., 2009). This critical

analysis began with an assessment of “what difference” a social work degree makes as a means

to understand “how change in knowledge, the tension, and behavior may be attached to teaching

and learning” (p. 4), as well as how knowledge is applied in practice as a function of the

“process” of “knowledge augmentation” (p. 5). The key to such research is discovering, from

those who have experienced these domains, what factors might have better prepared them to

foresee the risk of becoming a doppelganger for the host hospital, school, or courtroom.

In the so-called foundation courses, students take a year of social policy and advocacy,

practice, research, and psychopathology courses, interspersed with the history of the profession.

Every profession, like every society, has its narrative: its Romulus and Remus upon the hilltop.

Immersion and inculcation in the narrative of a professional discipline builds core, shared values.

Academia is thereby the training ground for acquiring objective and rigorous knowledge of the

natural and social world and the role of politics, values, and ethics. If the “helping professions

are concerned with putting knowledge into action to promote change” the process of doing so

means the employment of scientific knowledge borrowed from the “relevant disciplines in an

attempt to act and modify the environment, or they attempt to develop and then use their own

body of scientific knowledge” (Meenaghan, Kilty, Long, & McNutt, 2013, p. 3).

31

There is, however, a dampening of knowledge enthusiasm, as social work, still pausing

with self-doubt, glances back to the famous speech of Abraham Flexner in 1915 about how

society defines a “real” profession. A more trenchant response is specifically addressed later but

his oft-cited missive that social work must create a “systematic body of knowledge and theory”

rather than act as “the auxiliary and assisting other professions, such as physicians and attorneys”

and or not qualify as “professionals in their own right” (Specht & Courtney, 1994, p. 87) is fair

enough for that era in general. By 1917, Mary Richmond herself was worried to find that she was

“subservient to physicians” (p. 96). The whole speech by Flexner, when read in its entirety,

seems more of a reaction to the threat to patriarchal authority (Freud was still alive and well in

person and practice) than a clarion call for social work to stop the pretense of being a profession.

Nevertheless, this is one of those instances when understanding how authority is “historically

situated” helps accord meaning to what has become a loose can(n)on for nearly a century.

After all, Flexner’s comments coincided or preceded millions of deaths and massive

societal destruction during World War I, The Great Depression, the collapse of Russia and the

rise of communism and fascism, the nationalistic aggression and violence of World War II, the

Holocaust, racial and religious bigotry, political intolerance, Jim Crow and later the New Jim

Crow, massive poverty and wealth disparities, child labor as “freedom of contract,” the

exploitation and abuse of women, the exploitation of working class men, and the settled belief

that social welfare policy was defined by the twisted tenets of Social Darwinism. If the

circumstances in which Flexner’s thoughts were expressed are historically situated there was

nothing surprising, given the threat posed by social workers as women who developed and

guided its role in society on behalf of the vulnerable and excluded.

32

What neither Flexner nor Richmond could have foreseen were the confluence of factors

that would generate original social work knowledge from quantitative and qualitative research

streams and the novel conceptualizations of social justice which flowed from social work

education, practice and licensure, and research. Yet social work across these domains still finds

itself flinching when criticized for being “too liberal” or more about “feelings” than figures. This

flinching, a century later, has created an educational environment that, at one level, is defensive

about the efficacy of social work knowledge, but, at another level, is too readily dismissive (or at

least noncommittal) about evidence-informed training, despite the risk of subservience within

host environments. Nevertheless, a potential snare for the profession was honoring the generalist

model for students while trying to assure sufficient intellectual rigor across disciplines.

Some of the interviews quoted in this paper reflect that very point. This dilemma arises

because, from its roots, social workers constituted an intellectual and ethical bridge between

professional disciplines and institutional authority (government and private) and acted within and

between those environments for the vulnerable and the poor. There are few rewards for pushing

back against authority for the disenfranchised in a society. The secondary, though no less

complex dilemma, was that social work adapted research components from other disciplines,

such as the investigatory methods of anthropology, the mathematical and laboratory models of

behavioral psychology or social psychology, the medical disease model of personality, or the

multi-theoretical perspectives of public health (Bronstein, 2003; Lyons, 2003).

Without overstatement, no other licensed profession crosses so many lanes to translate

and transform knowledge that is often simultaneously interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary (see

Satin, 2009, for a discussion of the differences within medicine). Although social work has long

discussed the complexity of serving as experts while protecting the rights and needs of

33

vulnerable populations, social work also has actual knowledge, now decades old, that its

participation has consequences. A social worker cannot integrate organizational demands

without critical insights about individual autonomy, cultural diversity, and personal dignity, as

well as the risk that social work knowledge may be exploited or misunderstood.

To engage educational reform means to understand more deeply the experiences and

knowledge possessed by those who have lived within all the domains of the profession. An

understanding of what these experts see and perceive through the lens of experience is a form of

reverse engineering from which we may begin connecting a “wider range of knowledge–

questioning research” from which practice and research may mutually benefit by considering

how “the perspectives and methods of one provide a template for the other” (Shaw, 2003, p.

111). The MSW education (from courses to field placements) is the singularity from which

intellectual and ethical rigor may emanate. The question is not, as Flexner challenged, whether

social work should have a signature “pedagogy” (Earls-Larrison & Korr, 2013, p. 194). The

question is how to create an expert within competencies that require self-reflexivity and critical

thinking skills sufficient to translate knowledge without getting lost in adversarial environments.

Employing Evidence-Informed Research

Graybeal (2001) argued that the social work profession “has a great opportunity to

provide leadership in transforming practice theory and methodology” (pp. 233-234). What this

means beyond the abstract is that the profession must stop turning a not-so-subtle blind eye to the

mechanisms of institutionalized prejudice or coercion. Social work knowledge is the peculiar

aggregation of other disciplines rather than a cohesive, and potentially rigid, set of

methodologies developed for use only by those with insider knowledge. Indeed, it is quite

34

plausible to argue that the complex phrase “evidence-based practice” is a defense against the

accusation that social work knowledge is simply “folk wisdom” unconstrained by empirical data

(Gambrill, 2012; Regehr, Stern, & Shlonsky, 2007; Webb, 2001). Some research suggests that

many social workers do not appear to draw on research findings as a means to inform their

practice while social work educators, practitioners, and researchers struggle to overcome barriers

to knowledge dissemination that seem to revolve around four themes: knowledge, lack of fit,

suspicion, and resources (Bellamy, Bledsoe, & Traube, 2006).

What is of particular relevance to these barriers is what a scholar in the field of

management many years ago referred to as a “theory jungle.” This phrase meant casting aside

people in “armchairs” in favor of the “distilled experience of perceptive men and women who

understand the nature and role of theory-in-practice” (Koontz, 1980, p. 175). Koontz

characterized the “maturity and usefulness of a science” as “the sharpness and validity of the

principles underlying it. No science, now regarded as mature, started out with a complete

statement of incontrovertibly valid principles. Even the oldest sciences, such as physics keep

revising the underlying laws and discovering new principles” (p. 187). Social work need not

apologize for revising and developing new theories and models. What social work must accept is

the relationship between theory, practice, and research outside the “lab” and the possible

influence of host systems on the transfer of actual evidence-based knowledge.

This conundrum may more likely evolve when proponents of a theory, in any

professional field, fail to develop methodologies that connect relevant theory to specific practice,

like forensic examinations or testimony (Goodman-Delahunty & Foote, 2009). In social work, an

abundance of theories for evidence-based translation at the clinical levels, for example, has

caused some to argue that a cohesive evidence-based approach to practice is rather like punching

35

Jell-O, or at least groping around in the Jell-O for the right prize at a birthday party. The effect

may be to dilute faith in the notion that there is an evidence-informed means of prediction and

interdiction for human behaviors that can be methodologically translated to practice.

An alternative response is that intellectual and academic rigor and practice training are

intended to create social workers with the capacity to sift through theory, examine the facts and

realities before them, and implement evidence-informed practices which fit the investigation and

intervention. Any “jungle” of theories merely reflects what the physical sciences have debated in

this context for decades and which the phenomenological approach suggests is much more than

just the philosophy of being: “no great advances in knowledge were made so long as man

contemplated the whole universe” (Koontz, 1961, p. 188). Thus, any approach to social work

research should fit the reality that the efficacy of scientific knowledge demands “parsimony,

generality, consilience, and predictiveness” (Wilson, 1992, p. 216). Teaching and training social

workers the imprecise or scattered use of theory is little different than what the physical sciences

dismissively term “the theory of everything,” or TOE for short (p. 287).

For the social worker as expert, the competent and ethical dissemination of evidence-

informed practice are coextensive. Just as a researcher should describe the traits and patterns that

emerge in conversation with those who experience the unique phenomena under study, experts

should understand the environmental forces that shape human behavior. Unlike the predictable

activities of atoms or subatomic particles acting in concert and without motivation in a lab or

from a cell phone tower, research pertaining to personality tests, bonding and attachment, the

causes of aggression and violence, and the functional capacity to parent, among selective

examples, may have little connection to reality when the person under observation and facing

judgment is subject to the compression of the criminal or civil court environment.

36

The point is that to translate knowledge forensically implicates the ethical and intellectual

duty to assure that measures and methodology are generalizable outside the clinic or the

laboratory, as well as across cultures, race, socioeconomic status, and other forms of diversity or

non-dominant populations (Maschi, Bradley, & Ward, 2009). To properly generate research

questions relevant to these experiences, therefore, it is important to understand that within the social

work discipline, there exists the various epistemologies of social work (Brandell, 1997; Turner,

1996), the macro elements that connect evidence-informed practices to social welfare policy

(Bogenschneider & Corbett, 2010; Netting, & O’Conner, 2008), and thereby the legitimacy of

expert opinions for and on behalf of the courts (Gould, 2010; Hoefer & Jordan, 2008).

By neglecting an exploration of the experiences of individual social workers as experts,

social work, as a professional discipline bounded by values that actively engage evidence-

informed competency and social justice, cannot make more precise changes at the roots of

curriculum and training. From this knowledge, it is possible to begin to explore whether courts

may distort or co-opt social work knowledge as a means to achieve an efficient end for the

institution but ill-conceived to protect the vulnerable (Chambon, Irving, & Epstein, 1999;

Dominelli, 2003). After all, expert opinions are not merely abstract events but have tangible

consequences when expressed in forums with the power and authority to reward or sanction.

Specific Mechanisms: Who is an Expert?

For decades, LICSWs have testified as experts before a judge or jury about a set of facts

based upon an investigation and, in some cases, offered an ultimate opinion based upon those

facts, such as in damage from emotional trauma or mitigating factors in the death penalty phase

of trial. In a jury trial, the judge instructs the jury on the law and the jury weighs the evidence

37

and finds the facts. In most family court matters and many civil and criminal matters involving

misdemeanors, there is no jury, just a judge, who decides the facts and applies the law. For

example, child custody, parental terminations, commitment proceedings, traffic tickets, and

restraining orders are decided by a judge only. In both jury and non-jury matters, however, the

judge alone determines the who is the expert based upon factors that, though unique to each

state, always implicate qualifications, methodology, probativeness, and reliability.

The question of who is an expert raises one of those thorny philosophical questions that

have permeated various strains of postmodernism. The question of “knowing” another and

“being” another has spawned thousands upon thousands of pages in books and peer reviewed

literature in the social sciences. When this philosophical dialogue is carried to an extreme, the

shadow of the cave inevitably breeds late night discussions about “how many social workers and

lawyers can safely sit on the head of a pin?” or “If God is omnipotent can God create a rock he

cannot lift?” Within some arcane literature, the American judicial system has not been immune

to these types of debates, which has little chance of feasible resolution for educators and courts.

The extremes, however, should not obscure the fundamental question of what knowledge

and skills should LICSWs have to become and be an expert in the courts? By engaging in

debates about whether quantitative and qualitative research is “scientific” enough or failing to

account for the generalizability of that research to the probative factual and legal issues before a

court, the caves of both law and social work misalign the definition of science with the test for

admissible expert opinion. Indeed, and beginning with the United States Supreme Court’s

decision in Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), the social sciences have been a

particular target because courts have struggled to develop legal tests that can fit both the physical

and social sciences without the need for variation by discipline (Adrogue & Ratliff, 2005).

38

Not only is this an approach as metaphysically unresolvable as the questions above, but it

also creates a false paradigm for analyzing the purpose of expert opinion in a specific case.

Chemistry and physics are not social work. The tests for expert testimony cannot be the same

because the methodologies of each branch of science are not the same (and even better, this

means Flexner does not get his way by exalting one over the other with music the point of

demarcation). This may seem rather obvious but, indeed, it is not. Although the philosophical

questions will remain unanswered here, the question of how courts employ experts from social

work requires additional grounding before proceeding further: How to teach and train LICSWs

to become effective experts in court within the ethics and values of their profession?

At the level of epistemology, the assumption of expertise is one of learning and knowing

through experience or methodological knowledge that is evidence-informed and that a lay person

could not explain (Coffey, 2004). This division between lay and expert knowledge drives the

development of court rules that govern the admissibility of expert testimony. For that purpose, a

judge must first determine that the opinion is legally admissible, because the subject matter may

not be “plainly comprehensible” such that “unskilled persons” would be incapable of “forming

correct conclusions” without the “opinion of experts” (Ginn v. Penobscot Co., 1975, p. 883).

Once a judge determines that expert testimony is necessary to establish a fact beyond the

keen of ordinary experience and observation, the judge examines the admissibility of expert

opinion, beginning with the qualifications of the proffered expert. The threshold challenge is

avoiding trial-by-resume before connecting qualifications to methodology and thereby to the

probative facts in dispute. An expert qualified in one area may not be an expert in another area,

so there is sensitivity to expert opinion bleeding into the case in ways that give more weight to

qualifications and thereby confuse the fact finder. The question of qualifications to offer expert

39

testimony has proven contentious in other ways as well. For example, states have historically

limited competence examination in criminal cases to psychiatrists or psychologists, but

assessment and opinions by clinical social workers have increased (Siegel, 2008).

Courts have frequently struggled with this threshold qualification requirement because

there is a consensus: expert testimony, when admitted by the court, is a powerful predictor of

trial outcomes because the fact finder may give more weight to the credentials of the witness

than actual reliability or validity of the methodology (LaRue & Caudill, 2005; Lewis, 2009;

Rome, 2013). As the Supreme Court in General Electric Co. v. Joiner (1997) reasoned:

Conclusions and methodology are not entirely distinct from one another. Trained experts

commonly extrapolate from existing data. But nothing in either Daubert or the Federal

Rules of Evidence requires a district court to admit opinion evidence…connected to

existing data only by the ipse dixit of the expert. A court may conclude that there is

simply too great an analytical gap between the data and the opinion proffered. (p. 146)

Assuming qualifications relevant to the case, a court must consider whether the

methodology which the expert will employ is itself the proper foundation for expert opinion.

After an extensive review of cases and literature, Androgue and Ratliff (2004) concluded that

methodologies “that are generally accepted in practice in the real world are not always accepted

in court. Further, methodologies interchangeable in the real world are often more strictly

separated by case law” (p. 900). The conundrum is not so tactfully argued in court: what is “real”

science? What “proof” is required to establish scientific fact or scientific truth? Is it the test the

same as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West or the calculation, with a range of error,

that a car moving at 60 mph will require x feet to stop after the driver hits the brakes under

certain weather conditions? Is it the statistical probability that recidivism decreases for men after

40

age 40 or that children who are raised by parents of substance abusers have a greater risk of

substance abuse, marital failure, or lower educational achievement? These types of questions are

routinely entertained by courts with varying degrees of frustration and inconsistency.

More than a century ago, the renowned judge, Learned Hand (perhaps the most famous

appellate judge never appointed to the Supreme Court) wrote that “[n]o one will deny that the

law should in some way effectively use expert knowledge wherever it will aid in settling

disputes. The only question is as to how it can do so best” (Hand, 1901, p.40). Only a few years

after his article was published, a federal court developed the so-called Frye standard, which is

often summarized as the “general acceptance” test (Frye v. United States, 1923). Although

variations evolved throughout the country, the essential requirement was that proffered scientific

testimony has some form of “general acceptance” among some set of scientists within a specialty

or the scientific community in general.

In 1993, after decades of scholarly debate and litigation, the Supreme Court required trial

courts in Daubert to act as “gatekeepers” and determine, at the threshold, whether to exclude

expert testimony because the evidence lacks a scientific methodology. The Frye test was

considered too strict; therefore, some form of reliability, in an evolving but still amorphous form,

would govern admissibility. In subsequent Supreme Court decisions, the Court clarified (sort of)

that relevance and reliability required a “fit” between expert reasoning and conclusions

irrespective of the type of science proffered to the court. In some states, Daubert was not even

accepted as law with variations like when “an expert's methodology or science is unreliable, then

the expert’s opinion has no probative value” (State v. Irving, 2003, p. 208).

In cases in which expert testimony rests on newly ascertained or applied scientific

principles, a trial court may consider whether “the scientific matters involved in the proffered

41

testimony have been generally accepted or conform to a generally accepted explanatory theory”

(Searles v. Fleetwood Homes of Pennsylvania, Inc., 2005, p. 516). Indicia of scientific reliability

may include whether any studies tendered in support of the testimony are based on facts similar

to those at issue; whether the hypothesis of the testimony has been subject to peer review;

whether an expert’s conclusion has been tailored to the facts of the case; whether any other

experts attest to the reliability of the testimony; the nature of the expert’s qualifications, and, if a

causal relationship is asserted, whether there is a scientific basis for determining that such a

relationship exists. In this manner, trial courts were generally encouraged to reject privilege-by-

degree as a source of uncontroversial knowledge, as well as “idealizations of law that seem to

render scientific standards superfluous” (LaRue & Caudill, 2004, pp. 43-44).

The loop then oscillates because it is often argued in the social sciences that mere

specialization or personal experience by the proffered expert is sufficient by itself to meet the

threshold test as it has evolved in some federal and state courts on a case-by-case basis. What has

made this expert-by-credential issue so challenging is the inversion of the Frye assumption of

experts as honest brokers of science to one “influenced by the social, economic, and political

situation of the expert and the expert communities” (Sanders, Diamond, & Vidmar, 2002, p.

149). By recognizing that the scientist and the scientific community share “common human

frailties” the court “extends law’s empire by making the judge, not the expert community, the

final arbiter of what constitutes acceptable expertise” (p. 151). This is not simply a cynical

reaction to “junk science” which began to overwhelm the courts in the 1980s (and there is truth

to that suggestion across disciplines).

The struggle is to find a balance between realist and social constructionist views of

science when retrofitted to court rules for deciding cases unrelated to chemistry or physics. Yet

42

the courts are often the final arbiter of science because the courts have the unenviable task of

deciding increasingly complex and multifarious forms of litigation that cut across all strata of

American society. What matters to social work education and practice, however, has deeper

implications. For example, when expert testimony proffers “social frameworks” to the courts,

such as “battered women’s syndrome” or “PTSD” or “repressed memory” this proffer implicates

social constructions of “normal” mental health and reactions, as well as “general causation and

specific causation inferences” (Faigman & Monahan, 2005, pp. 652-653).

If teaching evidence-informed policies is itself fraught with dispute within the profession

(Rubin & Parrish, 2007; Swenson, 2006), training social workers to recognize the co-opting of

expertise for a “greater good” by a host environment requires the profession to generate a

consensus within its own “scientific community” about rigor. Psychology itself has struggled

with how to integrate the complexity of studying human behavior outside a laboratory. For

clinical psychologists, one side of the debate takes the view that psychologists should restrict

professional activities to “those which have ample support in the literature” (Faigman &

Monahan, 2005, p. 655). The other side, with no less fervor, argues that their professional

discipline need not apologize for treatment or actually need to prove effectiveness. When this

debate, however, moves through the courthouse portal it is not efficacy for the client but

empirical evidence, or at least the minimum of consensus among the discipline, that what is

testified to about have some modicum of a reliable evidence-base beyond a privileged voice.

A final point is required before moving to the next section. Many of the cases cited and

decided by the United States Supreme Court concern class-actions, that is, environmental or

product liability litigation with high stakes and clients with millions in insurance and corporate

dollars. This is the realm of elite who can protect themselves in the battle of experts or, as

43

pejoratively labeled, junk or genuine science. The vast majority of Americans who find

themselves in courts or hospitals or schools do not have the resources to challenge the efficacy of

a claimed science, to challenge the opinions of an expert about his or her mental health, to reject

a label, or to obtain a team of lawyers with the time and resources to challenge the methodology

underlying attachment theory or parental alienation or the latest evolution of Axis II disorders.

Social workers are, however, the daily engine which drives case management, bridges

diagnosis and labeling by other disciplines; translates the observations of others to service plans,

and offers privileged and powerful opinions about bonding, death mitigation and imprisonment,

home-care for the elderly, or placement in a hospice facility. These cases rarely attract any

attention from commentators or courts. Vulnerable individuals and disadvantaged groups with

whom social workers perform their clinical and community tasks more often than not lack the

will or knowledge, in the daily grind of survival, to continue to fight back or even challenge

expert opinions about them. This is not to deny the thousands of transactions in which a social

worker alone and advocated for services or interventions that would otherwise have been denied.

However, people should not be fooled into imagining there are no differences between privilege

and poverty when being labeled and judged.

It is precisely this disparity in power which places a special burden upon the profession

from the classroom to the clinic to the research lab to the host environment. Busy courts and

busy lawyers and busy social workers rarely have sufficient time, motivation, or money to argue

the fancy standards for admitting expert evidence in court. Indeed, the juridical norm too often

becomes a staged play in which efficiency and volume substitutes for substance. Thus, any check

on power and authority will have to come from within the social work profession itself before

personal privilege or heuristic decision making is substituted for expert opinion (Heineman-

44

Pieper, Tyson, & Pieper, 2002). Although this objective cannot be achieved without an

understanding of the experiences of those LICSWs who act as experts, it definitely cannot be

achieved across the domains of education, practice, research without context.

Specific Contexts: Courts as Host Environment

Since at least the 1920s, the judiciary has embedded social science experiments in

judicial decision making as a function of policy and practice. Despite an absence of evidence-

based research to support the efficacy of such experiments in the courts, much less the rudiments

of informed consent, theories and models from clinical research are regularly transferred to an

analysis of persons immersed in the judicial milieu (Grove & Barden, 1999; Tippins &

Whittmann, 2005). As Foucault and other scholars warned decades ago while studying hospitals

and mental health institutions, social workers-in-practice risk an inversion of the core value of

social justice by interpreting and translating knowledge in the form of authority-by-license

(Banerjee, 2011). In such circumstances, social workers may serve the dominant interests of a

host environment and thereby subject human beings who are already vulnerable to “the rational

discipline” of applied (or misapplied) human sciences (O’Neill, 2011).

Unlike other public organizations (see Lipsky, 1980), the judicial system, for historical

and functional reasons, has been rather impervious to most forms of quantitative or qualitative

research (Schepard, 2004). For the courts, therefore, the threshold question of qualification and

admissibility of scientific knowledge protects the values of the courts not the values of social

science disciplines which offer up services and opinions. What makes this specific relationship

worthy of study is that federal and state courts have, for several centuries, jealously reserved the

exclusive authority to the judge as ultimate fact finder or “truth detector” and “gatekeeper”

45

within a constitutional and legal framework of rules, laws, and traditions (Coffey, 2004; In re

Soriah, 2010; Rome, 2013; State v. Black, 1988). In this juridical context, distinctions between

evidence-informed knowledge create a trap for the courts when preferring one form of scientific

methodology over another:

While critical self-reflection concerning values and intersubjectivity is common in

qualitative research endeavors, it is rare in quantitative research studies deemed

“scientific.” Yet, the stories of lived experiences found in qualitative research are

precisely the kind of storytelling long approved in the tribunals of law. When courts

construct a set of facts for the adjudication of a particular case, those facts may or may

not correspond to an objective, veridical reality. Pragmatic constructivism, consistent

with pragmatism generally, also seems to view truth as relative to its perceived

consequences. (Caudill & Redding, 2000, p. 758)

In a similar vein, Weed (2007) noted that values are vital and powerful players in

scientific inquiry at both the theoretical and practical levels. Some say that in the actual practice

of making an expert (scientific) judgment of the available (weight of the) evidence, these

objective and subjective value-laden traditions cannot be separated (p. 154). At its core, the

American judicial system is institutionally designed to resolve conflict by imposing, after the

artifice of a trial, a judgment about the present quality of another in the future (Berger, 2009).

The vexing problem of courtroom fact-finding, however, is often skewed, like science at many

levels, by the ability of lawyers and clients to present a slice of life under high stress and in

circumstances of imperfect information. This is true because a judge, as decision maker, is the

filter and finder of a truth about each fact as presented by lay and expert witnesses. The sum of

these facts is fitted into matrix of standards and law from which a judgment is entered.

46

Without belaboring the point, institutional and adversarial pressures, the financial limits

of clients, and the skills of the lawyers and judges, generate more random outcomes than not. To

provide a semblance of rationality that the public might accept as more than guesswork (Elster,

1990), a kaleidoscope of facts is often arranged into juridical truths through experts from a

variety of professions, including LICSWs. Yet despite acting as experts in thousands upon

thousands of cases for decades (Benveniste, 2007; Barker & Branson, 1999; Maschi, Bradley, &

Ward, 2009), there is little qualitative or quantitative research in the United States exploring the

experience of licensed social workers when becoming and being an expert (Orme et al., 2009;

Pettus-Davis, Grady, Cuddeback, & Schevett, 2011). This matters because the core values of

social work require the social worker to challenge and expose disparities in power and

oppression as against the perspectives and actions of dominant cultures like the courts which

have very different traditions and values (Culp, 1991; Hartley & Petrucci, 2004; Pepper, 1986).

Conversely, the legal system and its educational model, have, for a century, applied a

matrix of values and traditions that “cuts with a sharp edge” (Cervone & Mauro, 1976, p. 1977).

This means that unless gender, cultural, racial, or economic differences are a “prevailing

orthodoxy” (Preston-Shoot, Roberts, & Vernon, 2001, p. 16) these differences may be

marginalized or generalized in court proceedings. In the context of LICSWs operating within a

forensic role, this clash of traditions and values may diminish the capacity to avoid legitimizing

the organizational goals of courts at the expense of difference; particularly among the powerless

or oppressed. Preston-Shoot, et al succinctly framed the question in this manner: “It is not

surprising, therefore, that values are treated unevenly, but can social work defend a value base

given its position in the legislative and state apparatus?” (p. 16).

47

The lack of social work research concerning the experiences of social workers and how,

if at all, their role within courts influences their identity (attitudes, values, and behaviors) makes

it much more difficult to develop precise competencies and frameworks for teaching and training

social workers to proffer expert opinions. In a qualitative study of divorce lawyers in practice,

Mather, McEwen, and Maiman (2001), casting a critical eye upon the legal system, recognized

that its professional values were constructed by “white men in a particular class” (Mather,

McEwen, & Maiman, 2001, p. 9). From their interviews, the researchers found that widely held

assumptions central to the “ideology of professionalism” and the influences of bureaucratic or

organizational control over “work decisions” accounted for the potential of the courts to “bleach

out” (p. 8) characteristics like gender, race, class, or religion. LICSWs risk, as do divorce

lawyers, mechanistic or heuristic forms of decision making and judgment if untrained to

recognize the differences in themselves and others.

The overarching risk is that expert opinion which serves courts becomes anchored in

overgeneralizations or stereotyping that extends the historical harms caused by sexism, racism,

and hetereosexism. The social work profession is certainly not immune to this “bleaching out” of

professional and personal identity in favor of canon when transferring the profession to powerful

host environments even if it is more attentive to the difference. Given social work’s complex

relationship to various postmodern analytics (Witkin & Saleebey, 2007), and the court systems’

constitutive power to apply the law to its subjects, each side of this living-equation may distort

contextual subjects “rooted in their relationships and social settings” (Leckey, 2008, p. 3).

Of course, the legal and social work disciplines regularly engage in relational activity that

engages rapport and trust in various personal and professional combinations (Masson, 2012). The

potential for a more balanced collaborative relationship was present decades ago if both

48

disciplines had better understood the “profound differences in the way lawyers and social

workers think and communicate” (Cervone & Mauro, 1996, p. 1976). Eventually, the ready and

inexpensive (relative to other disciplines like psychiatry or psychology) availability of LICSWs

incrementally shifted the duty from factual investigation to an authoritative and privileged

proponent of a diagnosis of prediction.

The emphasis on “a” is not accidental. Courts must render judgments in one case and

move to another dozens of times a day so efficiency matters. As Federal Judge Jerome Frank

wrote many years ago:

[judges] are asked to perform in the dark what is the very essence of the judicial function.

The task of the judge, if well done, is no simple one. He must balance conflicting human

interests and determine which of several opposing individual claims the law should favor

in order to promote social well-being. (Frank, 1930, p. 120-121)

What these propositions expose is the obligation of social work to continuously examine

the linkage between the education of social workers, the functions of practitioners, and the duty

to employ the current art and science of research (Barusch, 2009). When social workers

undertook to transfer their knowledge to courts, responsibility for evidence-informed practice or

and social justice should not have evaporated at the courthouse portal (Arredondo & Rosen,

2007; Mullen, Bledsoe, & Bellamy, 2008). Whether social workers offer predictive or value-

laden opinion evidence through authority-of-license or evidence-informed research is of critical

importance to a profession with dual ethical responsibilities to client and community (Siegel,

2008). If the social work profession does not study itself across these domains, therefore, it is

doubtful that the profession can protect itself much less vulnerable individuals and communities.

49

Chapter 3: Methods of Inquiry

Purpose of Research

As described, the purpose of this research is to explore the experiences of LICSWs acting

as experts within the courts. In social work research, theory and methodology share an inherent

tension and connection (Grinnell & Unrau, 2009; Mitchell & Jolley, 2010). The connection

between roles and the transitions which occur between being a student and becoming an expert

may be studied for the properties that may reveal those transitions. These roles, often adaptive

and uncertain as the nuances unfold, may influence the feelings and thoughts of the expert-in-

training. Recognition of these role conflicts grounds the purpose of the research precisely

because the essence of the participants’ experiences is influenced by their perception of whether

their education and training provided the skills required to serve as an expert.

As a method of inquiry, phenomenology fit the research because social workers who

participated shared the experience of being an expert in the courts as well as transitions and

transformations from the domains of an MSW education to licensure to consumer and user of

evidence-informed research (Creswell, 2013). In accordance with the philosophical and

methodological traditions of phenomenology, the forces of these experiences cannot be properly

understood apart from a specific host environment. Similarly, the range of epistemological and

ontological debates in the social sciences, which social work research incorporates into

qualitative theory and methodology, has contributed to the development of various paradigms for

program evaluation. To a greater frequency in Great Britain than the United States, the social

work profession has felt pressure to demonstrate its effectiveness within organizations and

institutions (Berger & Rosenberg, 2008; Ruegger, 2001).

50

Understanding the efficacy of interventions (and expert testimony is a causal

intervention) is critical to evaluating and improving program efficacy on behalf of the individual

consumer and the organization served by social work. The capacity to undertake such

organizational research requires certain assumptions which connect the material aspects of

program design and the measurement of outcomes. Research has not, however, sought to first

explore the most powerful human variable in the equation between input and output: the

experiences of the experts who offer opinions about those persons subject to institutional

judgment. At this point in social work’s evolution the best of intentions cannot excuse expert

opinion that confuses or blurs the implications of relevant and generalizable research to courts. If

experts cannot connect their experiences to their influence on the host environment, or the

reciprocal (and perhaps more gradual but powerful) influence of the institution on the expert, it is

much more difficult to engage future research that may target positive change across the

educational and practice domains.

Given these limitations and concerns, the selection of phenomenology, and more

specifically hermeneutic phenomenology, connects to methodologies for the future design and

measurement of outcomes in organizations. Realistic Evaluation (RE) and Participatory Action

Research (PAR) provide different theoretical lenses but consistent approaches to the intersection

the experiences of experts within an organization and the experiences of its consumers. In RE,

the crucial difference between knowledge and perspectives is the difference between appearance

and essence (Kazi, 2003). RE incorporates the concept of embeddedness which means that all

human action and experiences occur within a wider set of social processes within society. As

such, explanatory theories and experimental work reveal properties of programs, not as

51

segregated from individual experience, but causally connected to functions, structures, powers,

and mechanisms that generate events that may or may not be experienced (Kazi, 2003).

Unlike PAR, RE has not yet taken hold in the United States as a methodology for

evaluating programs. Although PAR has different theoretical roots than RE, PAR shares with RE

a concrete means to connect knowledge-about-an-organization with the “diversity of

perspectives as reality and ways to co-create meaning” (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013, p. 1). The

inquiry may be split between theory (episteme) and technique (techne) or the notion that inquiry

divides between substance and processes. PAR recognizes that within democratic structures,

science has been harnessed for political goals that have, too often, been applied to individuals

and organizations as a form of theology; not science. PAR, therefore, often addresses the

experiences of those marginalized from power and resources as a means to gather information,

critically analyze root causes, and redress injustices (Lykes, Hershberg, & Brabeck, 2011).

Each of these modes of inquiry is linked with hermeneutic phenomenology by engaging

observation, logic, and the reality and essence of human lives and experiences. This is relevant

because qualitative research is concerned with patterns of meaning and not merely generalized

hypotheses statements (Mason, 2010). The thesis for this research is that social work, as a

professional discipline, must first understand the essential experiences of the professionals it

trains and empowers before engaging in hypothesis testing or a study of processes within

institutions like the courts. To do so in reverse is unlikely to generate, as proponents of RE

metaphorically point out, a shift from a “black box,” which evaluates a program’s effects without

addressing the components of the program, to a “clear box” in which effects and operations of a

program are visibly connected (Kazi, 2003).

52

A Phenomenological Methodology: Hermeneutics

Phenomenology is a qualitative method that examines and describes lived experiences

from the perspective of an individual’s construction of the meaning of a phenomenon as opposed

to some form of objective description of the phenomenon external to the individual. In its

philosophical sense, phenomenology evolved from what Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) described

as understanding of the essence of experience as a response to the preoccupation of science with

explaining natural objects and events (Lindseth & Norberg, 2004). The boundaries between

phenomenological philosophy and methodology can be rather blurred but are traceable through a

rather complex framework from Aristotle to the German philosophers of the early and mid-20th

century. Forms of phenomenology that take the constructivist approach accept and posit that

there are multiple realities which are socially constructed.

The debate, now many hundreds of years old, between empirical science and the means

for answering questions about active intelligence usually consist of a flotilla of arguments over

verification or falsifiability or objective and tangible proof of some truth about nature

(Blanchette, 2003). Phenomenology implicates the debate over active intelligence but in a way

different than someone playing by the rules and roles of empirical sciences. As Blanchette

writes, this distinction is “less in terms of abstract aspects of being taken apart from other

aspects, as physics considers the physical aspect of being apart from its living aspect, but more in

terms of its experience as a whole” or the “quiddity of things in our own mind” (p. 48).

For reasons that remain a strangely immature criticism of qualitative analysis, leaping to

study empirical solutions by operationally defining variables without any knowledge of the

experience (or quiddity) of those who connect their lives to how they think and act leads to

flights of abstraction which may fail to differentiate between the “accidental and the essential in

53

experience” (p. 48). Some would argue that it is the very act of composing and dividing the

experience which constitutes a “critical science in its own right” (p. 49) and is, therefore, more

than a mere metaphysical discussion of being. The purpose of phenomenological methodologies

is to draw from these lived experiences so as to find patterns or a universal essence from which

the researcher can delineate a composite description (Creswell, 2013).

To accomplish such a task, researchers who employ phenomenological methodologies

impose a conversation of reflection with persons who share a peculiar experience. Drawing on

these views of a person-in-time and recognizing that phenomenology is often considered

ontological—the world is intelligible to all of us—means that my familiarity with the phenomena

both impacts and instructs the interpretative lens through which the research questions and

interview guide were formed. A risk or limitation is that the participant experiences become that

of the researcher rather than the participant. This risk is diminished (though not eliminated) by

employing a hermeneutic process through which interviews are analyzed by moving between the

lines of each transcript and the whole of the transcripts (Pascal, 2010).

Husserl posited that through bracketing (or keeping a distance from one’s one subjective

experience), it possible to analyze the experience as it appears to the researcher (Pascal, 2010).

Bracketing, however, was criticized for sacrificing the liberation of prejudgments at the expense

of intellect (the Cartesian mind/body dualism) over experience (Pascal, 2010). Eventually,

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a pupil of Husserl, argued rather convincingly that it was not

possible to bracket human experience but rather, through reflection, to become aware of our

assumptions and engage that shared experience as part of shared human knowledge. Although

there is still vigorous debate on this point, modern hermeneutic phenomenologists “do not

attempt to isolate or bracket their presuppositions but rather to make them explicit” (Deikelmann

54

& Ironside, 2006, p. 261). As a consequence, the key is locating the individual in the context of

their life experiences such that “validity in a phenomenological study is just that: the unaltered

faithful telling of experiences by people” (Munhall, 1994, p.84). Moreover, social justice values

need not be lost when employing phenomenology because these faithful re-telling may “infuse a

study with layered meaning” (Padgett, 2009, p. 103).

Ultimately, these philosophical and methodological dimensions, with assumptions about

ontology, epistemology, and human nature merge in such a way as to render the concepts, as

Hans Georg Gadamer suggested, a means to bind together questioning, responses, and

interpretation (Laverty, 2003; Wood & Welch, 2010). This weaving of the interview events then

provides space for understanding the meaning, structure, and essence of those lived experiences

(Patton, 2002). The objective is to reveal hidden interpretations through continuous engagement

so as to uncover experiences which were then organized into clusters of meaning or essential

themes or what Creswell (2013) calls “horizontalization” (p. 82).

The researcher engages a circular interpretative process, in which the lived experience of

the participants permits a deeper understanding of themes and essences of what is already known

or thought to be known about the phenomena. There is never a precise point of termination

because circular means precisely that: successive reaction and re-reaction within iterative

feedback loops. Thus, by interviewing the participants in person and observing and studying

their experiences, it is possible to generate themes or patterns that constitute a recurrent category

(or set of categories) embedded in the interview texts.

Although there is value to learning about the experiences of these experts, to do so from

one direction alone is incomplete. From the original conceptualization of this research to the

development of the research proposal to the interview guide, the purpose was to eventually

55

inform these other questions: Does social work knowledge enhance or diminish the efficacy of

outcomes in the courts? How and why does expert knowledge influence judicial decision

making? From these questions (and others) there may be a means to test, assess, and measure the

influence of expert opinion on outcomes in the courts and, as appropriate, differences across

poverty, family systems, diversity, and other demographic and cultural factors. The brief

summary which follows concerning RE and PAR is intended to reflect the influences of these

methodologies on this research and its implications for future social work research.

RE and PAR as Alternative Methodologies

The power of randomized controlled studies (RCT) lies in “their approximation of closed

systems” (Porter & O’Halloran, 2012, p. 19). The legal system, like complex health care

interventions, is an open system subject to inputs and outputs that generate outcomes. These

recursive and complex feedback loops (see Taylor, 2001, for a discussion across disciplines)

complicate the disclosure of causal relations. RCTs alone, of course, cannot control precisely for

the effect of social complexities, organizational structure, cultural mores, or tendencies that “are

the result of different combinations of causal mechanisms” (Porter & O’Halloran, 2012, p. 19).

Even if not formally part of this research, the methodologies described here constitute an

“orienting framework,” which guided the assumptions, the sampling, the subjects, the focus of

the inquiry, and functioned as a means for organizing and interpreting the findings (Lopez &

Willis, 2004, p. 730). In the future, this fit may help identify pertinent mechanisms for

understanding the influence of education, practice, and research on the expert and the influence

of experts on the tendencies of the court system so as to assess, more precisely, whether these

“pathways” are actually “helping those it purports to help” (Porter & O’Halloran, 2012, p. 22).

56

Participatory Action Research

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is situated within the interpretative paradigm of

qualitative research methodologies grounded in the relationship between knowledge derived

from practice and practice informed knowledge (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013). As with

phenomenology, the roots of PAR are founded in the German school of social and experimental

psychology and philosophy. What renders PAR particularly suited to future research concerning

the courts is its recognition of the “messiness” of the democratic process and the deployment of

scientific knowledge to solve problems beyond linear causality (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013). In

Figure 1, Chevalier & Buckles (2013) diagram the intersection of the social plane (participatory),

the plane of experience (action), and the plane of mind (research).

57

In particular, interdisciplinary knowledge, melded within the demands of organizations,

requires reflective and pluralistic methodologies of science that “mesh” and “interface” with

complex systems (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013). Like certain aspects of hermeneutic

phenomenology, PAR is based upon just such a critical perspective, that is, “to engage key

stakeholders as participants in the design and conduct of the research, diminishing the distinction

between the ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’” as a means to obtain knowledge of structures and

social practices in organizations by examining conditions and efficacy within “historical, social,

cultural, and political contexts” (Fossey, Harvey, McDermott, & Davidson, 2002, p. 720).

For the purposes of considering PAR as theory and methodology, a research model would

aim to study the exchange of experiences between experts and the courts through a collaborative

committee of experts and judges, for example. The authentic representation of the participants’

information and a coherent fit between the data and the context from which the data is derived

requires transparency of data collection, analysis, and presentation (Fossey, Harvey, McDermott,

& Davidson, 2002). This form of transparency is termed permeability, meaning the explicit

disclosure of intentions, perceptions, and values. This point becomes acutely important for PAR

because social work has a duty to consider the implications of research participation that may fail

to consider oppression, racism, and diversity (Fine, 2006; Varcoe, 2006).

Realistic Evaluation

As a preliminary matter, RE has not yet taken root in the United States as a methodology

for the study and assessment of social service programs as compared with participatory-action

research. The reasons seem unclear because there are strengths in both approaches which are

relevant to understanding social service organizations or those organizations, like the courts,

58

which provide social services in modern America. Like PAR in some aspects, RE itself is rooted

in a contextual philosophy of realism, which has aspects of positivism and interpretivism (Kazi,

2003). For several centuries, Western scholars have vigorously debated legal positivism, natural

law theories, and various forms of realism (Posner, 1990) within the prescriptive rights of

judicial practice or, as many have somewhat facetiously commented, the “cult of the robe”

(Murphy, 1964, p. 13). In either case, courts have proven rather impervious to study in the US.

In their seminal work, Pawson and Tilley (1997) argued that social policy programs are

an attempt to address an existing social problem so as to create some level of social change.

Their realistic evaluation approach was grounded in a school of philosophy which asserted that

both material and social worlds have “real” effects and that it is possible to obtain a clear

understanding of what causes change in programs. Pawson and Tilley theorized that the contexts

in which programs operate include various factors from the specific organizational and social

environment to training to funding, but that there is always an interaction which generates

impacts or outcomes.

Thus, the authors’ formula, Context + Mechanism = Outcome, means that evaluation

requires researchers to learn more about what works, in which contexts particular programs are

effective or ineffective and, of critical import here, what complex mechanisms of judgment are

triggered in what specific contexts (Sanderson, 2000; Wimbush & Watson, 2000). In Figure 2,

the research cycle involves identifying the most salient features of each stage and the circular

nature of understanding the interrelationships and influences of each element as applied to the

program and the consumer.

59

Within this paradigm, RE requires an understanding of the inner workings and

components of a program and how these connect (Kazi, 2003). In metaphorical terms, realism

seeks to move from what has been described as the three “boxes” of program evaluation: black,

grey, and white, or what Kazi, revising the metaphor drawn from Scriven (1994), suggests is

“clear” (p. 20). A “black box” evaluation concentrates on the program’s effects without

addressing the components. A “grey box” evaluation is when the components of a program are

discerned but the inner workings or principles of operation are not fully revealed. In social work

research, the challenge for a “clear box” approach is to contribute a study that evaluates a

program, within a peculiar institution like the courts, that is outcome-based and also applicable to

diverse populations and institutions.

RE is particularly appropriate for researching existing, rather than hypothetical,

organizations or programs, operating in real time. The research questions for RE, particularly

60

when there is little supporting research, are first developed in terms of a model that explores the

connections and regularities between Mechanism [M], Context [C], and Outcomes [O]. In an

oversimplified form, if RE is applied to experts in the courts, for example, one theory for future

research may be that M (Experts) + C (Courts) = O (More informed and precise decision making

by judges), for example. The threshold task for the development of any plausible theory

concerning the efficacy of LICSWs as experts is a more precise understanding of M.

By qualitatively exploring the experiences of LICSWs, the social work and legal systems

may actually construct theories, and engage future research, that better inform the design of

education and training programs. Moreover, this form of shared knowledge may actively engage

opinions and judgments that are more sensitive to poverty, bias, and the consequences of

employing social work knowledge within dominate political structures. In fact, Pawson & Tilley

(1997) pointedly highlight the “great promise of evaluation: it purports to offer the universal

means with which to measure ‘worth’ and ‘value’. Evaluation, in short, confers the power to

justify decisions” (p. xii). What distinguishes RE, in fact, is its effort to sustain rigor and

objectivity in the context of evaluative cycles of mechanisms and contexts, as well as a

willingness to employ quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods so as to capture more

accurate data (Kazi, 2003).

Although some will argue that no “prophet, intellectual or evaluator, can claim to be in

possession of the universal standpoint, that secret scientific key to the truth” (Pawson & Tilley,

1997, p. xii), this point is usually a function of those who wish to prevent change rather than

improve a program or policy. One of the critical tasks of RE is to generate explicit theories to

develop hypotheses about how, and for whom, programs might be effective (Byng, 2011;

Stavropoulou & Kelesi, 2012). For Pawson and Tilley (1997), quite properly, the evaluation of

61

programs must: (a) deal with what is real, that is, all social interaction “creates interdependencies

and these interdependencies develop into real-world customs and practices, which are often quite

independent of what people wish them to be;” (b) follow a realist methodology ,that is, a goal of

detachment and objectivity in the evaluation by establishing a scientific methodology; and (c) the

evaluation is realistic, that is, the “whole point is that [RE] is a form of applied research, not

performed for the benefit of science as such, but pursued in order to inform the thinking of policy

makers, practitioners, program participants and public” (p. xiii).

Summary

Phenomenology shares with organizational system theories like the realistic approaches

of PAR and RE an attempt to understand dialectic relations in which forces generate complex

states of disequilibrium and equilibrium between individuals and organizations. Initiatives like

experts, therefore, may be seen as complex social processes of interaction that may be evaluated

rather than variables or treatments which are randomly good or bad. As with PAR and

phenomenology, care is required to assure that the conversation between experts and those-in-

power avoids assumptions about the consumers that may often enter the portal involuntarily. The

risk is one of confusing utopian aspirations or “piecemeal social engineering” (Porter &

O’Halloran, 2012, p. 26) with modes of action and analysis that are concrete and useful. There is

always a risk of overreaching and thereby confusing what the social work profession ought to do

with what social work is bound to do. Without the experiences of its own in a particular host

environment, however, there is the greater risk that social work follows habituated pathways and

confuses privilege-by-license with expert opinion-by-science.

62

Any analytic strategy requires ongoing collection of data which embeds mechanisms for

feedback and reflection so as to assess meaningful connections between expert testimony and the

host environment (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013; Fossey, Harvey, McDermott, & Davidson, 2002).

As described above, the warnings of Foucault parse all forms of qualitative research that invoke

institutional judgment and the risk of science-by-privilege. If great care is not practiced in the

design and interpretation of data, the exchange of information may become (as I have observed)

a discussion of blame about others and self-congratulation about the privileged.

Being an expert means becoming a critical realist with the experience to know the

difference without discriminating in a manner that is unethical or unjust. A sensitive awareness

of how “power works to produce, sustain, and naturalize social inequities across multiple levels

of analysis” (Fine, 2006, p. 93) requires care with findings that do not involve consumers or,

worse, do involve consumers but bury the voices. None of these methodologies are value free.

Despite those who argue for some pure form of falsifiability or strict positivism (or neo-Luddism

as Chevalier & Buckles amusingly write), the study of humans within the forces of human

systems is often a process of tendencies or “expertocracy” (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013, p. 3).

The purpose of this research was to try and uncover strategies and methodologies for

understanding the human and organizational forces that engage and influence the teaching and

training of social workers.

63

Chapter 4: Research Design and Methodology

Study Design and Research Aim

The preliminary conceptual framework for this research is guided by three primary

questions concerning the experience of becoming and being an expert: what do those forensic

experiences reveal about the connections between the domains of an MSW education and

licensure, the act of practicing social work, and the integration of evidence-informed practice?

What do those experiences reveal about the act of power commensurate with offering expert

opinion about another? How do LICSWs retain their values and ethics in host environments?

This interpretive study consists of qualitative interviews with LICSWs who share a fundamental

understanding of those experiences because each of them has actually lived each domain. As

Smythe, Ironside, Sims, Swenson, and Spence (2008) described, hermeneutic phenomenological

research means “thinking about the experience of being human, and as such can only be achieved

by recognizing the gift and limitation that being human brings” (p. 1397).

In qualitative research, an inductive approach provides the opportunity to fill a knowledge

gap. By employing my own expertise and experiences and acknowledging those influences on the

outcome, this approach engages an epistemology akin to intersubjectivity, or the “mutual knowing

between two people of the other’s experience, including meaning, intentions, and emotions” (Arnd-

Caddigan, 2011, p. 373). An inductive process also permits the use of conversation as the primary

instrument for data collection and data analysis, with a richly descriptive end product which

organizes the findings in the context of relevant literature (Merriam, 2002; Creswell, 2013). A

crucial dimension of this research is the development and improvement of the content of social

work practices so as to better meet the needs of clients and the society (Kazi, 2003).

64

The original research questions were intended for social workers who served as a court-

appointed guardian ad litem (GAL) (Boumil, Freitas, & Freitas, 2011; Gleiss, 2010). Following

initial IRB and committee approval, LICSWs were contacted nationally by virtue of their self-

identification on websites and other public sources. As responses were received, it became

apparent that this research provided a unique opportunity to interview LICSWs with more

diverse forensic experiences. With the approval of the Dissertation Committee and IRB, criteria

were re-defined to permit inclusion of LICSWs beyond the role of GAL (see Appendices A and

B). The IRB thereafter approved an extension of the research on those terms (Appendix D).

Although there is some research cited in this paper which describes the experiences of

MSW students and clinical social workers, there is little research available to educators,

practitioners, and researchers concerning the phenomena under study. The realist accepts that the

experiences of professionals and clients may reveal causal powers that may be material and

descriptive of reasons and intentions, but the objective is still to find differences and similarities

among strategies and patterns associated with decision making (Levin-Rozalis, 2003; Rycroft-

Malone, Fontenla, Bick, & Seers, 2010). Beyond epistemological or conceptual debates in the

social sciences, social work, across all three domains, has plunged ahead with the use of its

expert authority despite a rather thin examination of the influence of differences or similarities.

This hermeneutic phenomenological research design, therefore, is a means to start a

conversation from the perspective of the participants so as to find those strategies and patterns

which may illuminate gaps or connections within or between education, practice, and the use of

evidence-informed knowledge. After all, social work education itself has never been based upon

a “simple model of transferring knowledge to students “but is intended to provide students “with

opportunities for experience, reflection, and circumspection” (Barsky, 2010, ¶5.0). To more

65

deeply and precisely understand the experiences of LICSWs as experts is to begin to develop the

means to teach and train the virtues of practice and research in a manner that promotes critical,

moral, ethical, and scientific thinking before LICSWs enter an adversarial host environment.

Pilot Study

With the consent of my committee, no pilot study was conducted. Although a pilot study

is an effective means of refining the research design, the preliminary nature of this research and a

sample drawn nationally from experienced LICSWs reduced the likelihood of potential harm or

that pilot interviews would substantially alter the interview strategy.

Sample Recruitment

The selection of participants involved purposive sampling which aims to select

participants who display common experiences with the phenomena under study (Patton, 2002).

In order to maintain representativeness, the sample was limited to social workers who had an

MSW, passed the clinical licensing exam in his or her respective state, and had acted as an expert

in court. The literature suggests that a phenomenological study should have between 5 and 25

interviews to assure sufficient evidence of patterns from shared experiences (Creswell, 2013). By

prior approval of the committee, the author interviewed 20 participants.

Contact was initiated through the Internet using public search engines and the following

search terms in various permutations and combinations: LCSW, LISCW, Licensed Clinical

Social Worker, Guardian, Forensic, Expert, Child Custody, Evaluator, Witness, Court-

Appointed, or Advocate, or Child Abuse and Neglect. The researcher also used professional

contacts to identify potential respondents. Initial contact was through email only, with the IRB

66

approved contact letter attached (Appendix A). Respondents were asked to share the contact

information with other LICSWs so as to employ snowball sampling.

No phone contact was initiated unless the respondent first agreed to be contacted.

Through telephone or email, participants confirmed that they met the inclusion criteria. A few

asked for a copy of my resume (or found it online) and several wanted to speak with me first. No

persons who agreed to participate were excluded. Five other respondents initially responded to

the contact email but, either as a function of their schedules or a failure to respond to follow-up

emails from the researcher, no interviews were held. The researcher contacted all second stage

volunteers by telephone or email to confirm that they consented to be interviewed face-to-face in

a private setting of their choosing. The data was eventually drawn from these 20 interviews.

The original Interview Guide (Appendix C) pertaining to GALs was left intact because

the interview criteria across expert specialties was essentially the same. As the interviews

progressed, topics and questions were refined. The choice for the researcher became more

obvious with each interview: rigidly follow an interview guide or let the participants express

themselves in their own words and on topics meaningful to them. In consultation with the Chair,

and consistent with a phenomenological methodology, the Interview Guide served as an outline

but did not restrict the reciprocal flow of the conversation as guided by the participants and

shaped and shared by the researcher.

At the close of the interview, participants completed demographic information, in

accordance with their preferences. The pseudonyms are not necessarily gender specific, nor do

Tables 1 and 2 reflect the order of interviews. Because identifying the states of origin in Table 1,

if combined with other criteria, may reveal participant identities, Table 2 contains a separate list

of professional practice areas so as to protect confidentiality.

67

Table 1

State and Gender of Research Participants

State Gender

1 MD F

2 SLC, UT F

3 SLC, UT F

4 SLC, UT F

5 SLC, UT F

6 LA/CA F

7 LA/CA M

8 MA F

9 RI F

10 NO/LA F

11 ME F

12 LA/CA M

13 PH/AZ F

14 SF/CA M

15 SF/CA F

16 ME F

17 ME M

18 CT F

19 MA F

68

20 LA/CA F

The sample in Table 1 was not racially or ethnically diverse. Of the 20 participants, all

but 2 had at least 20 years’ experience as an LICSW. One participant had let the LICSW license

lapse but this interview was included in the data because the information was still relevant to the

participant’s court experience as an LICSW. In addition to an MSW, several participants had law

degrees and several others had a PhD in social work or another field. As identified in Table 2, the

areas of expertise reflect primary practices at the time of the interviews as the participants had

other overlapping professional experiences or specialties.

Table 2

Areas of Expert Testimony

N=20 Area of Expert Testimony

3 Forensic Interviews / Child Abuse / Criminal

4 Child Custody / Parent Coordination / Evaluation

2 Elder Care / Guardianships / Disability

1 Death Mitigation Specialist

1 Death Mitigation Specialist / Sex Offenders

6 GAL / Child Custody / Child Welfare

2 IPV / Forensic Evaluator / Civil and Criminal

1 Immigration / State Violence

From this sample, the interviews were conducted and analyzed in conformity with the

hermeneutic phenomenological methodology described above.

69

Data Collection and Management

Participants were told that the interviews would last an hour. In most cases, the

interviews lasted an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half as a result of the responses to

questions or new thoughts or experiences expressed by the participants as important to their

narrative. The participants (N=20) were interviewed (with one exception in Boston on business)

in their state of residence or workplace of choice, with females (n=16) and males (n=4). Each

participant was provided the consent form approved by IRB to read and then sign (Appendix B).

The signed consent forms are on file with the researcher. All conversations were digitally

recorded and later transcribed verbatim by the consultant, who signed a confidentiality

agreement (Appendix E). The digital interviews were downloaded into NVivo qualitative data

management software to assist with analysis. The recordings, transcripts, and demographic

information are maintained in the exclusive possession of the researcher and on a computer

database which is password protected. Only the researcher and the transcriber had access to the

digital interviews. The transcriber did not have any actual names or other identifying information

other than what was contained in the interviews.

Ethical Considerations

Human Subjects Review

This study was approved and approval extended by the Simmons College Institutional

Review Board (Appendix D). As the sample was limited to LICSWs, the population was not

considered presumptively vulnerable. Participants were not asked sensitive or personal

information or to share identifying information about clients and could decline to provide

information. All participants were informed of the purpose of the study, as well as possible risks

70

and benefits of participation. According to the consent form and reaffirmed at the outset of the

interviews, participants could freely choose not to answer any questions or to end the interview

at any point without any consequences. There was the possibility of discomfort with the

reflections of the participants as questions were asked or clarified but this was likely to be minor.

All of the participants completed the interviews without any expressed reservations.

Protection against Risks

Given that all eligible participants have a master’s degree or higher, it was assumed that

they could read and comprehend the Informed Consent Form (Appendix B) without assistance.

All identifying information, digital recordings, interview files, transcripts, and other related and

relevant information concerning participants is maintained in a secure facility in the possession

of the researcher and all digital or electronic-based files are on a password-protected computer

maintained by the researcher in a secure location. No one other than the transcriptionist and the

researcher has heard the audiotapes and only the researcher has read the original transcripts. All

audio or print files will be destroyed within 12 months of completion as required by IRB.

Benefits of Participation

None of the participants were compensated. Each one contributed his or her experiences

consistent with the social work tradition of seeking to improve the profession through new

knowledge and insights. Some participants noted in their communications, during and afterward,

that they had not thought of some of the connections between their MSW education, practice,

and the employment of evidence-informed research or the influences of host environments on

their practices as experts.

71

Data Analysis

Creswell (2009, 2013) has suggested that an analysis of themes in qualitative research

builds from an interactive approach by listening several times to the actual recordings, studying

the transcribed interviews, and then arranging the data into categories or types. After reading and

re-reading the data, general ideas or concepts were extracted so as to reflect on the overall

meaning of the interviews. With the assistance of the consultant, the researcher engaged NVivo

for identifying and coding the material into chunks or segments of text for purposes of

developing meanings using the actual language of the participants.

Initially, a generic list of domains (i.e., categories of information) drawn from the

methodologies described above and embedded in the interview guide was used to orient the

search for codes. This analytic approach engaged protocols developed from the literature and the

professional experiences of the researcher. In order to maintain the “essence description”

(Creswell, 2009, p. 184) within a phenomenological approach, codes or categories should be

derived from patterns in the data, rather than only the preconceived ideas of the researcher

(Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Patton, 2002). As the text was deconstructed and reviewed, some

segments remained uncoded or not included, while others were coded once or multiple times.

Building from the research questions and the interview content, the researcher

highlighted significant statements, sentences, and quotes from the transcripts, including

questions and answers, so as to initially yield the broadest, overarching understanding of the data

(Friedman, Friedlander, & Blustein, 2005). This step is often referred to as horizontalization,

from which the researcher then develops “clusters of meaning” into themes (Creswell, 2013, p.

82). The researcher thereby connects what the participants’ experienced (textural description) to

the context or setting which influenced how the participants experienced the phenomena under

72

study (structural description). Throughout this process, the researcher integrates his own

experiences as a means of integrating the dialectic which occurred during the interviews

(Creswell, 2013). The objective is to write the essence of these shared experiences in a manner

which, Creswell aptly suggests, leaves the reader to conclude that “I understand better what it is

like for someone to experience that” (p. 82).

The researcher performed the extraction, analysis, and development of domains and

themes. As a function of reviewing themes, some themes may not hold together and other themes

may prove inaccurate or untenable. For qualitative researchers using a phenomenological

approach, the researcher shapes the general description so as to build additional layers of

complex analysis (Creswell, 2009; Patton, 2002). Additional questions that emerged may be used

to expand the power of explanation and thick-description. The participants’ experiences and

perspectives may explain the phenomenon through central explanatory concepts that represent

the core themes that emerged during the research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). Once key concepts

are delineated, the researcher refines the analysis so as to identify poorly developed categories or

integrated categories, which may diverge from, validate, or extend the conceptual framework.

The domains and themes subsequently identified and organized as general emerged from

the iterative process of reading and re-reading the interviews. Domains and themes which

revealed unanticipated and unique topics may not have enough patterns to support them, or may

be too broad to be useful were captured within an emergent domain for purposes of informing

the reader and future study (Patsios & Carpenter, 2010; Patton, 2002). Ultimately, qualitative

validity requires that each theme hold together in a meaningful way within a domain and that the

themes, and the relationship between those themes, should be an accurate and useful

representation of the data set as a whole. Only after continuing to refine themes, and

73

acknowledge and identify errors or assumptions by the researcher that may interfere with the

descriptions of the participants, is a qualitative write-up appropriate. The verbatim selection of

questions and answers is intended to provide the reader with the independent opportunity to

judge the essence of the experience and the interpretations captured by the researcher.

Trustworthiness and Credibility

Self-disclosure of the researcher’s assumptions in a hermeneutic phenomenological study

is a critical element of the trustworthiness and credibility of the analysis. In qualitative research

generally, truth-value is equated with internal and external validity in the sense of

trustworthiness, credibility, transferability, and conformability (Creswell, 2013; Denzin &

Lincoln, 2005; Naumburg, 2012). The researcher is the primary instrument for acquiring data,

developing the interview guide, interviewing the participants, organizing and explicating the

findings, and summarizing the discussion. Trustworthiness may be compromised if each of these

stages is insufficiently described or revealed to the reader. With the assistance of the committee,

the researcher has clarified and expanded upon that information throughout this dissertation.

It is the status of an expert on some professional par with the participants that may render

the data more robust but concurrently generate a fair criticism that the researcher wants to see in

others that which he believes is his experience. In Foucauldian terms, I relate more to those who

perceive and exercise power that is like me than those who may disagree with my interpretation

of these experiences. Some of that outcome may be a rationalization for the exercise of judgment

over the years (e.g., “I should not feel bad, because others made the same error”) or a shared

experience that is influenced by the human capacity to deflect responsibility to others (e.g., “We

did our best, but they put us in that position”).

74

In many respects, the avoidance of bracketing in hermeneutics is more intellectually

honest, because it is impossible to render the conversations subject to a hermetically sealed

vacuum. My experiences over 30 years as a trial lawyer biases, in many negative ways, my

perception of the influence of experts on judicial and jury decision making and the effect of trials

and judgment on the public. Those connections, I hope, better informed the interviews and the

interpretation of what these LICSWs, as experts, emphasized amidst the power they observed

and exercised. Much of the interview texts reflect these shared experiences.

Likewise, the theoretical lens which informed this study provides a structure for testing

trustworthiness (or “validation strategies” as Creswell, 2013, prefers) within a framework which

accounts for the personal biases and experiences of the researcher. In phenomenology, the

accuracy of the findings, and thereby the potential generalizability and value to social work,

derive from the fairness of the themes as described and expressed in this dissertation. Potential

distortions introduced by the researcher may be revealed by that content. For that reason as well,

hermeneutic phenomenology suggests that inclusion of the researcher’s voice in the discussion in

the form of the actual questions is appropriate to provide context and depth for the reader. What

is important, at such a preliminary stage of research, is that others may utilize the flaws to refine

and strengthen future research because, as noted in the nursing literature, the challenge is “not

only to articulate the principles of phenomenological philosophy, but to ensure that they are wed

to good scientific principles” (Norlyk & Harder, 2010, p. 429).

Strategies for Rigor

Creswell (2013) synthesizes the standards of confidence, as follows: an understanding of

the philosophical tenets of phenomenology, a clear phenomenon to study, data analysis methods

75

supported by the relevant literature, the essence of the experience of the participants includes

description and context, and the author is reflexive throughout the study. The debate among

qualitative researchers regarding rigor as a function of validity and reliability (or other

terminology like credibility and transferability) is complex, but the key connection here is

between the stability of responses, the data itself, and the dependability, credibility, and

coherence of the reported themes (Creswell, 2013; Friedman, Friedlander, & Blustein, 2005;

Golafshani, 2003; Laverty, 2003). For a phenomenological study specifically, Munhall (1994)

defined validity as the unaltered and faithful telling of experience within this framework:

Resonancy: Does the written interpretation of the meaning of the experience resonate

with individual readers?

Reasonableness: Is the interpretation a possible explanation of the meaning of those

experiences?

Representativeness: Does the study adequately represent the various dimensions of the

lived experiences?

Recognizability: Can individuals, who have not necessarily had the experience, read the

study and recognize certain aspects of that experience so as to become more acutely

aware of the meaning of that experience?

Raised Consciousness: Does the study engender a focus toward a gained understanding

of the experience?

Readability: Does the study read like an interesting conversation about the experience in

a manner which is understandable?

Relevance: Does the study increase consciousness, enable understanding, give us

possible interpretations, meaning, and guide us personally and professionally?

76

Revelations: Was something originally concealed but once revealed enabled others to

find a deeper level of understanding?

Responsibility: Was the researcher aware of ethical considerations when performing this

study? (Muehlhausen, 2009; Munhall, 1994).

By engaging these elements, iterative themes are located across narratives, beginning

with the accuracy of the transcriptions, the use of quotes as a means to locate repetitions and

highlight the testimony of the participants, disclosure of the influence of the researcher, and the

internal and external coherence of the findings (Friedman, Friedlander, & Blustein, 2005; Stiles,

1993). Nevertheless, there are critics of such a framework. Lincoln and Guba (1985) argued

rather vigorously that conventional trustworthiness criteria such as reliability and validity are

“incompatible with the axioms and procedures of qualitative research” (Porter, 2007, p. 84). This

acceptance of a relativist approach has sufficient other critics without exploring the

epistemological detail beyond the virtue that perspective matters to the seriousness of the

scholarship and its realistic usefulness to policy (Pawson & Tilley, 1997; Porter, 2007).

Sociologists and anthropologists long ago recognized that it is group behavior which

governs the best and worst of human activity and, therefore, understanding the experiences of a

group sharing any institutional environment (with all its nuances) is one key to unlocking useful

knowledge. Ignorance or relativism seems a rather rigid way to understand the human universe

and the human condition within that universe. Quantitative and relativistic proponents may share

that same logical flaw: the lab is not the courtroom and all environments are not equally unequal,

but that is not fatal to a study if sufficiently clear to the reader (Wood & Welch, 2010).

By itself, of course, validity or reliability measure quite well efficacy using medication to

treat a biological disease in an RCT study. In qualitative research involving human behavior

77

actively living within organizations, the singularity from which all measures start may well be

the experiences of those who perceived with their senses. There is always a rather risky slippery

slope when attempting to find coherence or cohesiveness in data filtered through the experiences

of participants, who are then filtered through the researcher, who then interprets and organizes

those voices for the reader. In hermeneutic phenomenology particularly, patterns that emerge are

critical but pose the same dilemmas (Laverty, 2003). Was something concealed? Does the

researcher reveal language which is objectively coherent and rationally related to the

experiences? Does any of the information inform and generate an inclination to reflect? Does any

of the information matter to the profession or those who consume its power and authority?

The conceptual framework for rigor described by Munhall (1994) fits particularly well

the effort to connect the domains of education, practice, and research within host environments.

Indeed, Shaw (2003) makes such an argument for such an exploration and explanation rather

persuasively. Strengthening social work’s “disciplinary character and location” is not so much a

matter of arcane debate but the extent that social work inquiry is “marked by rigour [sic], range,

variety, depth, and progression” (p. 115). Thus, the rigor challenge for the researcher is the

circular nature of the methodology: the experiences of the researcher must be honestly revealed

and challenged, because professional identity and shared experience with the phenomenon under

study may blend, understate, or dismiss experiences incongruent with that of the researcher.

This is both a methodological concern and an ethical challenge. However vexing those

concerns, rigor is a function of accuracy and trustworthiness which beneficially informs action.

Thus, in Chapter 5, the domains and themes are developed by quoting questions and responses in

sufficient length and depth to afford the reader the opportunity to independently assess the data

and its interpretation as organized by the researcher.

78

Chapter 5: Results

As a “branch of the humans sciences, social work seeks to understand human beings from

a holistic perspective, viewing them as complex, multifaceted beings in a multi-layered network

of relations” (Wilcke, 2002, p. 1). Although hermeneutic phenomenology has not been as widely

used in social work research as other qualitative methods, such as grounded theory, its

application fits the study of those experiences in which the researcher shares some meaningful

understanding of the phenomenon. As such, reactions and interpretations are approached with

openness to preconceptions or projections, such that the questions and answers are explored in

detail in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of the detail (Wilcke, 2002).

To report these results requires a hermeneutic circle of understanding and interpretation.

This means paying careful attention to that which is directly said and revealed, the silences and

assumptions, and the totality of meaning. In hermeneutic phenomenology, direct quotes from the

questions and the answers are used to illuminate themes, to elucidate descriptions that showed a

strong reaction or experiences, and to reveal connections between lived experience and revealed

meaning. This choice of methodology, if presented in a direct and evocative manner, encourages

the reader to enter into the experiences of the participants and the researcher (Wilcke, 2002).

In the first stage, the transcriptions and recordings were compared for accuracy. The

iterative process of listening and comparing the transcriptions permitted a reintegration of the

experience of asking the questions, listening to the answers, and observing reactions. Thus, the

inclusion of selected questions as well as answers is appropriate to: (a) give the reader context

and content, (b) better measure the influence of the researcher, and (c) better understand the

conversations that elicited the themes. As the researcher, and interlocutor, this experience

allowed me to reflect more deeply on the participants’ emotive and cognitive expression, as

79

opposed to a mere reading of cold transcripts transposed to text so as to position myself within

the research and explicitly reveal the orientation that guided the development, design, and

composition of this dissertation. Four general domains and one emergent domain, as summarized

in Table 3, were inductively generated (see Appendices H, I, and J, for graphics). Within these

domains, themes evolved from copying, pasting, and refining, the transcripts in iterative loops.

Table 3

Summary of Domains and Themes

First Domain: From Becoming to Being an LICSW

Theme 1: An MSW Education

Theme 2: Knowledge Transfer

Theme 3: Training to “be” an Expert

Theme 4: Clinical Licensure as the “Final” Stage

Theme 5: Evidence-Informed Research and Connections

Second Domain: Power, Ethics, Self-Care, and Poverty

Theme 1: Experience of Power and Authority

Theme 2: Values and Ethics in the Host

Theme 3: Trauma and Self-Care

Theme 4: Poverty and Discrimination

Third Domain: The Dimensions of the Host Environment

Theme 1: The Act of Being an Expert

Theme 2: Actually Being the Expert

Theme 3: Tensions between Neutrality and Advocacy

80

Theme 4: Judges and Juries Judging

Fourth Domain: Emergent Themes

Theme 1: Interdisciplinary Experiences

Theme 2: Evolution of the IPV Experience

Theme 3: Changing the World (or at least the System)

Within these domains, patterns evolved that reflected the common experiences of these

experts within adjudicative systems. There is, however, a caveat to this point before proceeding

to the second stage of explaining themes developed within each domain. There were responses

too painful or too revealing to include in a public text. Respect for the participants superseded

the interests of this research. The reader will also find ellipses in some responses. The researcher

has substantial experience with confidentiality and privilege. If there was the reasonable

potential that a specific reference might cause conflict or reveal identity, that portion was

deleted. Responsibility for that decision is that of the researcher. No participant asked that any

quote be excluded. To the extent these choices may constitute a methodological limitation; this is

an ethically responsible trade-off.

In the second stage of this analysis, and after the transcripts were downloaded into

NVivo, items were coded and subdivided in nodes with the consultant in collaboration with the

researcher (Saldaña, 2013). In qualitative inquiry, a code “is most often a word or short phrase

that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a

portion of language-based or visual data” (p. 3). In phenomenological research, precise coding of

data is not specifically required (Saldaña, 2013). Nevertheless, coding was used to divide the

transcripts into manageable questions and answers or “horizontalization” (Creswell, 2013, p. 82).

81

From reading and analyzing the language within each node, and with iterative repeating of that

process, content was organized into essential themes or clusters of meaning by the researcher.

The preliminary nature of this research itself suggested that content analysis would not

begin with rigidly predefined categories, but that iterations of thematic analysis would allow

categories to emerge from the data. Saldaña (2013) suggested that in phenomenology the process

is one of winnowing down the themes to that which is essential rather than incidental. By

extracting verbatim statements of significance from the data, meanings are formulated through

the researcher’s interpretation and then clustered into a series of organized themes. From that

product, the researcher may elaborate rich written descriptions (Saldaña, 2013). The themes

themselves do not merely describe areas in which the participants share experiences but offers

comparison and contrast so that the reader may vicariously share in the experiences.

Like coding, thematic analysis is an intensive process that requires reflection on

participant language, meaning, and outcomes. The process of theming begins with “the primary

questions, goals, conceptual framework, and literature review” and evolves as the data is weaved

together during later cycles to “detect processes, tensions, explanations, causes, consequences,

and/or conclusions” (Saldaña, 2013, p. 177). As Saldaña suggested, another approach to

organizing these themes may have included metathemes. However, the number of nodes and

differences in the interview questions as this preliminary research evolved did not lend itself to

metathemes. To illustrate the experiences, the themes selected revealed repeated ideas that

followed some of Saldaña’s categories, which include “participant or indigenous terms,

metaphors and analogies, transitions or shifts in topic, similarities and differences of participant

expression, linguistic connectors” suggested by the data or missing or in the data (p. 180)

82

One of the quests hermeneutic phenomenology proffers is to “invite and expose readers

to this journey in a way which makes the experience part of their own thinking and learning; to

avoid closing off thinking and reflection as if there is but one answer or correct means to analyze

and reveal the voices of the participants” (Smythe et al., 2008, p. 1392). The reported

experiences will always be situated within the researcher’s choices. This limitation should not

limit possibilities hidden to the researcher yet potentially available to readers with vastly

different—or more—experiences in the domains of social work education, practice, and research.

This approach, of necessity, reveals the struggle to understand the essence of the phenomenon

within its “rich textual background” without reducing or categorizing interviews in a manner that

bleaches out the “possibility of understanding the experience as it is lived, for we can only live in

a context of time, place, and situational influences” (Smyth et al., 2008, p. 1392).

Although any qualitative methodology may be criticized for its lack of empirical

grounding, empiricism may miss or minimize important linkages located in the participants’

experiences, such as multiculturalism and diversity. As Jones (2004) succinctly argued:

“Qualitative research is no longer the poor stepchild of quantitative analysis” (p. 95). To

operationally define variables with precision or to design objective measures of subjectively

internal or external human experiences seemingly requires a threshold understanding of the

human experience and the human condition (Gringeri, Barusch, & Cambron, 2013; Lindseth &

Norberg, 2004). Conversely, merely asking for experiences may reveal themes but may not

provide generalizable knowledge that quantitative analysis may reveal. What matters is that the

explication of these findings within themes is systematic and transparent vis-a-vis data and the

role and influences of the researcher as the source of questions and interpreter of experiences

(Creswell, 2013; Finlay, 2009; Lopez & Willis, 2004; Norlyk & Harder, 2010).

83

First Domain: From Becoming to Being an LICSW

As described throughout the results, each theme is not a silo but has connections to the

words and experiences of the participants. The thematic category in which the participants’

words appear, therefore, is the artificial research construct required to organize the material.

Each theme is more than a verbatim report of conversations; it is intended to be informative,

aspirational, or inspirational as social workers move from becoming to being an expert.

Theme 1: An MSW Education

Every human being is a summative product of his or her past. Those experiences

influence, and in profoundly positive and negative ways, define our choices of profession.

Although this information was not actively sought in the research design, research suggests that

the choice of professional discipline may be influenced by experiences in the family system of

origin (Mizrahi & Dodd, 2013; Nachmann, 1960; Rompf & Royse, 1994). Connections between

past and present remain an important area for future study because the MSW attracts such a

diverse cluster of students from personal, academic, and cultural backgrounds. Does one

undergraduate background better prepare students for the rigor of an MSW? Does becoming an

expert attract a particular type of student? Is the specialization of an expert a function of the past

or informed by education and field placement? These questions will not be answered here but are

worth keeping in mind as these experiences unfold.

Diana will begin this section with a reminder that families caught in court systems are not

so easily fooled by the language of social workers. This matters as a theme throughout these

domains because professional language can be read by clients and consumers as arrogance and,

though not intended by Diana’s comments, by judges and juries as well:

84

I was working with this family that I’d been working with for a while. We were getting

along quite well. There were just a lot of mental illness in their family, but just were

really very, very bright people. I started telling them how amazing they were and the

father in the family, he goes, “…, they teach you to say that in social work school?” I just

laughed and so then I remembered something I did learn in social work school. I said,

“Oh, I think that what I said kind of tweaked your problems with trust. I think the way I

talked makes you have a hard time trusting what I’m saying.”….I didn’t mean for it to

come out that way, but he said, “Yes, you’re right.” We were able to move beyond and be

ourselves after that. Once again, kind of retrieve who we had been as a partnership, but I

still remember that. I’ve told my students that, that you learn the principle and the ideas

and the, would you say, attitude, maybe.

During the interviews, participants noted the connection between life experience and the

choice of an MSW. For Kate, the expansive connection of an MSW and her past work fit her

goals and interests: “I’ve always believed, definitely life experience helps. It makes us

understand better. The education definitely has provided—it’s helped me to think differently, not

so one channel. Opened it up.” Sandy described this connection as more random but still a part

of her experience: “I didn’t know what social work was until I got back from India and Mexico,

and I don’t remember how I encountered the profession and decided oh my gosh, that’s exactly

what I wanna do.” Other participants connected their global and multicultural experiences to

their entry into an MSW program. As Janet described her experience:

Then I—these were Tibetan refugees, so while I was serving in the capacity of a

volunteer teacher with the kids—really enjoyed the cross-cultural experience; certainly

began to become acquainted with some of the trauma stories of the members of the

85

community, and really wanted to combine those keen interests. I felt that social work

would afford me the opportunity to learn some very useful and meaningful skills that

would enable me to provide some kind of service and combine my interests.

The design of MSW programs as clinical or community-based advocacy remains a source

of discussion among social work educators and administrators even today. Sandy was questioned

concerning those connections years after she completed her MSW education:

When people are looking back and I ask these questions, you’ve had a different

experience than some, but for three—or two or three years of a program do you

remember any discussion or debate in your classes about what it means to be a licensed

social worker and what you can do?

We were taught heavily to go into community organizations and to organize

communities. We talked about anything from working directly to the family to working

in politics. I never remember anything being said about the legal system and working

there. I just don’t think a lot of social workers, besides CPS and maybe social workers

that stayed at hospitals that petitioned people did a lot of that.

For Emily, her work within the criminal justice system informed her choice to enter graduate

school and she shared, from a different perspective, the knowledge gap described by Sandy:

I remember one time I just was sitting on my hands and I said, “Why don’t you just give

‘em [men accused of domestic violence] to me cuz they’re gonna end up in my system

[probation].” This is where the criminal—you know, I wanted to march social workers

into the prison, at a maximum security where I was at, and just say, “This is what

happens when you don’t do your job right.” This is a huge influence on the choices that

86

they make because they get ripped from one home to another. It really—yeah, my

criminal justice experience really impacted the way I looked at the field of social work.

Theodore expanded on his experience concerning the capacity of social work education

to distinguish ideology when a policy may challenge “traditional” tenets:

This [MSW school was a] very liberal school. I remember when we discussed—I

remember we were discussing social welfare programs. We were discussing this new

program, in the ‘80s, called the…Program, which was welfare to work kind of program.

It was a pilot program that was attempting to put mothers that were on welfare to work,

getting them childcare for their kids. I remember reading about it and thinking, this

sounds like a pretty sound proposal.

The party line on this, according to the professors was this is a terrible idea. This

is exploiting poor people, and its racist and its classist. I remember thinking, no, it’s not.

It’s a good idea. Maybe these programs can be improved, or I could see the dangers, but I

just thought—there seemed to be a lot of a doctrinaire kind of attitudes, which I mostly

agreed with, but I didn’t always agree with. I don’t recall a whole lot of discussion about

gender politics too much. I was a feminist—still am. You don’t really understand the dark

sides of feminism until you go into the field of domestic violence. In most fields,

feminism is something I’ve always embraced.

Using domestic violence as an example as well, Theodore suggested that ideology and science

require careful thought before transmitting knowledge in graduate school: “To expect a student

going into social work school to have any real knowledge about domestic violence is just, the

paradigm, the assumption about domestic violence are so deeply entrenched in our collective

consciousness that they’re just really hard to overcome.”

87

Maggie offered a different but important insight: Given the reality that money creates

family conflict; the absence of any education concerning finances is a topic worth considering

(see Despard & Chowa, 2013, for a recent discussion). When entering her MSW education,

Maggie spoke from her unique life experience as an entrepreneur:

Well, certainly it starts with education in the social work program to help the student

understand the system problems. I think it’s still a problem. I think it’s more of a problem

since we’ve had this five, six year problem of economic difficulty….We see grandparents

taking care of children, second or third generation children depending on age and how

early they’ve had their children. I think part of the social work education it would be

helpful for social workers to understand the financial piece of family. We didn’t touch at

all. See I always knew that because that’s part of who I am in private business and my

CFP work that money drives so many decisions, but we didn’t talk about money at all in

our social work program.

The same way we’re not supposed to want to value who we are in our education and ask

for more money.

Right, within the family system how money is power. I have never, and I’ve been doing

this for 25 years plus, in my guardianship 17, I have never had a family member argue

with me about guardianship when there was no money.

Each of the points made by the participants encourages constant reflection when

designing curricula. Zeta was asked about sensitivity to multicultural issues in her MSW

program, for example. She mentioned that “We had one class on diversity. Here was one of the

assignments. Go to the hallmark store and look and see what groups are picked on in the funny

cards. That was diversity.” Of course, this could have changed in the ensuing years, but this duty

88

to education should never be taken as for granted. What matters is that these experiences are still

remembered which is reason to pause and examine current competencies and learning objectives.

In language which may not be unusual even today, Adam began by noting the rigidity of

graduate social work compared to his college experience:

There was only eight or ten of us in a classroom [in college]. Then we had individual we

had independent study with every teacher—the don system, you know, from Oxford—

and so you just got pushed constantly to try to put something out that mattered. When I

got to [my MSW program], and they said this paper needs to be 10 to 12 pages with six

references, I was apoplectic. I literally said so. If I wanted to write 14, and used ten

references, or write nine, and used one reference, I can’t do that, right? I was told you

cannot hand it in if it doesn’t comply with the 10 to 12 pages with six references. It took a

year for me—a full calendar year of being in school—to figure that out.

Adam explained that from his perspective, “building critical thinking and writing skills” was “the

central deficit that I see in terms of any relationship with, broadly, forensics, is that they [MSW

students] couldn’t handle the writing. Even if they could handle the interviewing of the clients,

you know, even if that—let’s say they developed an expertise in that, they couldn’t handle the—I

mean the writing would be so inadequate.” One question is whether MSW students today tell a

different tale or share the same experiences with a researcher? Is this gap still there?

Theme 2: Knowledge Transfer

The translation of knowledge from academia to practice is one of substantial discussion

in the social work literature, with field placement designated as the “signature pedagogy”

connecting various forms of active learning to eventual licensure (Council on Social Work

Education, 2008; Lee & Fortune, 2013). How those connections are effectively translated to the

89

power and authority students will someday exercise as LICSWs remains a rich source for future

research. For now, graduate school is both an ambition driven by past experience, idealism, or

some other motive and, for most MSW students, an economic set of trade-offs. Sandy described

her experience concerning this dichotomy based upon her observations:

It’s interesting because we were told frequently social workers do social work, case

management. There was always the students that whispered I’m going into private

practice. They were like the traitors. Pretty soon, after I got my master’s, all the case

manager positions were being filled by non-professional social workers. I didn’t have a

choice but to go into clinical. I wasn’t trained clinically, I was trained systemically.

These experiences may reflect the values of a specific MSW program, of course, so it is

important not to overgeneralize anecdotal experiences. Zeta expressed a feeling that is common

enough among students (and often heard by social work faculty and administrators) in response

to a question about the value of her MSW education: “Yes, I think theory is fine. I kept asking,

“Where’s practical?” I don’t need to be able to speak in whatever theory you’re gonna give me.

These are the primers and this is the way I have to talk to clients because this is the theory I’m

working under. It’s gobbledygook.” Maggie looked back at her MSW program as a successful

set of trade-offs for her: “I felt that I came out of my MSW program having given them a lot of

money to achieve what I wanted to do and had academics, but not practical information.”

In response to a question concerning whether there is “a knowledge gap there that needs

to get fixed” when transferring graduate school to practice, Zeta responded:

I think there’s a major knowledge gap. When you look at, the social work field, really, is

fraught, and with exposure to similar criminal proceedings, even if you’re a therapist.

You can get hauled into court. You could get subpoenas. If you don’t have any clue as to

90

how it works or the reasons why things happen, you just do stupid things because you

don’t know. If you've been an esteemed therapist for years, you might not always ask

those questions because well, people assume, “I already know.” Well, you don’t know

because you never had any training in it.

Maggie noted that socialization performs some of these knowledge functions. When “we get

together we have cocktails afterwards and that’s when most of our good training and education

and sharing comes up, and we learn from one another that way. It’s a more informal mentoring

with specific topics that happens between those of us in the profession.” Janet suggested that the

connection to specialized practice may relate to interdisciplinary mentoring: “I, myself, gained a

lot of my specialty knowledge after my MSW program through attending specialized workshops

and trainings. Also by being mentored, as well, by seasoned forensic colleagues, not all of whom

were social workers. In fact, most of them were not social workers.”

Among the aspects of an MSW education and CSWE competencies that may indirectly

model mentoring are the hours of field experience required to graduate. There are, however, field

experiences which should warrant more careful attention and may not be unusual or rare enough.

For example, Erin described her experience this way:

I’ll never forget, and we all have this experience. My first patient in my practicum, this

guy had the most severe anxiety disorder. I’d never seen this. You’re just kinda thrown in

there, and you have to be a therapist to this person. I’d been in graduate school two

weeks. It was like, what do I do? I think the whole social work model is really interesting,

how they just kinda throw you into it without literally any education. I have to say, I

guess a lot, psychology’s a little bit different. They don’t start seeing patients ‘til after,

‘til they have had a lot of education. I’ve learned how to be a therapist through

91

experience, not through graduate school. The same with the family law stuff: it’s through

experience and with mentors. Mentors as a clinician, also.

Theodore added a similar experience in more graphic detail:

Yeah, I recall I was at the VA Hospital…., when I was still in my MSW program. It was

a placement. I remember I was put in this ward to work with chronic schizophrenics. It

was a placement. I was supposed to just interview these clients, and then I was supposed

to see them for six to eight sessions and help them. They really didn’t give me any tools.

They just kinda threw me in there, and told me to work with these really, really, really

psychotic individuals. I would ask, “What should I do?” They said, “Just use your skills

that you’ve learned.” I thought, these skills aren’t really preparing me to work with these

crazy people.

After finding an intervention as a student Theodore thought might work and which was already

in place at the facility, he “started to learn about that on my own, and then I started to apply these

principles with these clients. I did get a little bit of flack for kind of going off on my own, but

even at that time, I thought, I had a responsibility to these people. I can’t just use ‘em as guinea

pigs, because I’m a MSW intern. I really thought it was important to help them. I did try to use

evidence-based practice.”

Although Theodore’s willingness to challenge authority in a field placement is not

something other students may find comfortable or safe, his example requires careful reflection.

Each of the participants shared a passion for new knowledge, for helping others, for a deeper

understanding of human nature. What also became clear was that the connection to becoming an

expert was driven by an intellectual curiosity, personality traits, a healthy skepticism of

92

authority, and a fervent sense of balancing the scales of justice. Theodore expressed these

connections for him, as follows:

I kind of thrive on conflict, to some extent. Most of the time, I’ve encountered some

pretty nice people. I enjoy doing it. I tell my wife, some people like watching Jeopardy,

or they like fishing. I like doing research on domestic violence. I don’t see a lot of money

from it. It doesn’t translate into a lot of dollars, but it’s something that I enjoy doing. I’ve

always—to me, it’s always been important to pursue the truth. I’ve always been a skeptic

about things, about religion, about lots of things. I’ve always been that way….My

training as a social worker was, as I said, it was okay. It wasn’t great. It was okay. It got

me a degree, and it gave me a certain amount of knowledge that was good. I really

supplemented it on my own, after I graduated.

This collection of insights matter because classroom education and field placement are

the accepted methods for teaching and training experts. The question is whether this transfer of

knowledge is sufficiently targeted to the intellectual, evidence-informed, and critical thinking

and writing skills required for responsibly transferring social work knowledge to students who

will later become LICSWs and experts in the courts or other host environments.

Theme 3: Training to “Be” an Expert

From courses and field placement there is an obvious question as to why MSW programs

do not more overtly teach forensic interviewing, report writing, and testimonial strategies that

most social workers will need, whether voluntarily or not, at some time in his or her career (see

Allnut & Chaplow, 2000, for a medico-legal example). This type of specialized training

implicates the mandated transfer of social work knowledge within virtually all host

environments. If it is assumed that courts have unique institutional wants, needs, traditions, and

93

rules, such basic knowledge is a valid predicate to the ethical and evidence-informed delivery of

skills by LICSWs as experts. Janet suggested such a connection when she was asked whether her

writing and teaching were an important aspect of her forensic work:

Yes, it has, and it’s given—what jumps to my mind, the part I wanna respond to, is it’s

also in the act of teaching, in the act of training, in the act of engaging, or writing, or

preparing, even testimony. It gives me a chance to reflect on the work that I’ve been

doing, and also to try to conceptualize it.

And the mistakes, and the positive stuff.

Right, and also to reflect on what I might’ve been able to do differently and what I have

learned or could learn—or should learn—from that experience. Yeah, but it isn’t always

—I think social workers, I know what your point of view is on this, I think many people

in society, and I would say in this whole realm of forensic social work, don’t really

understand the scope of social work profession….

In a similar way, Jackie was conscious of the knowledge gaps from education to court

and that “I would hope that it’s included in social work programs now. I don’t remember any

exposure to legal systems and information. I certainly think, as we’ve been talking about a

course about just that, what knowledge base areas social workers could potentially be called on

to be expert witnesses, how that works, what the limits and boundaries are, what the pitfalls are,

what the liabilities are, and how to continue your education then, if you’re interested in that area,

to be able to be wise enough to do that eventually.” Dwayne remembered that in his MSW

program there was “Not a word, not a word, not even a—there wasn’t an inference even. No, it

was a brand new area. The court was a brand new area.”

94

Dwayne then went on to describe that blind experience of his “first court experience,

which was about 400 years ago. I was naïve. I was like, “Okay, they want me to come to court,’

never been to court….I walked in as the—well, I didn't know what the rules were, who was

gonna do what, how's it work? Neither of the attorneys talked to me about the approach, or what

was gonna happen, absolutely no preparation.” From that experience, he made a decision

common to those who feel as he did to either never go to court again or, as Dwayne said: “It was

a very difficult experience, personally, emotionally, and I walked out of there saying, “I’m gonna

either get—I've got two choices here, only two. I’ve gotta get really good at this, or not do this at

all.” When Paul was asked about his experience, he noted in a similar manner the absence of

even the most practical aspects of knowledge about the courts, such as how to even get paid:

We didn’t really get any training on the legal system, and how it works. I think the core

training tries to do that, but it’s so overwhelming. There’s so much that some kind of

mentorship would be a lot more effective. I mean just we all have a different form on

how to get paid. We all do different things. Do you file a motion to enforce? Do you file

a motion for contempt? Do you go through small claims court? If you actually put the

dollar amount in the order you can skip a step. Whereas if it just says, “Fifty percent is

owed by a defendant, and fifty percent is owed by the plaintiff,” you have to go get a

different order. Things like that that I’ve learned that I wouldn’t have a clue as a social

worker how to do those sorts of things.

With regard to a similar question concerning the adequacy of her training to be an expert,

Diana responded:

Not much. I will say, though, people have asked me before, “Do you feel like you were

adequately prepared for this job?” My response is, “Social work is such a broad field that

95

I am happy with the foundation that I got that made it, that sort of emphasized the need to

learn everything I could learn about whatever kinds of cases were there when I landed.

You know what I'm saying?”

The short answer to your question is no. I don't remember ever having any kinds

of training with respect to what does it mean to be an expert witness and what are the

ethics involved, what are strategies. No, I didn't get any training. I ended up reading

about it and getting some clinical supervision once I found that I was going to be doing

that….What you're asking is should this issue of expert testimony be taught more

directly? I think so, yes, but I also think that I learned in the MSW program that all that

stuff about being humble and being true to the role, any given role in any given time.

That was very good training and so that I think that seeking out a book and figuring out

that little piece was—yes, I did it—yes, it was somewhat random, but it also was an

outgrowth of what I understood is good social work.

Abigail offered a fair response to this knowledge gap, and shared Diana’s reference to

humility or humbleness, by suggesting that, “I think that you can’t really train someone to be an

expert. That’s a confidence that comes with experience. The idea that someone is an expert is

problematic, in and of itself. I think humility is really important.” When asked if this means

knowing what you can testify to, and what you cannot, she added “Yes, and just to understand

one’s own belief system, and what theories they ascribe to, and not going outside of your area of

expertise, or competence. That’s pretty important.” From her expertise in criminal proceedings,

Abigail described what she would want MSW students to know about her work:

If we took a bunch of master’s and social work students, who subsequently get their

licenses, and we put them in a program, as you look back on it, what do you think the

96

trainings really need to get across to be effective and ethical, within social work ethics,

about doing the job that you do? What do these folks need to know?

They need to understand the goal and the ethics of the criminal justice system, and the

social work profession. They need to know how to really take care of themselves, and

have gone through their own process, whatever that is, so that they’re really clear, and

they have healthy boundaries, and that… and to understand the difference between a

forensic client, and a therapy client. What are the—and that you—we’re not in the

business of saving people. We’re in the business of doing our best, most professional job,

to be a mitigation expert, or a social life historian, or whatever it is. It doesn’t really help

to come at it with an agenda, or an, “I have to save this person, or we’re all going to die,”

with a crisis mentality.

You must really stay grounded, and present, and level-headed. Practice some

compassionate indifference because it’s really not. There’s multiple—there’s a lot of

reasons why we all wind up here, and working on this together. Students don’t always

realize that, especially when they’re new social workers.

In response to a question about her experience testifying and what she would offer as

training, Emily offered this important and insightful commentary:

The fact that you didn’t try to blow up an answer just to sound like you’re so smart I

think is actually lends to your credibility; that, therefore, what you did say must have

some truth to it, some bearing. That’s important too as a juror—I mean as testifying. I’ve

seen people get up; in fact, a friend of mine testifies as an expert, but she gets real

adversarial up there….It’s like I view my role, and this is what I would—if we were

teaching this class, I would say, “Your role is to educate the people in that room to

97

understand what you know, so that they can use that knowledge to come to a good

decision, a just decision.” You’re not at war with anybody. You’re not up there to wield

the sword and the right or wrong; it’s up to the jury to make that decision, so you have to

understand your role as an expert. It’s not to sway the jury one way or the other; it’s

simply just to give them the information and let them put the pieces together.

Janet positioned the role of becoming an expert and the availability of observation and

mentoring as critical to social work training but with a recognition, similar to Emily, that the

expert social worker needs to consider the burden of the role. As she said, “I was fortunate to be

able to sit in with a seasoned colleague, my clinical director, who had done hundreds of these

things, and also to get some training and mentoring from her. One of the things she told me,

because I felt—erroneously, my first few of these things—I felt an enormous sense of

responsibility, because I felt this person’s life was in my hands, right? Because they might be

deported where they had a high prospect of being tortured, again, and/or assassinated.”

In a different but related way, Sandy bluntly described what being an expert ought to

mean: “Yeah, and well it makes a difference when you know, when you get into their business,

that you’re gonna actually leave them better off than when they started hopefully.” Erin shared

the limitation of wanting the best outcomes but knowing that this was less likely to be so in the

real world of social work, “I was a practicum supervisor, so I’d have a student. I would talk

about this stuff. They weren’t getting any kind of training with that. There, again, idealistic, trust

the system. They come outta graduate school—I came outta graduate school just trusting the

system. It’s the school of hard knocks, I guess.” In response to a similar set of questions, Zeta

responded by noting that social work is “like any other profession” and that “skill level’s all over

the board.…There’s some training available but very little for social workers on how to handle

98

defense attorneys and how you can frustrate the hell out of ‘em just by being sweet and so nice.

You just want to help them, and the tricks of the trade. There’s some training out there, but it’s

not a lot. You may go, but you don’t really get to practice.”

When there is no training or, potentially even worse, the training is based upon biases or

myths about different disciplines, there is the risk that critical knowledge will be subsumed by

assumptions about the other discipline (lawyer as zealous advocate uninterested in a child’s

safety versus purity of the social worker acting as objective fact carrier). At a minimum, and

from the experience of the researcher, the challenge for MSW programs is not merely teaching

courses and field placement relevant to court environments but the ethical challenge of being that

expert in a host environment in which lawyers and social workers together hold privileged

licenses to label others as well transfer the authority to make a judgment to courts.

Theme 4: Clinical Licensure as the Final Stage

By itself, of course, obtaining an MSW confers a degree is of some significance but with

legal and ethical limitations. In many states, a graduate may take a lower-tier licensing

examination and not complete clinical supervision. The LICSW is conferred by the passage of a

licensure test and completion of the requisite number of clinical hours under supervision (usually

3000 hours). The distinction is that only the LICSW may engage in clinical practice, provide a

diagnosis, or obtain billing reimbursement from insurance companies or the government. This

distinction is critically important, because, when violated, a social worker can suffer ethical

sanctions by state licensing boards.

A threshold question, of course, is whether the participants perceived that this licensure

status affected their experience when acting as an expert. Paul believed that clinical license did

facilitate his work but with important reservations about the scope of its use in court:

99

I think the clinical license helps me ask particular questions. I think sometimes I am

asked to be appointed as a guardian because of my license. Well not, again, not because

of my license, but because I’m a mental health provider. Some attorneys are looking for a

mental health provider as a guardian rather than an attorney. I just think it helps me ask,

look at families in certain ways and ask questions that I wouldn’t have otherwise. This is

a little bit off the point, but it also in parent coordination cases I can actually charge

insurance, which saves people a lot of money. I’m a little of two minds about that, but it

does help families if they can pay a $20.00 copay rather than a hundred bucks.

What about the piece of the licensure that allows you to diagnose? Have you used that in

your role as a guardian ad litem, or is that something you, for lack of a better metaphor,

put in a box when you’re wearing that hat?

I put it in a box. I am not a big diagnostician anyway. I, the book is over there on my

desk, and I use it occasionally, but I feel if someone has a major mental illness I’m going

to send them, and they come to my office as a therapist I’m going to send them to a

psychiatrist for a diagnosis. There are sort of a basic five of depression, and anxiety, and

panic, and PTSD that I will diagnose myself, but beyond that I don’t. I think it helps me

read a psychologist report better. I think it makes me less likely to ask for psychological

evaluations. Partly because I learned early on when I did ask for a psych eval, and I was

not a therapist then. I was a guardian six years before I started my private practice as a

therapist. I’d rather point to behaviors in a report or on the stand, and let the judge decide

what those behaviors mean rather than have a psych evaluation that is a pretty blunt

instrument in my experience. It doesn’t really diagnose very accurately.

100

For Tammy, “the LCSW was probably helpful in that you get more respect, and people

think you know what you’re talking about more….Yeah, it just sorta comes with it. I mean, you

do know a little more, cuz you studied and you got licensed, so yeah, that’s helpful, definitely.”

Cam agreed that the power of licensure was a core part of his role as an expert:

Yeah, it was more global, just more global. Also, I just found it really fascinating. I mean

it’s just totally fascinating. Plus, it was—Dana it was like—I think you’d be able to

appreciate this, it was just like, “Wow, I’m gonna get paid and carte blanche to

investigate this person’s life and figure out why they did something so horrible?” I not

only get to interview him as much as I want to, as often as—but all his family members,

all his grandparents, his parents, his parents’ siblings, his grandparents’ siblings, his

cousins, his neighbors, his—I go, “Wow, they’re a fascinating project.”

The building of a puzzle into a real shape was what intrigued you?

Yeah, that’s what intrigued me.

Diana then added her connection to licensure, in that, “good, solid MSW training is

critical” it is important to recognize that “you’re being asked to be an expert on this narrow piece

of the case. You’d better do it the best you can do. You better stick to that because people are

gonna give you more deference than they should. You best only stay where you’re supposed to

be and do the best you possibly can do in that little arena.” In a similar way, licensure is privilege

and privilege is power or, as Debbie insightfully, respect-by-licensure influences the the role:

Do you think that your stature with your license, that expertise, is important to being able

to carry on these conversations with people? That is, how they perceive you

professionally?

Absolutely.

101

Apart from the training and expertise you get, but that the licensure matters?

It does, but it’s interesting, cuz a lot of 'em, once they learn to respect me, then wanna

start calling me doctor. You’ve gotta be a psychologist to do this, not a licensed clinical

social worker [laughter].

Conversely, Dwayne was asked a similar question about whether the licensure helped

inform the skills he needed to do his GAL work, to which he replied “No, they had nothing to do

with it really.” In particular, only the MSW was needed because, as he saw his role, “Its taking

sides, potentially involved in a legal decision. It’s not just—it’s being too specific. It’s not

working in a global way, or a political way, or family action way. It’s completely different.”

Indeed, Maggie referenced the authority and limits of her licensure status as knowing “that

window of time a client can present really really well, or they can present really really bad. I

didn’t feel a one hour visit was appropriate to determine the loss of constitutional rights for that

individual.” Diana responded to a similar question concerning whether she thought that she had

any “extra standing in the court” as a result of being a clinical social worker as against a

caseworker who might have a degree in English, to which she responded:

I was at first surprised by the deference that was afforded to me. I kept looking behind me

to see if—but I took that as a challenge to be as clear and to use my understanding, my

little piece of the puzzle, to do that the best as I could possibly do and not to sort of bleed

out of that into folk wisdom. With respect to the court, I think that the clinicians had a lot

of power, yeah, I do.

Yet Dwayne shared a common experience because the “supervisors I had in internships

and in licensing process, they themselves knew nothing about the court system. They themselves

had never testified or anything.” Although Jackie never had any legal role as a social worker in

102

hospitals, her first experience was when she was called in for a deposition (a process of testifying

under oath outside the courtroom) concerning her observations about a woman with dementia

and the probate of a will. This was her first exposure to attorneys. She described knowledge gaps

too common for many LICSWs until that very last moment of a legal event:

I was so guarded about what can I say and not say? Certainly I can say this—I didn’t

think about this. Certainly then in the beginning of having any contact with the legal

system, certainly went back to our….Board of Social Work Examiners and their materials

and their—the rules and—the policies and procedures of our—with our license of what

do you do about a subpoena when—and all that. When can you speak? What—how much

permission do you have to get?

As described in the next section, these experiences may translate to a deeper mission for

graduate schools and trainings concern the integration of expert opinion and research with the

specific demands of a host environment. It is reasonable to accept that self-achievement is to be

applauded but that is too dependent upon a learning curve which is self-directed and may cause

harm while skills are acquired. Moreover, there is no assurance that anyone but the expert will

know the difference at all between self-knowledge and evidence-informed knowledge and that is

a problem for professional values and ethics.

Theme 5: Evidence-Informed Research

To explore the utilization of research in courts, the interview guide provided for inquiry

into use of the DSM as the most common example of canon across professional disciplines and

organizational systems for purposes of expert labeling and diagnosis. Indeed, the absence of an

explicit DSM diagnosis may prevent the admissibility of expert evidence, as the legal system has

itself accepted the notion that the DSM is grounded upon rigorous science. This is not the place

103

for this debate (see Littell & Lacasse, 2012, for such a discussion). What matters is that an

LICSW has the legal authority to render an expert opinion and the ethical duty to properly utilize

evidence-informed practice when being an expert in court. Kate responded to a question about

the power of diagnosis from her experience:

When I went—especially, this was extremely evident—when I went into my second year

practicum and, upon entering, The Bipolar Child book was just coming out. That was the

diagnoses. They literally copied the first two chapters and told us to give it to the parents,

and read it, and see if their child fit any of these criteria. I found that to be a

generalization, because of course we can find times that our children will fall into any of

these categories. I found that extremely difficult. Being slightly rebellious myself, I

would seek out any other diagnosis possibility than that one.

Diana rooted her academic and field experiences and its relationship to evidence-

informed practices in response to these leading questions:

What about the terms now used, evidence-based or evidence-informed practice? Did your

MSW program teach you how to go to the literature and connect the dots from the

general to the specific, intentionally?

Intentionally. Well, that's a good word. To some degree. I think probably my research

classes were helpful that way. I did an independent study to publish a paper so in that

respect I sort of learned the process.

How about field placements?

Field placements. There was no formal expectation that I delve into evidence-based

practice, but in field placements I got some pretty good supervision around those….

104

That’s where some of those connections to how you go about looking for research-based

evidence started?

Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s hard to tell what’s my personality and what’s my training, but I’m

pretty conscientious. If I start to do something, I want to do it well. I think the whole

generalist training in social work was a good foundation for somebody like me, who may

need a stepping-off point to learn everything I need to learn to do a particular job well.

This concept of a “stepping off point” fits with other participants’ description of role.

Cam noted that his MSW program had a “huge emphasis both times on research, understanding

research, and being able to do research, both—especially quantitative. I wasn't necessarily drawn

to that during my MSW. I was more interested in that during my PhD, of course, and did all the

different—did a quantitative project.” What was particularly interesting was Cam’s comment

that “the big difference for me was the—the PhD program, which was the philosophy of science,

was really a kicker for me that was—oh is that right—yeah, that was—that just blew mind.”

Janet, herself with a PhD, suggested a similar opinion in the context of analyzing research:

I have woven in the research literature and the clinical literature all the time, but I find

that that’s not always the case, I feel. We weave in—and you weren’t really asking about

this so much, but—weave in evidence-based practice, and we rely a lot on students’

writing papers, and needing to draw on and critique, and become good research

consumers. We realize that not a lot of MSW graduates are going to choose to go on into

a doctoral program, or to be researchers themselves, but we want them to be able to be

strong research consumers.

In the realm of practice, Dwayne was asked whether he integrated evidence-based

literature and how he transferred that knowledge to court:

105

I will pull from some research and some theory based to provide foundation or a template

to compare against. “Here’s this family. Here’s this construct. How far away are we?

How close are we?” The evidence based, as you described, has come to mean many

things. We’ve seen—we being me and somebody else I suppose, what’s touted as the

current evidence based model could likely turn into “Well, we just learned how to

measure it. It’s not that it’s more effective. We hadn’t learned how to measure some other

things.”….I’m real sensitive to being like what’s current doesn’t mean I should go there,

it means let’s see how that pans out. There’s certainly fads and trends and I say what’s

ever the hot disorder, I’m not going there.

Adam shared a similar experience with diversity of opinion in the social science literature. For

example, “the reality is that you can present that [research literature] to a good district attorney,

meaning a conscientious one, and he or she will say, I read the same report, so I know exactly

what you’re citing, and I can cite the other four that say that most people who are molested as

children don’t end up as pedophiles.” Adam was then questioned about these connections:

One of those issues when you look back now—and 20 years is a while, but it’s not a long

time in the history of social work—was a discussion about how to integrate evidence-

informed or evidence-based practices. I’m not using those terms in the philosophical

sense. I’m using them in the sense of what you were talking about—taking critical

knowledge, incorporating it into a paper, being able to express that knowledge in a way

that other people can read and understand.

Now the only thing that’s—in terms of evidence-based, the difference is, is that students

are now required to do evidence-based searches. They’re supposed to go on Cochrane

106

and Campbell, you know, two of those collections. They’re discouraged from doing

Google searches, or Google Chrome, or Google Scholar.

They’re trying to get them to focus in on—the problem for them is that in—as

you know, in many cases, there isn’t an evidence-based practice model for all kinds of

issues. Then they really need to use their intelligence, and say, well, if I don’t have an

evidence-based model, then what theories and practice would fit this case?....

There’s also a debate within the [social work] department about that. The clinical

older school—you know, people in their more 50s, late 40s, 50s, and 60s—are very

troubled by the requirement to look for evidence-based practice, and only use it if it

exists, and not use their thinking skills as to what else might be, or to provide alternatives

to evidence-based. I mean you have to be able to sort of think about it. Some of the more

senior clinical people at…are very concerned that that’s all they’ll ever learn, and then in

cases where there isn’t an evidence-based model, they won’t know what to do.

In a different manner than Adam but with equally important insight, Theodore noted that

his experience with social work was that “it wasn’t all that evidence-based to begin with.

Recently…I was reading a lot of articles from social workers in academia, who talked about

evidence-based practice. I see now that, over the last 10 or 15 years, since I’ve been in private

practice, there’s been more of a movement among social workers towards evidence-based

practice, so that’s good.” Nevertheless, he articulated his concerns with that approach in a way

that requires careful consideration:

I’ve seen the term evidence-based used by people who don’t even know what evidence

would look like if it bit 'em in the face. They’re ideologues who—it’s like Freudian

psychoanalysts who would quote each other and cite each other as evidence. It’s just a

107

circular argument. You’re all wrong, and you keep citing each other, which is what is the

case in domestic violence research with a lot of people. They cite so-and-so who wrote an

opinion piece. That’s not scholarly research. It’s an opinion piece, and you’re citing it

like it’s evidence. They call that evidence-based. It’s not evidence based.

I didn’t even use the term for a long time, because I thought it was an empty

phrase. Now, I’m beginning to think that, now that states are looking at the evidence-

based policies, it’s a jargon that’s used by politicians and policymakers now. If we’re

really gonna focus on evidence-based policies, then let’s get serious about it. I’ve seen it

shift. More people are interested in domestic violence research now than they were

before. The hardcore feminists are a dying breed. They’re still around, and they’re still in

control. Kinda like South Africa, in the last years before apartheid came to an end. I think

it’s just a matter of time before it sort of falls apart.

Theodore then expressed a critical point that should also not be lost, and which, even if

controversial, is supported by a genuine commitment to the ethical use of research:

In all social science fields, there’s a lot of politics. I know that, even in the hard sciences,

you have competition among scientists, even among physicists and chemists in the hard

sciences. You have different schools, and you have people, you have journals that would

try to favor this guy versus that guy. In the field of domestic violence, it’s been so

pathetic. The scholarship in domestic violence is just so, so pathetic. You have journalists

accepting opinion pieces as scholarly research, and then turning down scholarly research

that doesn’t conform to their point of view.

Zeta described her experience in the context of testifying to the competing interests of

children as one of “prophylactic roles, to a certain degree, you have to prove that the people who

108

are gonna be doing your jobs are going to do it with ethical conduct, with boundaries, with

evidence-based research.” Sandy cogently warned that evidence alone requires care in some

specialties, “We know, like with domestic violence, it can’t all be science. There’s a lot of art to

it. Yes, we can look at the books and say okay, this fits here, but there is something that you have

to be able to recognize as a clinician that can’t be taught.”

The practical need to transfer evidence-informed knowledge to courts is important even if

the phrase itself is not articulated. For example, Victoria was asked how she used research to

inform the task of a GAL:

I got to the point where I was done with the investigation piece, I certainly had an idea of

what was going on. At that point, I would start to—I would do a search, a literature

search, either for articles or books and I would read. I would sit and I would read. At that

point then I would pull into my conclusions or recommendations information from the

literature….I felt like just me saying what I thought wasn’t really helpful to the court or

attorneys. It wasn’t really fair to the parties. I had to really—that was really important.

That was always—that took me the longest amount of time. God, the conclusions really,

to pull it all together and to really have the child—it’s from the focus of what was best for

the child was the—the parents so often are kind of wounded people, at least one person is

a wounded person. I absolutely wanted not to focus there, but to focus on the child and

the child’s relationship with the parents.

In Abigail’s role as an expert in criminal matters, evidence-informed practice is an

explicit function of integrating and applying “research to support my themes and narratives about

—when I’m writing a report, especially the risk and protective factors for juveniles.” Although

109

articulated differently, Kate was asked a similar question as it pertained to her practice specialty

and was careful to explain the differences between diagnosis and description:

I don’t diagnose, when I do a custody evaluation. I may talk about traits that people have,

but I don’t believe I’ve ever gone in and said, “This mother is a borderline.” I may say,

“She demonstrates some of these symptoms,” or, “There’s a lot of splitting,” and talk in

that sense, with not only the professionals involved, but with the clients. I think it’s, in

my opinion, more important to focus on the actual behaviors, as opposed to the label. We

get clients that come in here so much and say, “I want 50/50, joint legal custody, joint

physical.” I try to get them away from that, and throw that out, and say, “What does joint

look like to you? What does that mean to you?” I think that they can swallow that better.

When you have a client who you could clearly diagnose as an access two, you don’t

really wanna tell 'em that. You wanna talk about the behaviors that are affecting their

coparenting or their relationship with their kids. I guess I avoid it somewhat.

Yet there is the reality, as Emily expressed, that research is still a judgment call and

accuracy matters because of the power of that expert opinion:

Yeah. I think if it is a close call—well, very rarely do you testify in absolutes just because

people aren’t absolutes. Yet, you’ll see that sometimes in social services where you’ll see

them testify as though it’s an absolute and it’s not. Sometimes, unless the judge has other

experience coming to play, and I see this even with probation officers and dealing with

therapists, because it’s not their field, they assume you know everything. They assume

what you say is accurate.

As Emily further explained in response to the need for critical thinking skills, “just because you

are of a certain profession and you say something, you need to be able to back that up. Are there

110

others who agree with you? Are there others that—is there other evidence to support that

conclusion? I think too often we wanna say, ‘Oh, well they have this label, so therefore they

know,” and they really don’t.’”

Although these varied experiences connect to the transfer of evidence-informed

knowledge to the courts, Janet specifically commented on her perception that courts “aren’t so

used to having a social worker doing the kind of testimony that I’ve done. Some of the judges—

and I have to say, trial attorneys and officers—seem to be very skeptical, or not put much stock

in anything a social worker, or more broadly, a mental health professional, may have to say.”

Sandy’s perspective, however, is an interesting and insightful twist on Janet’s point. As to the

court process, it is “so different from regular clinical stuff, and I’m frequently the third or fourth

therapist because, prior to my assignment, they’ve gone through people—therapists who don’t

know anything about the court system and don’t do justice to the case just because they are not a

—forensically informed. I am what you call forensically informed therapist” [emphasis added].

Cam added that his teaching in an MSW program “helps me, because I encounter articles,

and I do things as a professor that sharpen my critical thinking skills—having to read the entire

syllabus, for example, you know, in order to teach it” and that doing so:

sort of just opened up the—other—different ways of arriving at knowledge that’s

reliable, as opposed to just one way. The methods of collecting that knowledge and

corroborating it, or making it valid, they always—as you know, they use different terms

of it and there’s different qualifications and modifications to all these things. It’s still—

that was just fascinating to me. Not only that, but it helped me understand the value of

knowing a number of other ways of looking at things and the different assumptions that

111

—and how that changes something that you’re looking at. It made me understand more

what I already knew by doing that.

Nevertheless, Cam suggested that forensic use of instruments like the DSM is

unavoidable within current judicial frameworks for evidence because, “in the forensic area,

there’s a little higher demand for scientific basis for things. The qualitative approach is used all

the time, of course, but the more that you can have a foundation of—that’s—and corroborated in

these scientific—well DSM form—the DSM classifications, the better off you are in terms of

having a case, and presenting the case, and being persuasive.” As he added, “I'll make very clear

and explicit the symptoms that I see, and when I saw them, and how it was documented in other

places, and maybe noticed by other people, and how some other interview—people I interviewed

may have mentioned something that also confirms that particular symptom.”

Adam integrates diagnosis in his interviewing and report writing as a tool but not as a

substitute for telling the human-life story. As he described that role:

Part of it, but what I tend to do is I tend to want to tell a story with a lot of intimate details

to humanize the defendant. For me to humanize them, I interview parents and caregivers

extensively. I use multiple developmental and psychiatric inventories that I ask people to

fill out. I dig around for missed pieces in their development, and I dig around

diagnostically for kids that were diagnosed, but never treated.

Diana also seeks to apply the DSM without subsuming the humanizing narrative in court or

permitting the diagnosis to become the narrative:

Yes, and the way I would try to present—to me, the DSM, the diagnosis that I would

come up with, based on the DSM, would provide some parameters, I think, within which

to sort of structure my thinking about a person and about a case. I tried not to use it as a

112

label, but I took pretty seriously the criteria there and kind of let that be my guide about

how I would formulate a case and how I would talk with a client about where they

wanted to go and how the circumstances in which they found themselves had an impact

on the choices they made and their ability to move to where they wanted to move to….

Probably I could talk to you in stories probably more easily than in generalities.

Since most of the kids that I worked with ended up with a diagnosis of PTSD, otherwise

they probably wouldn't have been in foster care or later on working with adults as well.

We would begin with a narrative, I think, about what was going on for that kid, and I

would try to help the child articulate what about their current narrative was troubling to

them. For instance, they were in trouble at school or they couldn't make friends or

whatever….Then I could relate that to the diagnostic criteria. Well, of course, it’s hard to

make friends when you have trouble trusting people. It’s hard for you trust people when

you’ve been betrayed as you have been or something like that. That would be how I

would relate the diagnosis to the problem identification. The child and I would figure out

where to go with that. Is this something that—is trust something that you would like to be

able to do more or is it too scary for you to trust? In which case, what else can we—

where else do you want to go to make your life easier or better?

Victoria warned, based upon her experience, that the traits which may make a good

diagnostician in one environment may not be effective in another:

Honestly, yes, because when I became a therapist I found one of the mistakes I was

making was you get pretty good at—you have to kind of quickly, as a therapist, come at

least to a working hypothesis to diagnosis so that you can accurately treat the person.

113

What I found was I was kind of in my head saying, “Well, of course this is the case,” or,

“Of course that’s the case.”

I worked for a number of years as a crisis clinician, so I diagnose fast in the

emergency room. That was sort of a detriment actually, because I needed to go and talk to

—instead of my saying, well of course—I got shut down in one of my last cases on that

and they were right. “Did you talk to so-and-so’s doctor?” Well no, I didn’t because I’m

thinking I know what’s going on here. It was wrong, because I needed to have talked to

so-and-so’s doctor. That line blurred for me toward the end.

Erin’s experiences concerning differences in clinical care and forensic roles can arise

when clinical diagnosis is misused as a label in court:

I think clinicians mean well. They don’t realize that that, first of all, how dangerous that

is, and that, actually, it’s very unethical. They’re just rendering an opinion, based on

ignorance. They don’t understand that you cannot do that. I didn’t understand that ‘til I

started working in this field. Now, I really understand it, and I understand how, again,

how dangerous clinicians can—how much damage they can do. I don’t think they do it,

or they do it with good intention. They just don’t understand it. They’ve not been trained.

They’ve not been educated.

Even in the midst of all the discussion of the DSM as one form of expert knowledge,

there is still no substitute for intuition and insight. Not all of human behavior can be connected to

an approved-intervention or judicial judgment based upon an empirical assumption of truth. As a

means to understand, Kimberly wanted to tell the researcher “something before I forget to tell

you. It’s anecdotal but I think you might like it. It’s one of my favorite little memories” and so it

114

is shared at length here for the reader who may reflect on a similar experience with the art and

evidence of the social work profession:

One of the GAL cases that I did involved a very young child. She was about two years

old, and she had been, both of her parents were addicts had an addiction history, and she

had been living with the maternal grandparents and the paternal grandmother wanted

custody. That’s how it wound up in court. Excuse me…I wound up talking to everybody

involved both the grandparents and family members. Then I met the little girl and when

you’re dealing with a two year old you know? What I did was talk to her about her two

grandma’s houses and we drew a picture.

I asked her to what to put in the house with the grandma. One grandma there was

a dog and her sister was there, so we put the two things, you know put the little. This is

this grandma’s house and this is this grandma’s house the one with….Then I said to her,

“Two grandmas which one do you want to stay with while mommy gets better” ‘cuz

mommy’s gone to the hospital. She took that little tiny finger and she showed me what

grandma she wanted to be with.

Again, not just based on that but, weighing that as I tend to do I wrote the report

and as I was sitting there going through finalizing the report the phone rang and it was the

daughter of the paternal grandmother saying, “Please don’t give my mother custody. It’s

taken me all this time to pick up the phone and tell you this, but please don’t let my

mother have her.”…It confirmed what the child had shown me that it was the other

grandmother. I was so grateful to have, you know, I was gonna do it anyway, but she just

lifted it off me.

115

Each phase, each and every time, of being an expert invokes the specialized knowledge,

the transfer of knowledge, and the ethics of difference and diversity. As expressed through these

experiences, even when the opinion is not science, in the strictest sense of that word, the art of

being an expert is still grounded in a humanizing narrative which may effectively and ethically

serve the client and the court.

Summary

What appears from the experiences in this domain has two primary flavors. First,

education and training, including field placement was, for lack of a better term, adequate. The

MSW did what the degree was expected to do, which was open the door to the benefits of the

profession. Second, and true of most professional disciplines, there is both art and science, and

some balance between the two must be learned in the life-of-a-social-worker in court. Drawing a

picture of a family may not be good science but it may, if used to fill a story and not label

another, frame the knowledge for an open-mind possessing critical thinking and observation

skills. The puzzle is how to provide those skills so the “hard knocks” does not become opinion-

by-privilege and that is the challenge for the profession as expressed in these themes.

Although no one need agree that social work possesses the limitations expressed by the

participants’ experiences, politics is indeed a part of science, and the politics of science are

certainly a part of all adjudicatory systems. What this mean to the profession of social work, is

that understanding the depth of these connections are a necessary part of the education and

training of students who aspire to be LICSWs, who profess a desire to act with power, and then

to be an expert in court. Those connections do not operate in isolation from the consequences of

actually being that expert. What emerged from these experiences was a vague sense that the

identification of the role, and the perception of the LICSW of that role, reflected the nature of the

116

experience. These consequences emerged as well in the context of the Second Domain.

Specifically, poverty became part of that domain because, as maybe shown to the reader, the

perception of the social worker and the role often hinged on that factor more than others.

Second Domain: Power, Ethics, Self-Care, and Poverty

Theme 1: Experience of Power and Authority

The intersection between teaching a student to become an expert and that same student

understanding the trips and traps of actually doing so implicates the values, competencies, and

ethical duties of the social work profession. Of critical consequence, values and ethics should

translate into intentional inhibiting agents for the use of power and authority, as well as and a

means for self-protection. Without adequate knowledge across domains, values and ethics are

more likely compromised and, most troubling, the vulnerable are harmed without any recourse.

A vanilla and all too regular error which occurs when a clinician writes a letter to a court

concerning a parent the clinician never met, was expressed by Erin:

That happens all the time. I think that that is just, again, a lack of education. I think

clinicians mean well. They don’t realize that that, first of all, how dangerous that is, and

that, actually, it’s very unethical. They’re just rendering an opinion, based on ignorance.

They don’t understand that you cannot do that. I didn’t understand that, ‘til I started

working in this field. Now, I really understand it, and I understand how, again, how

dangerous clinicians can—how much damage they can do. I don’t think they do it, or

they do it with good intention. They just don’t understand it. They’ve not been trained.

They’ve not been educated.

117

In host environments of rapidly tumbling and adaptive events, the potential that duty and

authority may thereby generate the feeling of power without understanding the meaning of

power, was described by Laura, as follows:

Its like, “Yeah, I put ‘em in a hospital.” It’s like, no. I think that’s, it’s kind of a

revelation. It’s something I’ve learned over time. I think it all stems back from that time

way back when, when I was doing my placement, my internship at child family

placement, whatever, the center. I couldn’t make this little girl do what I wanted her to

do. I was like, really? I know best. Aren’t I smarter? The answer to that is no. Even

though she wasn’t an adult, but she certainly, she made her decision [emphasis added].

For Jackie, these insights became a part of her quest to be an expert because “I’ve chosen social

work type positions where I could be an expert because I don’t like generic stuff. I think that

having a certain knowledge base, like I was the spinal cord expert. I knew more about that than

anything you could imagine. So like that was an expert thing. Then I was cardiac rehab and

whatever, so that was another—the whole rehabilitation thing with physical disabilities. I felt

really powerful [emphasis added].”

In an interesting revelation that others shared, the raw nature of exercising power was

translated by Paul as roughly falling within a boundary between rapport and manipulation:

Well as social workers we get taught or we believe before we get taught that establishing

rapport with people is you know name it, 60, 70, 90 percent of our work. I still believe

that. I think, some people respond better to authority, and some people respond better to

collaboration. I come at it starting out that we’re collaborating. We gotta get something

done here. I have gotten myself in trouble that way by being too friendly and too familiar

in the beginning, and they assume I’m on their side. Then they’re more devastated when

118

I’m not, so I’ve had to learn to back up a little bit. I could never control a classroom cuz

I’m just not that kind of disciplinarian and not built that way.

I have had to learn that that rapport building that works as a therapist, that works

in my life, whether it’s the grocery store or wherever it is, doesn’t, isn’t always

appropriate. I’m not to say that I crossed ethical boundaries or invited them over for tea

or anything, but my way is being friendly. It’s also a good way to get information. People

let their guard down. I don’t like operating that way, but that’s part of what I’m there for.

I continue to have to learn that, so I think yes the rapport building is both a strength and

a, the rapport building that is intrinsic to being a social worker is both a strength and a

liability in this work.

Zeta’s strategy, and her recognition of the splitting of the role between duty and ethics, was

similar when needing information to protect a child:

It’s amazing what that, or just simply tell me, I’m gonna listen without, I’m just listening.

I’m not the expert. I’m the stupid one in this room cuz I don’t know. I don’t know what’s

happened to you, but I would like to listen quietly to what you have to say. It’s

unbelievable of children what that does cuz for a lot of the kids that I’ve talked with, I’m

probably the first grown up that has said, in so many words, “I want to listen to what you

have to say.” I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t want you to think one way or the

other. I just want to know what you know. They’re like, “Whoa, this is really cool.” Of

course, that's also an ethical issue. It’s fraught with, but its like, “Okay, I’m just being

nice.” I want to know what they know, so how do I get there? How do I do that in a way

that I can live with?”

119

Dwayne, however, summarized his opinion as a differential of dominance in this context:

“Social workers—I have colleagues—my criteria—I’m the toughest critic of my own work and

my own profession of—my criteria’s would I send my children to them? It's a really short list.

There’s people that I’ve encountered, empathy? You’ve gotta be kidding me. We roll into

somebody’s house and are obviously in the dominant position. They’re in an aggressive position.

Then they act dominant and aggressive.” In a similar way, the narrative for Emily is about three

boys who had been physically abused by mom’s boyfriend, were removed for her failure to

protect, but were connected to a foster mother who had run afoul of her social worker:

The social worker got mad at the foster mother, so she removed the kids and put them

into another home on the complete opposite end. These were little Caucasian kids with a

Caucasian foster mother; were now placed in a Hispanic home with a father who still had

a very thick accent. I guess when my cohort would go, he’d say, “You take this one; he

bad. We keep those.” ….I don’t know if it was a family member or what….

It was just horrific to me to see how—and these kids had been—this was now

their third placement. This was a two-year-old, four-year-old and five-year-old. At one

point—she would tell some of the stories of the kids; like at one point, she was leaving

the home, and the two-year-old waves to her and says, “Bye, bitch.” I’m like, “Oh my

God, where’d this kid hear that? I mean he’s been in the foster care since he was an

infant, when he came in.” The four-year-old sitting up on the merry-go-round made a

comment; he saw a police officer drive by and said, “If I see one of them again, I’m

gonna shank him.” I’m like where does a four-year-old get this?

As was suggested by the participants in prior sections, critical writing and reporting skills

are a peculiar and critical form of authority and power. Sandy suggested that, “I learned that

120

from one of my mentors that said it—you don’t slap ‘em in the face with the report. You like ‘em

look at it.” Dwayne likewise believes that writing is a unique form of power which may help

engage constructive change but which also implicates honest disclosure rather than hiding behind

the report and waiting for a reaction (and he is quite right as a practice pointer):

Well, before I submit the report, I go over it with the adults. I want them to know from

me what my recommendations are, not get a surprise. Surprises, we don’t like surprises,

especially when it’s something I think they’re not gonna like. I’d rather them hear it and

I'll tell ‘em. Then tell ‘em they don't have to agree, but this is my best shot. Your question

of what goes after; I don’t know if I could say that I think there’s a strong trend or

weighted area. It’s factored in sometimes then mediation—this gets factored into

mediation and that’s kind of where it goes….There’ll be some agreement or acceptance

and it might be—then we might track this for, “Well, here’s my recommendation,” or it

might be, “Okay, let’s—over the next six months, I’ll stay in—on board. We’ll see how

this goes and we don’t need to go back to court.” Some, of course, abjectly disagree and

are quite aggressive about what my opinion is and then we’ll be back in court.

As Erin concluded, her approach reflects her position that “Yeah, I don’t wanna go to

trial. It scares me [laughter].” Erin addressed the same connection as Dwayne from her

perspective and experience, with an emphasis as well on the manner the message is delivered:

What makes it [a report] more successful? I don't know. I honestly don’t know. I just

finished up one, where the dad had a serious substance abuse problem, only really

minimized it throughout the whole evaluation and lied and all this stuff. At the

settlement conference, it was funny. I just laid it—I do it in a nice way, but I just laid it

out there. Afterwards—and they settled. Dad was in shock. He couldn’t believe what I

121

was saying, but he had a good attorney who said, “This is not gonna look good for you if

you take this to trial.”

This sense that the duty of an expert is to afford families the chance to reach their own

solution is consistent with social works ethical obligation to encourage personal autonomy and

respect self-determination. Kate expressed this point as the opportunity for families “to still

control their lives” because “I think it’s best that they still have control. They are truly our

experts on these children, even if they have blinders on. That’s my hope, is that they can settle

their end, hear what I have to say.” Laura was similarly asked whether, “in your work, have you

reflected on what it means to exercise that kind of power and authority over people”:

Not so much, because my feeling is that, when I make a report to the court, I’m reporting

what my thoughts are. Ultimately, it’s not my decision whether or not this person goes

under guardianship, whether there is a guardian appointed. It’s up to the judge. He’s the

one who makes the decision. Yes, my report, I know, does influence him, and provides

him with invaluable information, but there have been circumstances where maybe I’m

not the only one testifying, particularly where it’s not clear-cut whether or not, say, an

elderly person needs a guardian. You maybe have other people in the community, other

family members, who are also testifying before the judge. I don’t feel like I’m wielding

any kind of a power [emphasis added].There’s no, I don’t have any sense of that at all.

Paul specifically recognized one aspect of being an expert which is too rarely discussed

openly across domains and that is the possibility of influencing events while observing and

reporting on those events:

But most social work trainings are about intervening and doing therapy. How to work

with couples? How to work with the angry client? Now those probably are helpful, but

122

most of them are about intervening whereas being a guardian is mostly about an

investigation. I can’t remember. There’s a wonderful long word, but when you put a

thermometer in a cup of coffee it actually changes the temperature. I can’t remember

what that’s called. It’s the same thing. When we go in as guardians and investigate a

family, we change that family by our investigation. Even if we have no intention of

intervening we still do.

Do you see that as a powerful role?

I do. It’s scary in a way, but I have, we have good intentions, so I have to believe that it’s

not ultimately harmful.

Although these experiences reveal different experiences and meanings for the

participants, the perception and knowledge of power and authority is as important as the reality

that the LICSW struggles to balance, until the opening bell of trial, the ethical duty to encourage

and extract, as much as possible within the bounds of safety and the law, the publics’ right to

autonomy and self-determination. Nevertheless, these experiences do reveal that more dialogue

is needed to assure that those who enter courts maintain a conscious (and conscientious)

understanding of the consequences to themselves and others.

Theme 2: Values and Ethics in the Host.

Many of the participants practice their craft for the courts in realms where the client is

usually despised by society (sex offenders, accused criminals, convicted murderers, violent

abusers) or where the client is a victim but part of a vulnerable population (immigrants, elderly,

children). Each of these personal stories shares an intersection with the personal and the

professional and, again at the risk of redundancy, these narratives should be shared with students

in classrooms and practitioners in trainings.

123

Without generalizing to MSW programs today, Dwayne, who received his degree years

ago summarized his experience in this colloquy:

I asked this generally, but right up until you started doing that kind of work, from your

schooling to your licensure, had there been any discussion about how the Code of Ethics

for social workers intersects with the court system? What forensic work ethics were like?

Of course not. In my MSW program, there was no ever mention of a Code of Ethics.

At all?

Not once. I graduated, and got working, and then, “Oh, what's this? Code of Ethics, oh,

okay.”

Victoria suggested that the conversation about roles must begin at the MSW level,

because she was unprepared for the complexity of dual relationships in various environments, for

example, which is common to the forensic role as described in this section later:

I think it is important. When you're in school, so much of this seems abstract. You're

learning about a Code of Ethics and you read it and you say, ‘Well, of course, of course

that would be the case.’ I particularly ran up against it in terms of the dual relationship,

which I had not—I wish I had more information about what comprised a dual relationship

and why that was important. I think when you're in school you don't really understand

how things can impact you, until you get out there and you're working.

Besides the hope that these experiences were and are a rare exception today, it is important not to

take the possibility of glossing over ethics in school or trainings for granted even now. The

ethical and value challenges which arise in the daily practice of social work were described by

Zeta as “really disturbing” when sensitively looking back at the complex relationship between

her personal values and professional ethics:

124

I have whatever my standards are and my values, and I live by those. I have to be able to

step back from that. When I look at someone else’s family, imposing my values and my

standards on them is very unfair. Now, my value that violence should not be in the home,

there’s no exception there on that one. Because you may dress differently, you may have

different ways of doing things, but are you being supportive in the family? Are you gonna

raise your children to be productive in some manner? I don’t mean drug dealing, but be

productive. Then how I raised my children and how I would choose to live doesn’t

matter. I think when you’re young, it’s very hard to be able to step back and understand

that just cuz you do it one way does not mean someone else can’t do it differently….

Oh, I think about it all the time cuz you’re talking about ethics, and that's what

we’re talking about. Ethics are very interesting, and this whole field is fraught with

ethical decisions whether you realize it, whether it’s conscious or not. It doesn’t matter.

It’s fraught with, and I think my basic modus operandi would be just simply to educate so

that whoever’s sitting in front of me could make a better informed decision about what

they want to do with their own life. I think that's the basis, so it would be an eclectic

combination of lots of things.

Indeed, the conflict between personal values and professional ethics when acting as an

expert in a forensic capacity was described by Tammy in this way:

Well, I did a lot of child welfare before I became an LCSW, so I was protected by the

agency a lot, and I knew what my role was. In that forensic setting, the confidentiality is

vitiated quite a bit. My only goal was protecting children, so that’s what I did. I didn’t

have any allegiance to parents, and to a certain extent, I had shut down any feelings about

them, because—

125

Them, being the parents?

The parents, because they’re crying and sobbing, and I have to just not have any feelings

about it. I did have feelings, but I had to try to act like I didn’t or pretend I didn’t.

In response to this random question by the researcher during her interview, Emily

captured another variation on the ethics of power as it pertains to gender-in-practice:

I’ve heard different theories about this, but do you think being a woman helped you get

these men to listen as against being a male, or is it more about establishing rapport and

other things? I mean I really am curious when you think the gender piece in a prison

setting now, cuz that’s kind of a captive audience, took you a little more time or was it

something that really actually helped these guys see something different?

It had—it definitely has some bearing and being an older female definitely helped. There

are things I can do as a female that I did as a probation officer as a female that my male

officers couldn’t do. There’s things I can get away with, if you will. One of the things—

what I do teach female facilitators is you have to de-sex yourself. If they’re thinking

about sex, you’ve gotta do as much as you can in your power to reduce that. Because you

want them to learn, not to think about how they wanna take you out. You have to really

be sensitive to your own sexuality, your own gender issues.

As a female, you can play the mother role. See, for some of them, and that’s what

some of the research said; for some of them, these men have grown up in—you know,

their antisocial behavior is oftentimes are as a result of a negative relationship with their

own mother, so you almost re-parent them. Attachment issues come into play. I saw a lot

of that. Where you start to build a healthy attachment to an authority figure who, if you

happen to be female, that’s even easier. The one thing I didn’t have to deal with was the

126

testosterone fight; they didn’t have to prove they were more man than I was [laughs], so I

don’t have that struggle.

A specific ethical difference and its merger with the effects of power and authority do

confront LICSWs when working with lawyers and courts. Lawyers owe a duty to a client. Social

workers have a dualistic (and dueling) relationship with the client and the community

simultaneously. Abigail summarized her thoughts on that point, as follows:

Ethically, who is more important, an agency or attorney/client privilege, for example?

That sometimes victim family members have a very different agenda then perhaps the

defendant, or the criminal justice system, in a case. I’m speaking here about criminal

cases, but the—just to understand how the dynamics from the legalese, and the

terminology, to the role of each person. Really just try to empathize and understand

where attorneys’ jobs, and where they’re coming from, so that they don’t misinterpret

their people skills, or their agenda, or their attitudes and perspectives, as being—to be

able to work in a complementary manner.

Thus, one portion of this ethical dilemma (among others to a greater or lesser degree) is

the problem of identifying the client as ethical and legal duties flow through an adversarial

proceeding. As Paul noted, the other side of that question is:

Do I come up against the Code of Ethics in my work as a guardian? Yes. Part of that is I

don’t think the question as ever really been answered who is my client when I’m a

guardian. Is the court my client? Is the child my client? I suppose to some degree even

are the parents my client? I mean I think they’re at the bottom of that list, but there have

been lots of discussions among guardians is, “Who is our client?” That definitely calls

127

into question parts of the code of ethics. I have to say I’m not well versed, as well versed

as I should be with the code of ethics, but I know basically what’s it all—….

I may, I mean the very foundation of my mandate as a guardian ad litem is best

interest of the child. I have a lot of scope within that do almost anything that I, if I can

defend it as acting in the best interest of the child. Some of the things that I would do

absolutely feels solid that I was acting in the best interest of the child would be very

contrary to the social work Code of Ethics. I might talk to an attorney about something

else that’s happening because that might help sway a settlement, or it might a change in

behavior somewhere, or something.

Cam articulated an explanation of the intersection of dual roles for him:

I sort of led a double life in a sense. I felt like the men did deserve—and they were

mostly men that I worked with. Men did deserve a modicum of confidentiality, and

respect, and they really did need some clinical skills, as opposed to just being supervised

clinically. I mean, really that's the position we were put in. Most of the other social

workers I met in the field didn’t have any qualms with that. I had some qualms with that.

They didn't see any problem with being a probation officer, social worker.

Well, and that's a good description because that's really what it is, right? I mean you take

what they tell you and you use it against 'em in court.

Right, yeah—or you—yeah, or you violate them if they decide to bring something up.

We made it very clear what was reportable, what wasn't reportable, and how to speak

about things if you didn't want us to report it, and had them sign those things so that they

were aware. Even if they forgot or ended up admitting to another offense, I had to report

it, and I did.

128

There is another side to living this experience of dual roles, confidentiality, and duty to a

system of surveillance like the courts. Adam expanded on this point between trust and rapport in

his role as an expert: “what clients tend to do with me is they tend to underreport and not tell me

everything. For me it’s not so much they’re gonna tell me more than I can handle, or something

that they wouldn’t want in the report, it’s that they intentionally delete very important

information.” Sandy, however, recognized that one flaw when communicating with a client as an

expert in court was that the client’s strengths and limitations may well evaporate in the

compression of the court itself even if the client intends to be cooperative:

Truly I think that the—the thing that I brought away from the MSW program was meet

them where they’re at. Sometimes in court, they’re down here and all the court

proceedings are up here and they’re just not grasping, and the professionals are not

grasping that they’re not grasping. I feel like a parent a lot of the time. The balance

between you ever do this again and there’s gonna be problems, and by the way I

understand why you feel that way, but you know….

Judges and juries act as filters for a matrix of facts iteratively filtered through human

memory and cognition and then filtered again by the skill of the lawyers and experts whose job it

is to clarify, explain, or, within certain ethical boundaries, distort or advocate. The ability to find

a particular truth, or at least a structure for assessing truth, is sometimes a function of reporting

what was heard or seen without interpretation; but that is not so easy for the expert. As Victoria

responded reasoned, “You know, if somebody told me something like they were sexually

assaulted, you know, I couldn't one way or another prove or disprove, so I just put it in there. I

put it in there and I said, ‘Let the system do with it what it wants, but it’s there.” Zeta expanded

on this point: “It is a struggle. It’s a huge struggle. I interview delayed adults, and I interview

129

adults with dementia if they’re not too far gone, and there’s some way to build a support

structure so that they can report to me what has happened or allegedly happened.” Zeta then

responded to this question, as follows:

Ultimately, the role you’re playing is supposed to be to get this neutral voice to be heard

that are actual facts. You said it earlier in a really interesting way. Your job is to get at

the facts not to be the truth detector.

Correct. That's my job. My job, I’m strictly a fact finder, and that's my role in the

criminal investigative process. I’m a fact finder.

Theodore expressed his concern with role confusion in forensic social work in that, “we

are working with court-ordered cases. Our ethical commitments are compromised, to some

extent.” Because judges have a duty to adhere to legal authority as a means to enter a judgment,

these kinds of dilemmas for LICSWs arise frequently. Adam described his experience as an

expert within this dualisitc tension:

Those are the kind of things where I can, in good faith, in good conscious—I mean the

issue for me in terms of ethics is I’m not gonna write something that’s not true, so unlike

an attorney who is not necessarily constrained, or may not even—you know, can say to

themselves, I don’t need to know X, Y, and Z.

For me, obviously, that’s not the case. When I’m asked in court, which I often am,

you’re a defense witness, do you ever—you know, they grill you on that. They do that. If

given the opportunity, some judges will allow me to respond. Some think it’s just

perfunctory bullshit, so they don’t care anyway.

I was in a case in […] where the judge actually let me respond, where I said, you

know, the NASW Code of Ethics doesn’t actually allow me to lie to you, or to create a

130

story that isn’t real, or that isn’t in the service of the client. I’m not a hired gun in that

sense, in that I would never show up in court and lie.

In an extension of the points made by Adam and Zeta, Emily summarized the connection

between the duty of the social worker and the role of expert this way:

The fact that you didn’t try to blow up an answer just to sound like you’re so smart I

think is actually lends to your credibility; that, therefore, what you did say must have

some truth to it, some bearing. That’s important too as a juror—I mean as testifying. I’ve

seen people get up; in fact, a friend of mine testifies as an expert, but she gets real

adversarial up there.

It’s like I view my role, and this is what I would—if we were teaching this class, I

would say, “Your role is to educate the people in that room to understand what you know,

so that they can use that knowledge to come to a good decision, a just decision.” You’re

not at war with anybody. You’re not up there to wield the sword and the right or wrong;

it’s up to the jury to make that decision, so you have to understand your role as an expert.

It’s not to sway the jury one way or the other; it’s simply just to give them the

information and let them put the pieces together.

What all these experiences share, implicitly or explicitly, is the struggle between

authority derived from the power of the role and the potential hazard to the social worker when

trying to serve too many masters and still maintain empathy and respect for autonomy. Paul

described this tension for him in this fashion:

When I give my speech that “You may hate me by the end of this. You may really

disagree with me. I really want you to remember that anything I do, anything I do is in

the service of what I believe is in the best of your kids. It’s not about you.” They don’t

131

seem to remember that part very well. I’m also aware of recording devices at this point

when I’m interviewing people. It becomes a very much scarier world to me that

someone’s got a recorder in their pocket.

Diana added to this point in response to a question as framed by the researcher and which

can conclude this section on a point worth careful consideration: “I think that was a real strength

of the program that I came out of was the whole notion of systems as a foundation for how I

would sort of operationalize my involvement with an individual and a family. I think it kind of

kept my humble, just recognizing that my humanity is the same as the humanity of the person

sitting across from me, and that we're both kind of vulnerable to the same kinds of traps.” To

bring the threads of this section together around which an entire MSW course could be taught, in

“another little story” Diana offered to share her story with a future generation of social workers,

so I re-print it verbatim:

One case I had, it was a teenager who had—the family constellation was her mother, her

younger sister, herself, and stepfather. The stepfather had been a drunk and had groped

my client. I don't know how in depth 'cause nobody ever really described it completely,

100 percent what happened. But she was probably—I don't know, 12 or something like

that when it happened. Then the mom took the two kids and moved out of state and left

the stepfather behind. Over a period of time and a few years, he got religious and was

sober, working, and really wanted to reunite the family. They came back, the mom and

the two girls, and then the daughter was like 17 at that time. She was having some

problems, and so that's how I got into the case. It didn't take very long to figure out that

the whole family needed to be seen together. I desperately did not want to do that. I

132

desperately hated this man. I never met him, but just because his story of what I knew he

had done.

Yet there was nothing in the current situation to prevent us from trying to work

them together as a family. I made myself bring the family 'cause I knew that that was the

right thing to do. I just was dreading this, meeting this—I mean he was a monster to me,

from my own just personal point of view, whoever would do that to a young girl was a

monster. I brought them in and I left the door open to my office, which I never do when I

was meeting with my families. I sat myself right next to the door, but I was mindful of all

this. I see, well, I can do these couple of things to sort of calm myself down. At the

time…I was having trouble walking so I was wearing these big work boots that went up

to here and supported my feet. This guy was a woods worker and he comes in and he's

got Redwings on too. The first thing he said when he walked in the door, “Hey, I like

your boots.” [Laughter]. He settled me right down. We ended up doing some really,

really good work together; the whole family. Can’t even remember why I'm telling you

that story, but that’s also one of my favorite stories that I tell students.

Context matters. Prejudgment matters.

Yeah, and also taking care of yourself because I mean I knew I was being foolish…

But it could have played out in a way that proved you not foolish too. I mean it could

have—

It could have.

I mean it’s—woulda, coulda, shoulda is part of these judgments too.

Yeah, it could have, but I think and then years later I found myself teaching mindfulness

to my DBT people, and I realized that that's what I was doing, is I was not judging. Well,

133

I was judging myself a little, but not to the degree where I pretended I wasn't feeling

uncomfortable and I acknowledged the discomfort. Took a few measures to take care of

myself. Then he took care of me the rest of the way [emphasis added].

The social work profession has engaged in decades of discussion concerning the complex

differences between values and ethics but there is a need for more clarity when discussing the

effects of host environments. Cam summarized his role experience between these worlds in that

“our social work field was being co-opted by the criminal justice system from my view. That

made me really uncomfortable.” To Cam this meant that “the values of the—of clinical work as

an MSW—as a LCSW I should say, were being turned on its head, like confidentiality for the

sake of public safety. For me, it was like looking—it was like an Alice in Wonderland looking

glass world. You walk through this and everything is backwards and upside down.”

Leaving aside the philosophical dimensions of this debate, values concern various beliefs

and attitudes that determine how a person or group actually behaves. A well-defined value

system is a personal moral code. In contrast, ethics concern with how a moral person ought to

behave when subject to a code or standard imposed by others upon a group opting to obtain the

privilege of a particular license conferred by the state and subject to the authority of a licensing

board. For purposes of the experiences of these LICSWs, professional ethics are an action

concept; ground rules of decision making; principles of conduct that govern a group or an

individual; guidelines for how to turn values into action; and ethical decision making as a

process. This grounding is important because the experiences of the participants represent the

struggle, and reminder, to teach and train the consequences of being an expert to all experts-to-be

and not take that learning as occurring by random osmosis.

134

Theme 3: Trauma and Self-Care

Although there is research concerning vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, or burnout

in the social work literature (Adams, Boscarino, & Figley, 2006; Badger, Royse, & Craig, 2008),

the potential that the judicial process may inflict a unique form of trauma remains largely

unstudied. Before entering that pathway, however, we begin with a story from Laura who

reminds us that even as an MSW student, the memory and experience of field placement may

shape career arcs decades later:

I think I was terribly naïve about what I as a social worker could do. I’m not being glib.

I’m not being funny. I really thought that I would be able to direct somebody, and tell

them the right way and how to behave and how to act and what to do, and that they would

listen to me. The first time—and I remember very specifically the circumstance. I don’t

know if you want me to tell it—….The case, it was a young girl, school-aged child girl

and her brother, taken from the parents’ home or the mother’s home. The mother lived in

the projects in….with an alcoholic boyfriend. The children were taken away and they

were placed in the children’s center and going into foster care. A foster home was found

for the daughter, and this was probably one of the wealthiest families in….

It was a Catholic family, and that’s important because it was a very Catholic

family, very religious….This home had its own tennis court, swimming pool; the children

went to private school. They were a very lovely family….The daughter was there, and

she—I remember I went to see her. She had a tooth missing. She was just a little girl. She

had a tooth missing, and they got her a new tooth. She was just running around, she

looked gorgeous. But her brother was not there. I think it was too much for her. She

135

ended up—I forget how or why—she ended up leaving that home. She went back to the

children’s center.

I remember the first time I saw her at the children’s center since she left the home.

The tooth was gone, she looks ragged, she’s running around just like all the other kids….I

was devastated. My clinical advisor, she said, “It’s like you’re in mourning.” I did. I felt

like I had—I was, I was in mourning, because I felt she had so much going for her, and so

much potential in this foster home, and she gave it all up. Again, as I said, very naïve. I

grew up in a very upper middle class home. I couldn’t believe that anybody would give

up their own tennis court to go back and run around. I know there’s a lot more to it than

that. I understood all that. I worked through it, but that was kinda the turning point for

me. I said, you know, I don’t wanna work with kids. I actually never did have a real job

where I worked with children.

The connection across domains was explained differently by Cam but his answer shares

elements with Laura. He was asked by the researcher “if self-care is a professionally challenging

thing for people acting as experts. Our personal values, or social work values, lawyer values,

system values, and then our family lives. Some people integrate those better than others.” He

admitted that, “Yeah. No, it was influencing me. It was really difficult. It was really tearing me

up. Yeah, it was really tearing me up.” Cam described “looking back” during the interview on

decades in his specialty when he was “just this naïve, young, MSW graduate who was—that just

worked hard, put together some—the best reports I could and I just went in and said, ‘Here's

what I did and here's what I found.’" Cam added this about the effects, over time, on him:

They're usually—it was usually pretty tight and persuasive. I had a good memory of a lot

of facts and I could tell a good story. I could really construct—I could write a good

136

narrative that told a persuasive story that made a difference. I continued to testify a lot as

a social worker, but over the years it became less and less easy. I found myself going

through, having a more difficult time, and more stress, more anxiety about it over time. I

don’t know why. Maybe I got less naïve; I became more aware of a lot of the pitfalls.

Kate asserted that social work education and training should contain a deeper

understanding of life consequences when working with many family systems typically caught in

the courts because the very nature of the work carries with it the exchange of trauma:

I think we see about three percent of the top ten worst divorce cases. The 90 percent settle

on their own. Both have attorneys, a little bit of conflict, but they can work it out. We see

the top ten worst, or the top three of the top ten that are really bad. The majority have a

long history of trauma, childhood, throughout their lives, repeated traumas, that they’d

never had the tools or the availability or the even understanding that they can—that it’s a

trauma. It’s sad to see. A lot of these clients that come in here are very, very injured, and

have never even thought that what happened to them was wrong, or that they could have

a different life, or that the way that they resolve issues is abnormal.

Janet articulated this point in the context of transference, which is not a term or concept which

was part of the interview guide but was sprinkled into a few interviews:

I’ve also done a lot of writing, a lot of training around issues of vicarious trauma, and

helping people to develop skills to be able to enhance their self-awareness of what’s

going on with them, and being able to separate out that kind of transference, et cetera.

I’ve had attorney—you know, a lot of clinicians—but also attorneys, judges, asylum

officers, talk with me, generally confidentially, about their own vicarious trauma in

adjudicating these cases….

137

Victoria added a specific word of caution consistent with the reflections offered by Tammy: “I

think counter-transference is a big issue. People need to be aware of their own issues as they

approach this work. I think it's very important their own experiences with divorce or custody or

anything of that sort,” but she acknowledged this was never taught to her.

When asked if there is anything that social work school could have taught her that may

have helped, Tammy replied that “I think they [MSW educators] could have warned me better,

and prepared me better, somehow, for the trauma. I’ve had to go out on disability a couple of

times, go out on stress leave, they call it, and I just dealt with some horrific cases.” In a follow-

up question, Tammy expanded on her response by noting that “I went into it with this sort of

obsessive nature, about, ‘I’ve gotta do’—you can’t treat somebody who’s like that by giving

them more work. You have to stop them, or teach them, ‘You can’t do this.’ There’s lip service

paid to that, ‘Oh, take care of yourself,’ but then, they turn around and go, ‘Here’s five more for

today.’” As Tammy concluded, “I should have been prepared better. I should have been

protected better, but it’s not there” and that she was changing professional disciplines because

“social work is hard. It’s emotionally traumatic. It’s low-paid. I’m tired of it. [Child protection]

was brutal. And I’m just tired.”

Janet reflected on her experiences as affecting her in this manner: “It has—certainly since

I’ve been working cross-culturally with torture survivors since the mid-‘80s—has changed my

world view, which is one of the things that is common in the literature, right? Because oftentimes

I end up learning in massive detail about a lot of what never makes it to the press….” Sandy took

a respite from court work after more than a decade then went to work in an agency as a

supervisor in the public mental health system: “I did that, I think, for four or five years. It

brought back all the bad memories of CPS and just how futile the work felt. How you felt you

138

had to do certain things to make it look a certain way on paper, but it didn’t always pan out in

real life. I just walked away.”

The court experience itself has its own consequences; often unexplored in school or

trainings. As Sandy concluded, “You leave the stand feeling pretty awful.” The researcher then

posited this question to her:

You really don’t have to answer this question but in the years you’ve been doing this

work, do you think it’s had any effect on you personally in terms of professional time or

the time you felt about it, or the stress levels and the like? I’ve asked this of everybody

because this is a peculiar area of practice. It’s unique in many, many ways. Barriers get

stripped away when you’re dealing with the court system; in lots of ways it becomes both

personal and professional. I was curious about that.

I think for years after I left child protective services I had—probably had clinical PTSD.

As I healed I started to get into this and it’s with a different mindset. It’s been very

helpful, but this is definitely, definitely affected my life; working with this kind of case,

with that—such unsafe emotionally, mentally, and physically cases.

In a similar response to personal changes over time, Paul recognized that “I’m feeling,

and I don’t know if it’s my elderliness, jadedness, or the change in entitlement of families at this

point, the perception of entitlement in families. I’m feeling as though it’s helping less than it

used to.” Paul spoke of the effects of working with families-in-conflict from the perspective of

time and energy: “The negative is certainly how much it takes out of me. How much time, and

this is the way I’ve structured it, but I’m doing an hour of email before I see my first client at

7:00 here in the morning, so from 5:00 to 6:00 I’m doing email. Then I’m waking up bombarded

with yucky family conflict that isn’t mine. There may be phone calls during the day. Then I’m

139

doing the same thing at night. I just have found that it’s really wearing after a while. I really

dread hearing from families for the most part.”

Kimberly, who shares the same field as Paul, was asked whether her work was having

“any effect on you personally in that role? That it was worsening the day?” She responded that:

Yeah, I didn’t like it. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t like being in the position where people

were lying to me and I felt that a child’s, you know, I was the one with all this

responsibility to try to be helpful to the child….Then you have also all the systems. It’s

not just the parents it’s all the systems that you’re dealing with. I’ve had in 40 years of

practice one board complaint and it was work complaint because I stuck my neck out.

It just feels as though people don’t, there’s less respect for the system for any kind

of—people, more people are assuming that you got it wrong when they don’t like the

recommendation you make, than used to be true. They don’t slap themselves on the

forehead, and say, “Oh. I was being a jerk. I get it.” I think that happens less and that

makes me less wanting to do the work.

Do you think that’s a function of a broader cultural issue, or is it, or that you

noticed as all of us have grown older or is it something you see just within the court

system?

I think partly it’s us, me growing older, and just more, I hope it’s wisdom. It’s

definitely life experience, but I do think it’s a cultural. That more people are entitled,

more people are angry. There’s more road rage rather than saying, “Whoops. Go ahead.”

It is cultural. There’s less respect for authority. I’m not big on respect for authority just

cuz. As I just said I’m not big on labels or conveying respect just cuz you got letters, but I

do think there was a sense ten years ago. I had a sense more ten years ago, and it was not

140

cuz I was a starry eyed I’m gonna save the world and help people. That people did sort of

go, “Oh okay. We better settle down here.” That’s less likely to happen now. They’re

back in court more frequently.

Abigail reasoned that these roles required her “to learn how to take really good care of

myself. I still haven’t mastered that, but I’m trying. I have to do a lot of life/soul-enhancing

activities, to counteract all of the time I spend in prisons and jails, and hearing about the gory

details of trauma. I have to be—have really good boundaries.” Erin likewise described her own

vision of self-care as requiring certain self-imposed limits on her work but with recognition,

common to others who were interviewed, of the intellectual challenge of putting the pieces of a

puzzle together. Her point concerning limits and supervision is critical to better preparation of

students and practitioners for the trauma of this work:

Self-care for me, in this area, means I limit what I do. I turn away so much business, cuz I

just know that I would burn out too quickly if I didn’t balance that with the clinical work,

which I really love. I stick with it. I do it, because there’s also a part of me that finds it

really fascinating. Custody evaluation is a big research project. I like that. I like starting

from nothing, and within four and five months, I’ve got all this data. I like analyzing it

and figuring it out. I also like being a voice for kids who are in a position where they

don’t have it. I’m not ready to give it up, but it is the most stressful work I’ve ever done.

In terms of self-care, I limit my practice. I have supervision. We have a really good peer

supervision group. We meet every—we try to meet every month, those of us in this

community who do this work. I have a really good support group. I work in this building,

where we’re all doing this kinda work. I can have immediate access to another therapist. I

can say, “Hey, this just happened, what do you think?” Or, “This is what’s going on in

141

this case. This is what I’m thinking.” There’s that, and you absolutely need—you cannot

do this work isolated.

In a variation of the isolation commented on by Erin, Debbie succinctly commented, “I

can’t imagine doing this job isolated. I think I’d be sitting in a corner with my blankets, sucking

my thumb [laughter].” Debbie’s MSW program actually talked about self-care but that, “I’ve

learned a lot about self-care on my own, that way. I do know, with my colleagues and

everything, we know self-care is important. You’ve gotta have it, or this job will eat you up

alive. That is one thing I did appreciate about the social work program….They took very few

students right out of college. My feeling was that they wanted them to have a life, so that this

didn’t become their life and eat them alive.” Kate had a similar experience in her MSW program

because there “was a good amount of focus on maintaining your boundaries, taking care of

yourself, checking to make sure you’re not too far into the case. They did well in that front, I

believe,” but she still added:

I don’t think there’s any way that what you do all day can’t influence you and affect you.

I’ve got a funny story, but I won’t say it, cuz it’s recorded [laughter]. I’ll tell ya after. It

makes you look at things. It’s hard. It’s emotional. Working with the division—my whole

career’s been in a conflicted, emotional, sad kind of environment, a focus. I think I try to

—don’t always do it well—but I try to take the good in it, and hope that the work that I

put in, I give these people something.

The trade-off between trauma and the need for self-care was the feeling, implicitly

present in all these interviews, that the role of the expert was helping the lives of others so that

this was a reward worth the risk. Diana suggested that self-care should become more acceptable

but that “I had this notion that social workers are strong and don't need or shouldn't need a lot of

142

extra support. Then it became a necessity, and then it became a virtue to recognize the

discomfort. Then I started teaching, like my DBT clients, to recognize the discomfort….The

whole idea is when you feel the discomfort is not push it away. That's good for all human beings,

is to look the discomfort in the eye.” Jackie’s perspective of self-care is that of a “gatekeeper”

when acting as an expert but that court is not the least traumatic means to learn self-care:

Number one, as you can tell from my story, to me some of the positive experience of

being able to really make a difference because of my role of authority were an added

sense of quality and satisfaction about being a social worker, about having—being able

to, whatever, have my credentials and my whatever, whoever I was be recognized enough

that I could make such an impact in a positive way. That was great.

But more than that, I’ve probably had, because of the conflictual nature of some

of the cases, I would say it’s more on the positive side, really more on the positive side,

but two or three of these cases with highly conflictual, lot of legal and a lot of just

unsavory kind of things have been very stressful. I have been so happy to get rid of this

last case….It wasn’t my expertise. I mean, I had court appointed investment advisor

situation, but it was nasty and I hated it…. that family and their greediness and the

lambasting and the—I mean really, I was actually—how would I say this? I just think I

took such a verbal and emotional beating by these people who never respected or wanted

to go along with the limits that the court set on them, and that I represented that—I was

the gatekeeper. I have really disliked that. I’ve been anxious to—it’s been very stressful

and I would never—I’m smart enough now that I will—if ever a judge asked me to take a

case again I would study it real carefully and will decline anything that’s got some of

those elements in it. I won’t do it.

143

Janet added an important point about the empathetic role of the social worker as expert

and the judge as audience. Whatever the emotional content for the social worker, trained in some

manner to hear and translate those other voices, the listener may not manage hearing that

information as well. She remembered one judge who said to her after she testified in a PTSD

case for a torture victim:

Then, at the break—cause I had been in this judge’s courtroom for like a dozen years—

the judge said to me, “How can you do it? I can’t take it anymore. I can’t bear to read

about this, or hear them talk about these horrible things that have happened to them.” We

talked about most of the—people, pretty much everyone had left the courtroom at this

point—and she ended up granting. Then she, within a few weeks, had resigned—had

retired.

Janet then addressed a new conceptualization for vicarious trauma (which I will not name

specifically because it is part of her ongoing research) in words which are insightful:

It’s a new concept that some of my friends and colleagues are developing further, but I

have been—I believe first hand that that is alive and well, or I would not have been able

to stay in this line of work for so long. I had mentioned to you how so many of the

survivors I’ve worked with over the years—and, of course, some people are killed in the

process, right, and I have worked in various refugee camps. Also, one could argue that

the folks who make it over here might be different in many ways, and have certain kinds

of strengths or resources that others don’t. At any rate, we can gain resilience in working,

in hearing the stories of resilience, especially if you work with someone over time, which

—in my conversation with the judge who was experiencing a lot of vicarious trauma, she

was lamenting that she doesn’t get to hear any of that stuff….

144

Also, doing this kind of work helps to put in perspective one’s own life, and one’s

own every day sorts of challenges, or things that, maybe, before engaging in this work,

seemed really important, gets put into perspective. It’s been really helpful to do that, but

what’s been critical….is to have a network of friends and colleagues who we can call one

another up—and I have a number of them—but who get it. Who understand, and who

also—I’m sure this is true in these other areas that you work in—it’s a real specialty area

where you can seek peer consultation around some of the ethical dilemmas that emerge

from time to time.

In terms of the perception of others about the role of being a social worker, Paul added an

interesting comment in that “my family has come to have more respect for me professionally as a

guardian than they ever would or do as therapist,” which met this response from the researcher:

Really?

Because it’s [GAL] legal, so it’s not a touchy feely social work position. It’s a legal

position. The day someone in my family asked me if I wanted to go to law school when I

was probably in my late 40s, felt like the first time anyone in my family took my job

seriously. It was sort of a nice thing.

Paul also found in child custody a means to balance the methods of social work: “I am a

generalist in all walks of, all areas of life, but I have found that a strength-based perspective is

my philosophy of choice. It feels respectful for me. It feels hopeful. I’m smiling because I think I

probably employ it less as a guardian than I do in the rest of my social work practice.”

Tammy differentiated Paul’s view of hopefulness in the specific context of pressures she

incurred in her job: “Well, I think my sympathy got a lot less as time went on, but my role was

not to be the clinician or the advocate, the mom’s advocate or dad’s advocate, or any of that. My

145

role was to do emergency response.…It was just this breakneck, like never-ending, and I was

somebody who did a lot of work, so I got more work put on me all the time, constantly, until I

couldn’t take it anymore, and I had to go onto disability. They were like, ‘Oh, sorry you’re

leaving. Let us know when you’re coming back, so we can give you 50 cases a month’ kind of

thing.” Tammy was then asked what may have changed for her since she went into the field, to

which she replied that, “I probably became more judgmental over the years, when I saw things

that people would do to their kids, so, yeah, I could be pretty judgmental. It’s not really a

personal thing. It was kinda like, ‘It’s not that I hate you or think you’re a bad person. I’m just

gonna come to this judgment about this, and I’m gonna act accordingly.’”

In a metaphorical sense, self-care and self-awareness are coins of the same realm but

each requires the reciprocal and timely reflection of trained supervisors or, at a minimum, peer

assistance. Thus, knowing how to frame and respond to the burdens of being an expert, not

guessing or waiting until it is too late for the client or the social worker, is a duty of the

profession to its own and the community. As Diana expressed in these eloquent words:

I saw the kids—I saw this as urgent that these kids learn to attach, that they learn to trust,

that they learn to regulate their emotions. I see childhood as a small window. Later in life,

I did a lot of like DBT work with adults who couldn't regulate their emotions and were

just miserable. I wanted for those kids the kind of life that they could have in their foster

homes. I have to admit that. Looking back—you asked me to look back on it, and I

wonder if I was—if I had a proper sort of attitude. If things had been set up differently to

maybe afford better interactions between myself and the birth family and those kinds of

things. If maybe I would have not emphasized quite so much the things that I emphasized

like the traumatic reactions.

146

Abigail described the difference, from the perspective of an ethical life, as recognizing

that the choice of specialization may itself be a form of self-care. For her, the linkage between

respect for the client and self-care for the practitioner are organic connections:

Really do your own personal work. That is paramount to everything else, so that you can

stay grounded, so that you can stay centered and have good boundaries, and have a sense

of humor, and have good people skills. Just don’t take all of this so seriously. There’s not

a crisis. Don’t multitask all the time. Try to do the—which I say while I’m doing 20

things at once. Try to be—

We reach a point in our lives where we’re allowed to be hypocrites. That’s my

professional theory.

Try to be present, where possible. That sounds ridiculous from someone in….You’ve got

to continue to get a lot of training. I go to training every year, several trainings about

trauma. I’ve been—I’m going, doing this mind/body training. I do new ideas—I just went

to training in—for mitigation teams. It’s really important to just continue to try to be a

learner, and not—and maintain that humility. I mean its fun to be an expert, but really

none of us are experts. We always have to be open to learning new things. Don’t have

fixed ideas, where possible.

As mentioned earlier, I made a conscious decision to exclude certain statements as too

personal or stated in a manner which may disclose the identity of the participant. What is true

about these interviews is that words alone-and particularly a cold transcript-cannot convey the

eyes or the hands; the subtle movements reflective of the mind’s tics as emotions are recalled in

bits or waves. But that very act of being an expert, the experience within that experience, carries

a price. What begins to unfold is recognition that the trauma of living people’s lives with them

147

involves the circumstances of their lives. For many of the participants, poverty and

discrimination were a tangible measure of outcomes in court. The social work professions’ core

values derive from a fundamental duty to address those issues but it is true that the erosion of self

and the dampening of empathy can make practitioners and scholars pay more attention to

rhetoric than substance. Not intentionally but inevitably if the profession fails to account for

itself, iteratively and concretely, from the classroom to the field to the lab. The experiences

below connect these elements in the language of the participants.

Theme 4: Poverty and Discrimination

Social justice is more than an ephemeral concept disconnected from the human beings

served by the authority of LICSWs as experts. Adjudicatory proceedings in the United States are

the source of considerable interaction with clients suffering from the roots of poverty and

discrimination. As described by the participants, resources too often define outcomes in the

courts. The trenchant connection between these topics, and the reason for inclusion in the same

domain, evolved only during the interviews. Social workers, who struggle with self-care and

limited resources, may gradually slip over time into practices which are less than optimal. During

the interviews, this tension was framed by a few leading questions early in the interviews which

pictured child protective proceedings as poor-people’s child custody cases. As Dwayne noted:

Child protection cases tend to be—as often referred to 'em as poor people's child custody

cases versus people who have some resources that have lawyers, and psychologists, and

guardians, and things like that.

Yeah, that's probably not far from accurate. I work with people that don't have food.

Survival's a day to day—

148

They’re workin’ on survival. What am I gonna do Work on survival with them. If we try

and do other things than that, then why are they behaving this way? It's because they're

working on survival. They don’t know where they're gonna sleep tonight.

In particular, Tammy noted that child neglect is the “bread and butter” of child welfare

because it is harder to hear about sexual and physical abuse. Thus, “people with money, you’re

not gonna see. They can go out and use their drugs or whatever, but their home’s still gonna be

nice, and they’re gonna have food. Maybe, the child’s got—whatever. He’s insulated by that

money.” Tammy was then asked if she thought that the gender of the parents also influenced any

of the outcomes, with the researcher framing the question using this language:

I know the word gender can be a loaded question, in the context of child custody, whether

it’s child protective proceedings or private custody cases, but what is your experience?

Well, I think, mothers are the ones who come to the attention of CPS, and, oftentimes,

fathers are absent or whereabouts unknown or they’re in prison. I feel I always treated

mothers and fathers with equal respect, but I don’t know. We saw moms all the time, and

probably, there was some disdain or contempt for women in that, which is sad.

Tammy then starkly framed her response to her role in this potential dichotomy this way:

It seems like people who are poor and/or non-white and poor, I think, poverty is the most

glaring factor, because you can be non-white and have a lot of money, and you’re

probably not gonna come to the attention of CPS, maybe with the exception of, like,

Michael Jackson or somebody bizarre. Normally, money insulates everyone. Their skin

doesn’t matter, in my opinion. I think poverty is the great equalizer, and that’s what

brings CPS to your door, whether you’re white or black or whatever. Then, if you’re

using drugs and you’re not managing, then the poverty gets completely out of control,

149

cuz the food stamps are going for meth, instead of food. I think that’s what brings the

government’s attention.

Tammy concluded her experiences and observations with this salient point about her approach to

protecting children irrespective of advantage or disadvantage:

Well, I think it was hard, so that’s why, when I got somebody who had money, I treated

them just about the same, exactly the same. I went out to one case, and the cop I was with

said, “Do you know who this family is?” I said, “Yeah, I do, and we need to get through

the gate, cuz it’s a gated thing. I mean, we’re gonna do this case. I don’t care that he’s

famous in this county and he has a lot of money.”

Yeah, it’s definitely not fair, but when I was in it, I was pretty obsessive and just

really focused on my frontline work. I didn’t really think about the other stuff. All I care

about is, if this child’s being starved, raped, whatever, seeing his mom beat up all the

time, then I’m gonna come do my job. That’s what I focus on. It’s the nuts and bolts of

what I was doing, so it was really hard.

When Zeta was then asked about the role of poverty she analyzed the issue in a different

way than Tammy, but no less perceptively:

Of course, it does. It’s just that people have a bigger stake if the outcome’s not what they

want in terms of economics. I think that's something a lot of people, economics drives the

train. I don’t understand why that doesn’t make sense to people as why women stay in

horrendous surroundings because even if the guy only makes $20,000 a year. Its $20,000

more than she’s gonna make cuz she has no skill, so she’ll stay. It’s the same thing in

child abuse cases. Oh, man. “It’s just a kid. It’s okay. They’ll forget, because if I split I

lose income, I may lose housing. It could be a multimillion dollar house I will lose. When

150

you really look, its economics drives, in not all cases, but in the overwhelming majority

that I see….

They’re [social workers] all over the board, and what consists of the family is

certainly not Leave It to Beaver anymore at all. I think when folks come out, and they’re

very young and especially at a Catholic-est, the green cheese group. You walk into totally

unknown family dynamics to you just based on your experience. It’s like, “Well, this

isn’t a family.” Well, of course, it’s a family. It functions just like yours. It just doesn’t

look like yours, but the functions are still the same cuz we’re all human. There was

basically not much discussion about that…in the MSW program.

Diana made a similar point about poverty and the perspectives which must be assimilated by

social workers when making judgments for the courts:

Well, it's kind of interesting because you have a child and a birth family that are almost

always low socioeconomic status and likely some history of mental illness and poverty,

probably poor education or no education. You get that and then you get your foster

families who are—I would say there's kind of in rural…, there's probably slightly more

privileged, slightly better educated with probably, in many cases, religious and coming

from a tradition of kinda what I would call like old-school parenting. Then you have

people like me who are pretty liberal, not very religious and then like the case managers.

I would say bringing all those people together is kind of, yes, challenging.

Debbie was likewise asked about how she thought socioeconomic status influences

outcomes in court for a family: “If you have a lot of money to burn, you can spend a lot of time

in court. If one parent has more than the other, it can get pretty ugly. I think, frequently, money is

the deciding—I mean, I’m outta funds. I can’t do this anymore. I give up. You get what you

151

want, unfortunately.” These differences seem to reach a confluence when interpersonal violence

is part of the reality of income or wealth for a family system, as Emily articulated in response to

a question about how she thinks that socioeconomic status influences outcomes:

You know, I think as we talked about earlier as far as the economic, most cases of

domestic violence, they’re occurring everywhere. The only time the real high profile—

you know, the higher economic cases get before us is when the injuries are so egregious

that somebody—that they have no recall. For example, we had a case here where it was a

prominent attorney, and he broke his daughter’s cheekbone as I recall and severely

injured the wife. DV had been going on for a very long time.

What was interesting is when I spoke with the wife, I said, “Well, I imagine that

when the injuries happened in the past, you just go over to your condo at the coast and

you recuperate. Nobody sees you; you know, you don’t have to run down to the corner

store and do your grocery shopping.” Oftentimes where they get caught is in hotel rooms

because if you’re used to slamming your partner against the wall in a multi-thousand

square foot house where you need intercoms to talk to each other from one end to the

other, nobody else hears your business. When you’re in an apartment with paper thin

walls and you throw somebody up against the wall, the neighbors might call.

I remember speaking with a judge once, and I wanted to do a DV court here. He

said, “Oh,…it’s just that they don’t have the income or the education level.” I said,

“Judge, I guarantee some of your colleagues are doin’ this,” and he about fell out of the

chair….You know, if you grew up with that, just cuz you go to school, get a degree, and

put a nice black robe on doesn’t mean you’ve gotten rid of those inner demons as far as

relationship issues. I really do think that the role that economic and lower socioeconomic

152

status plays is simply due to the fact that they don’t have any other resources, and they

don’t have other places to go and hide the domestic violence that the ones with more

money and resources do.

Diana, however, responded to a question intended to find a pattern of positive outcomes

beyond poverty alone. Her answer is insightful; not as a function of blame or over-simplicity but

a means to locate a deeper understanding of embedded social problems and interventions:

I mean you mentioned poverty earlier, but is there—I want to ask it in a more positive

way. Are there themes or things where you've seen the successful results, something that

you think with your clinical experience and your training, they brought something to the

table that made that mixture work?

This is gonna sound weird, but intelligence seems to be pretty important for people to be

able to—and here's the cognitive therapist in me—for people to be able to step out and

look back into their situation with a degree of understanding. I’ve worked with some

really, really, really bright people who had some really, really, really horrible lives. The

bright ones seemed to get better. That’s totally subjective. That and motivation. Some of

the most fulfilling work that I’ve done has been with people who didn’t want to lose their

kids and finally had a motivation that was their motivation to keep their kids or to be

better parents than they were parented.

It was really powerful. It was more powerful than the other forces that were

compelling them not to regulate their emotions because that can be very satisfying, just to

have unregulated emotion. I would say those two things, intelligence or the willingness

and ability to gain a little bit of objectivity and the motivation to do that. Often that

153

motivation was just heart-warming, heartwarmingly had to do with wanting to be a better

parent than the parenting I got.

Following a discourse, Cam had a particularly unique insight in that he saw his role in

poverty cases as translator or, in that sense, an advocate for those without voice to a judge or jury

who may share none of those experiences or life challenges: “I tried my best to—again

verisimilitude, using corroboration, and just here's what it is, and let the jury sort of experience it

that way. Then you try to use—try to use the literature on certain things, and on poverty, and

what the—what kind of effects this has on people’s—limiting their choices, and the effects it has

on their mental health, and their health, and trying to tie those things together, it’s not easy.”

Summary

As suggested by Cam and implied by others, the expert as translator must understand that

what someone may say they understand about social justice may be a mask for bias or prejudice.

What distinguishes the professions of law and social work is well described in this quote:

[if] lawyers think about social justice at all, they will see it as emerging from counseling

and advocacy by individual lawyers on behalf of individual clients within the adversary

system. Most lawyers do not view the pursuit of social justice as an obligation or function

of their professional work. (Aiken & Wizner, 2003, p. 64)

Ultimately, the experiences described above may yield for the reader a concomitant

desire to better prepare social workers to hear these echoes before it is too late for LICSW or

consumer. The social work profession should generate tools to better engage LICSWs in self-

care and self-knowledge. To fail to do so means that the delivery of social justice is impaired, not

154

by the limitations of evidence or truth-detecting or adjudicatory authority, but by the internal

failings of the social work profession towards itself—and that simply will not do.

Third Domain: The Dimensions of the Host Experience

Theme 1: The Act of Being an Expert

Although the act of being an expert runs like a current through all the themes, the nascent

and embedded qualities of becoming and being an expert are juxtaposed in these two quotes:

Diana: The short answer to your question is no. I don’t remember ever having any kinds

of training with respect to what does it mean to be an expert witness and what are the

ethics involved, what are strategies. No, I didn’t get any training. I ended up reading

about it and getting some clinical supervision once I found that I was going to be doing

that.

Abigail: I think that you can’t really train someone to be an expert. That’s a confidence

that comes with experience. The idea that someone is an expert is problematic, in and of

itself. I think humility is really important….Yes, and just to understand one’s own belief

system, and what theories they ascribe to, and not going outside of your area of expertise,

or competence. That’s pretty important.

Kimberly summed up her role as an expert in this fashion: “I think the most important

thing for me was to not try to know more than I knew and to be clear about what my role as an

expert is. To see what I say and where the line where legally what was not my job to say, what

was the courts.” Paul, however, spoke in the context of a “social worker coming into a legal

arena, that’s the scariest place for us. I can’t speak for everyone, but I think for most of us. We

155

have no experience in testifying. We have no training in testifying. Lawyers becoming guardians

have all kinds of experience in that. No training. It is a very intimidating place.” As he added:

My colleagues say here in this hall or in my office, they are terrified to go to court, and

often will ask me, “What do I do? What do I say? How do I do this?” Now I’m able to

say, “Ah piece of cake. Just, you know, it’s okay to say I don’t know. It’s okay to say I

need a minute to think about that. It’s okay to ask for them to repeat the question.” Lots

of little tips that just ease that incredible fear for us of being in that place. No I don’t

think we got any training on that….

It wasn’t talked about in MSW school?

Nope.

Wasn’t talked about as part of your licensure status—

Nope.

—at all? The first time you walked into a courtroom to testify, what was that like?

Can I swear on this? [Laughs].

However—and this is an important distinction—Paul was also quite careful to distinguish the

role of being an expert from providing expertise itself:

Would you describe or use the word to describe yourself as an expert when you’re

testifying as a guardian ad litem? If you’re not comfortable with that word why not?

What’s that mean to you?

Ew. No. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. I would consider, well I’m an expert at the

overview I supposed, but the legal term “expert witness” to me is something different.

How would you describe the difference?

156

That legally the expert witness, an expert witness is someone with particular field of

expertise who’s been hired by one party to help that party prevail, and gets paid a whole

lot.

Of course, there is still a need for someone to transfer expertise as knowledge to the

courts. The alternative is an increased risk of guesswork without some rational framework for a

judicial judgment. As Kimberly summarized concerning the role of clinical social workers as

experts, “who else could do the job better” and added that “Certainly with child custody. It’s not

very pleasant. It’s not very nice but, if we’re in children’s services I don’t who is better suited to

do it.” Kimberly provided another starting point when she was asked if it would surprise her to

know that some LICSWs doing forensic work do not receive regular supervision:

It wouldn’t surprise me to know that. I think it should be mandatory, because I don’t

think any of us know. I still ask colleagues to sit in on cases. They think I’m crazy at

times, but I learn every day, just sitting there and watching how a case from a beginning

to end, with another psychologist or another social worker. We need it. We need to be

constantly reminded that we don’t know everything. We have to keep our eyes open and

our brain going, because what we’re dealing with is so important [emphasis added].

In response to a question about what it felt like to be the expert, Sandy expressed an

insight through a unique metaphor:

Yeah, well, after I got over the imposter syndrome [laughter] [emphasis added]. When I

was in my early 20s and I worked for CPS, I was one of the youngest case managers and

I remember thinking I can’t believe they’re listening to me. I can’t believe they’re

allowing me to remove children from people out in the community. Now I’m much older

and much more experienced and I feel pretty comfortable but also very respectful of what

157

that role means. I think that happens as you get older and you have kids, and your kids

haven’t done the right thing or you’ve been through a divorce; you realize wow, we really

gotta get people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t let ‘em get away with anything either.

A similar, if different form of modesty, was also expressed by Diana when she began to reflect

upon how she managed to act the expert in court: “Well, I think, number one, is truly

recognizing that there are multiple points of view, multiple right points of view for any given

issue. Keeps me humble. That makes me very cautious about identifying what I see and how that

relates to the conclusion that I come to and sort of identifying that process step-by-step so that

I’m not saying that this conclusion that I came to, that this is the way it is because I’m the

expert.” These insights into being humble and the imposter-syndrome, among other experiences

expressed throughout every section of this dissertation, form the chain which links the various

roots and routes of a social workers journey through life and education to the essence of what

does it really mean to be that expert about another?

Theme 2: Actually Being the Expert

For LICSWs, being an expert always, and unremittingly, occurs within and against the

forces of individual lawyers and judges wrapped within the rules and traditions of an

adjudicative system with real power to punish and reward. When Maggie was asked how it felt

to walk through “the court portal” to testify for the first time she said: “I’m a pretty confident

person, but it was scary because I had no idea what was going to be asked from the attorney that

I worked with or what was going to be asked on cross examination from the other or how the

judge was going to perceive who I was.” Indeed, what often comes as a surprise to other

disciplines (much less the public) is the randomness of the event itself.

158

Social work has struggled to balance this Realpolitik of institutional power since its

professional conception, while still encouraging self-determination and honoring diversity. In

that regard, Adam was asked about the need to educate professionals and clients. He replied by

explaining the tensions that exist between the act of being an expert when his role is to aggregate

the facts in a way the client could not cohesively explain to a judge or jury. For this purpose,

Adam used a complex and elegant word, “verisimilitude” which means truth, credibility,

authenticity and reliability. For him, this word fits his experience and his duty in court:

I approach it a couple ways. I mean, I always try to triangulate as much as I can, meaning

have more than—at least two sources for a particular fact, or more. Both through

anecdotes that you—from people that you interview, family witnesses, but also maybe

historical documents too that might—before this case even came to be, noticed it, and

observed it, and had documented in a report. There are plenty of times when I have to

make claims that are just based on what the client tells me because I can’t—there’s no

other source.

I just—but what I try to accomplish there is verisimilitude is—and what I mean by

that is if it's the only source, I try to get as much detail from the client and I try to write

that detail in, almost verbatim, in a sense so that the person hearing it will get a sense of

the verisimilitude of what they're talking about. It sounds—it’s persuasive in that sense

that it’s not being made up, that the kind of detail I give hopefully would be persuasive

that it’s real, a real memory and not a malingered memory or trying to be deceitful.

For the most part, the expert social worker is, in Adam’s language of verisimilitude,

present to tell the story of some other person; to share and articulate some matrix of events in a

way that few people could do themselves. Many of these stories are about people society has

159

reason to see as outside the social norms already. The expert social worker is that voice. It is a

role fraught with complexity of fact and emotion, as eloquently described by Adam:

How important is your ability to substitute your narrative, to organize it, as against the

way clients would have to express themselves? Do you think that expertise matters in the

outcomes?

Oh, yeah.

I know those sometimes seem like obvious questions, but I don’t think we talk about it

much.

Yeah, my ability to articulate, and put in—I mean I tell clients when I sit down with them

that—when I met a client on Wednesday up in…, I met the mother, the father, and then I

met the defendant. I would say my job is to tell your story. My job is to humanize you in

a way that they would rarely be given the opportunity, even in some sort of—you know,

given the opportunity in an impact letter or something like that.

Even if they could express themselves, yeah.

Right. They couldn’t do it the way that I can do it.

When Debbie was asked about what it felt like to exercise such power, she suggested that

“My cop-out is I see myself as a catalyst. I can be the leader, I can educate, but they have to do

the work. It’s their choice, whether they choose to do it or not.” Janet addressed this role in the

context of her work with victims of institutional violence and the need for lawyers to be effective

beyond what the social worker can do in court:

They [immigrants] have very little voice, and let’s face it—and this may very well be true

in these other areas of social work and the law that you have a lot of expertise in that I

don’t—but it’s a small percentage of asylum applicants, or torture survivors, or people

160

otherwise persecuted, who actually even have a lawyer. Then, let’s be frank—some of

their lawyers don’t spend any time with them. My worst example of this was appearing in

court as an expert witness and then the person’s attorney had never even met my client,

and had no clue who I was, and had not read—so I’m sitting there, and we’re waiting,

we’re waiting, so I’m glancing at my client’s asylum application again. Just waiting, and

he goes, “What’s that?” “That’s your client’s I-589.” “Oh, could I see that?” They’d

never even seen the thing.

In the end, this judge ended up—and this was a highly educated applicant…in

their home country, and during one of the breaks I had to intervene because the person’s

attorney was using racial epithets in the hallway, and calling my client stupid, and

ignorant. It was insane, and I had to pull my client back together to go back in there. In

the end—and I was so happy for this—the judge granted, and said, “I want to make it

clear—I am granting you asylum not because of anything your attorney did, but because

of the work you did to put your own application together and your testimony. It is not

because of anything your attorney did.”

Cam echoed that experience as an expert when the researcher phrased the question this way:

I referred to it in some variety of places as the random walk in the legal system that’s

much too dependent on the skill of the lawyers, even before you get to the experts.

There’s no question.

Has that been your experience?

Totally been my experience. I tell people this all the time. I say, “I don’t care how good

of experts you have, if you don’t have—the attorney really carries everything. It’s win or

lose on the attorney, really.” I mean that’s a difficult position to be in.

161

In the context of court, Kate accepted that: “Every client deserves the right to be

zealously defended in advocacy. That’s what their attorney’s job is. It’s not personal. That has

helped me a lot, in working with attorneys. With that being said, it doesn’t help with attorneys

that do make it personal, and that are not truly advocating for their clients because they’re so

enmeshed with the case.” The question for Kimberly was framed as “collaborative, non-

cooperative, bullying” by lawyers, to which she stated that, “Yeah I think it was pretty neutral.

You mentioned a few minutes ago the issue of boundaries and you have to know when

somebody’s crossing a boundary and asking of something that’s not doable. If you want to do

expert witness you have to, I think, have some trust in the attorney who hired you.”

Yet such a reciprocal framework for understanding the role of the LICSW as expert is the

source of legitimate concern in many of the interviews. Lawyers hire experts based upon a need

to generate evidence that mitigates or explains a particular issue to a fact finder. This may be

practical or desperate but it is, nonetheless, common and real as reflected in these quotes:

Abigail: Yes, there’s attorneys who don’t prepare you well, or don’t understand—you

might have a different understanding of what your job is, and how that’s—how you’re

going to testify about that, or prepare for that.

Cam: I just have to concede, just have to concede. I wasn’t aware of whatever they’re

using to refute what was told to me. I got—get blindsided from time to time, as much as I

try to prevent that and as much as I ask the defense attorneys to protect me and say,

“Look, is there anything you think I might get blindsided on? I’ve been working as hard

as I can to make sure everything’s set up,” but there’s always—it’s not always the case.

Erin: I’m constantly educating attorneys. They’ll call and say, “Hey, I have this case,

would you just see this kid in therapy and let us know if he should be with dad?” I’m like,

162

“No, I won’t. This is what it needs, this kind of evaluation.” They’re like, “Really? Why

can’t you just do that?” Cuz it’s unethical, and this is such an important—this is so

important.

Although it is true that lawyers must zealously represent individual clients while

appeasing the demands of the court, the unprepared LICSW inevitably confronts that challenge

in an adversarial environment at some peril. As Erin explained:

After this first experience, I’m like, whoa, I don’t know if I wanna do this work anymore.

I can’t make a difference. I can’t. The work is the hardest work I’ve ever done. Then, to

feel like you can’t even trust the legal system—I don’t know. This is not why I became a

therapist. I became a therapist to help. I stuck with it, but what I know is that there’s a

high attrition rate. I’m one of the few—and I won’t even do it that much anymore—but

I’m one of the few therapists in the community that will even do parent coordination

work anymore, for that reason. I know many therapists who have started down the child

custody route, and, after one case, they’re out. They’re like, “This is crazy.”

Courtrooms are a theater of rituals in which truth is an objective but the quest for that

truth a different matter entirely. As these participants learned that point through the hard tack of

experience, an entire curriculum could be designed by this narrative from Victoria:

Yeah, it was all a learning curve. I did attend…seminar, which was great….Somebody

wrote a book and I read the book also, about appearing in court, what you should and

shouldn’t do. Some lawyers would—again, I don’t know if this is proper or improper,

they’d ask me to come and run through what I had to say and coach me about just answer

the question. I mean, it wasn’t—any advice they gave me wasn’t improper, like vote for

my client, but they would tell me—

163

Here’s what it’s going to look like.

That’s right. I was terrified the first time I went.

What was the experience of testifying like for you the first time?

Horrible.

Was it just because of your own anxiety or the way the case was handled or sort of shock

as to how the court actually works?

Well, it was my anxiety but it was also—I wasn’t prepared for the cross-examination.

The lawyer kind of played a trick on me. The child in question had serious psychiatric

disorder. He was taking a number of medicines. When he had been released from the

hospital, there were ten medicines. He was down to three or four. The kid was really ill.

The lawyer for the mother—because I said in my report, he’s not on ten medicines. He’s

on these medicines. These are appropriate medicines for his disorder. The lawyer for the

mother shoves a piece of paper under my nose; it was his discharge summary that listed

the ten medicines. She never—she just shoved it under my nose and said, “How many

medicines do you see there? Count them up.”

I should’ve said, “Can you please tell me what this is? May I have time to read

this and understand what this is?” I didn't know that. I counted them and I said, “Ten.”

So, “See, it says in your report blah, blah,” and that was it and she moved on to the next

question. I was so upset because that was a trick, in my opinion, to make me say the right

number but it wasn't the right information.

Erin had a similar surprise when her own life experience and her best intentions as a

therapists attempting to provide objective information crossed-over into the courtroom:

164

For me, it was a huge eye opening. I was pretty idealistic. Having grown up in a divorced

family and a high-conflict divorce situation, many, many, many years before, I thought I

could go and really make a difference, and help kids who had the unfortunate

circumstances of having to deal with this. I was very idealistic, and believed that the

courts were—it really was about the best interest of children, and the attorneys were all

about best interest of children. That’s what you hear. It was—I’m not shocked anymore,

but it was really hard for me, as I started to see the cracks and the reality.

For Erin, the difference in roles (therapist or forensic expert) made no difference as she was

unprepared for the experience in litigation over children:

I’d never had experience in the family law arena. I’d never had to testify before, either.

My first experience testifying was a real shock. I had been a therapist for two daughters

in one of the worst divorced I’d ever heard. Legal fees, at that point, were like $1 million.

It’d been going on for ten years. The girls were suicidal, and had taken a guardian ad

litem years to finally get the court to order mom to take the kids to therapy. It’d been an

ongoing custody battle for ten years. I was subpoenaed to testify.

Did you accept the case for the girls, knowing what the case was about?

I did, but again, I was—I knew, I had some background information, but I didn’t have the

experience to really understand what I was getting myself into. Also, the guardian ad

litem had a good relationship with him. He’d warned me. He said, “This is a mess….”

I’ve learned since then is, if I am gonna be a therapist for a child, it’s going to be

only if the parents agree not to subpoena me to testify. It’s baptism by fire, and it was a

disaster. It was horrible. The judge was… it was an unbelievable outcome. To this day,

these kids are pretty messed up. It’s really hard not to get cynical, when you have worked

165

and seen how the court and the laws quite often don’t really protect the kids the way you,

as a therapist, think they should. That’s part of the problem. We think so differently from

the attorneys. I don’t like that part of this job. I will only work with certain attorneys

now, who respect my expertise. They don’t try to micromanage me, and how I do my

work. It’s an ongoing issue, problem.

Erin finished her thoughts by with a critical reminder for the researcher and the reader: she “was

talking about the kids, my concerns, my diagnosis. They were suicidal. These kids were suicidal.

And my involvement with the parents. The mother was lying about me and my work with her

kids. The judge believed her. It was traumatic.”

In a comparable way, Kate was questioned about whether people really wanted to know

the truth about what was actually occurring in a case in court: “I think people wanna know the

truth, what’s going on, from their perspective. I think we’re lucky that we have a lot of good

attorneys here, who have good client control, who also don’t always buy into their clients but

really just want to find—be able to find somebody who can put the whole picture together for

them. We’re lucky in that aspect.” Kate was then asked about her experience in court as expert:

I am totally anxious the night before, probably sitting up late, late, into the evening,

writing out outlines and making sure I know all of my data, and making sure I’ve got my

ducks in a row, and I can recite quotes out of my report and statements the parents made.

Then I get there, and, of course, I have the attorney that wanted me for it, so it’s really

nice and friendly, and everything’s great. He’s not challenging. When I don’t understand,

I can just sort of look at him, like, what? Didn’t get that one. Don’t know where you want

me to go. Then the other one gets up, and most of the time, it’s okay. I’ve had some

really aggressive, really angry, really, I’m sure, posturing for their client, showing that

166

they’re doing their job, trying to attack. It’s been okay. I always fumble on some words.

Being that I don’t view myself as a hugely articulate person, and don’t use big, complex

words—Dr. …, who’s amazing on the stand, and she can say all these words that I’m

like, I gotta use that word. I just am straight, and I try to make the clients understand. I do

the same in the court.

Debbie suggests, and Kate and Erin would probably agree along with other colleagues,

that “attorneys need to be educated as well. They frequently put us in positions that we should

not be put in.” Debbie was asked to consider the perspective of the lawyer in this exchange:

Do you think, as you reflect on those occasions, that’s a function of sometimes

desperation by the lawyers, versus the malice of setting somebody up to help? I don’t

know how else to really posture it. I know what desperation in custody cases is like. I say

it with some degree of empathy. I also know there’s a whole bunch of other lawyers out

there who would not play nice. What’s been your impression?

I think it’s mostly that they get so engrossed in winning for their client that, sometimes

they lose sight of what’s best for the kids, and also, what the other professional is capable

of, or should ethically do, in helping for their client….You get some attorneys that have

the reputation of just being a bully. You’re pretty sure they’re gonna get whatever their

client wants. I think the biggest thing that would be helpful with that, and I think that the

collaborative law approach to this is really good, that you’re having interdisciplinary

teams. I think there needs to be more education with everybody—the judges, the mental

health people, and the attorneys—with what each can do, and how you can work together

so that you don’t have the attorneys being anti the mental health people, or just using the

mental health—abusing the mental health people.

167

Jackie was tasked by a judge concerning the care arrangements for an elderly person

because “everybody was warring in the family” and she was asked to try and provide a solution:

Was that subject to challenge by lawyers on cross examination and the like at that time?

Hmm. Yeah, I think so. I think it really was. I—ooh, because his daughter wanted one

thing, his wife wanted another thing; the kids on the other side of the family wanted

something else.

What was your experience like for that?

Extremely stressed out. Two of the—his son and her son, two of them, were also

psychiatrists and analysts, and they were all very well educated….They grilled me to the

nth degree. They were intimidating. It was not pleasant, but it was an important role that I

served, so I took the heat. I actually had to make a decision about where he was gonna

live, and somebody wanted that and somebody wanted that, and I said no I think we’ll do

this. It was, you know.

Did the judge accept your recommendation?

Mm-hmm, oh yeah. I was completely supported on that. Yeah, I was. It was more the

attorneys on the two—of the—who were fueled by the angry family members who were

warring against one another and the whole estate and all the money. I mean it was classic.

It was a textbook war of the—war of the families. It ended that way, too. The man died

and they still fought.

As is often true in litigation, families use the court as a sandbox and lawyers as

surrogates-for-conflict. Abigail described her expert experience as “challenging” and thereby

requiring a special set of skills: “I’ve had to learn how to use economy of words, and maintain

my poise, and speak to what I’ve reviewed, and that’s all.” Dwayne compared which practices

168

work more effectively than others given the different roles: “Of course the attorney’s role is to

represent their client based upon their client's wishes. I’ve generally been pretty impressed with

the attorney’s in this area that I work with, and not arguing just for the sake of arguing, but

actually can get the picture. We usually have quite a good working relationship and

understanding what I think, why I think, and what they think, and why they think it.”

These experiences do generate a tension which is an inextricable part of being an expert:

the temptation to transform the LICSW from expert opinion based upon evidence-informed

practice to advocacy within the rules and objectives of the courts as host environment. The role

experience of being an expert is the experience of unraveling chaotic and complex human events

with speed and volume. This does not mean that honorable professionals do not try to mete out

justice but it does mean that since the time of the first human bureaucracies the best of intentions

may be subsumed by organizational demands as the experiences below may reflect.

Theme 3: Tensions between Neutrality and Advocacy

To describe the tension between neutrality and advocacy for the expert is to enter the

world of experienced experts who know the differences and the consequences of not knowing the

differences. Although LICSWs advocate in ways preternaturally consistent with the values and

ethics of social work, some cases bring little public support and much potential wrath, such as

arguing for mitigation of the death penalty. Thus, the quotations and the questions are presented

here at more length, because texture cannot always be fairly summarized. As other participants

above described their role as telling the story for someone who cannot articulate that story in

words acceptable to our culture, Zeta described her experience as actually being that “voice”:

I’ve still been able to give someone a voice, even if they changed their mind and say, “I

don’t want my voice to be heard.” Well, it’s a means to get it heard. What makes me

169

really sad is when the person that I’m talking to, the odds of having that voice heard

really aren’t gonna impact their lives terribly. That's what’s so discouraging, and it’s not

anything that they necessarily do….It may be the situation that they are in, basically.

Mostly, its children and mostly its child abuse cases where you give them the voice, but

you look at their life circumstances and go, “You really don’t have much of a chance or

no chance. The odds are not with you.” That makes me very sad. I can help in the

moment, but overall, this interview really isn’t gonna change your life a whole lot, one

way or the other.

Abigail noted that the difference between neutrality and advocacy may be between

labeling and describing as a means to humanize someone to a stranger:

I mean I’m not a big fan of labeling, even though there’s a lot of that that goes on, and is

sort of required. I don’t particularly agree with it. We humanize people by pictures of—

because everybody starts out a pretty innocent kid. There’s usually a baby picture

somewhere, or the first five years, or things that are commonly understood, whether it’s a

religious thing, or sports and teams. We try to give the impression that this was a kid, and

started out like most of us. I mean even these guys that just appear to be responsible for

maiming and killing all of these people in Boston probably started out as little kids, with

no likely expectation that they were going to grow up and become terrorists.

That’s the point, and their story, and what happens to them along the way, and

what forms them, is certainly compelling. Everybody universally, generally is born pretty

good and innocent. That’s where I’m coming from. I’m not a follower of psychopathy

and monsters, and this kind of thing.

170

Adam’s work requires him to explain culpability through the life experience of the

accused; an approach, which if it crosses the line between neutrality and advocacy, is may meet

with resistance by courts. Intellectual honesty requires him to frame the discussion, whatever the

blend of roles, with detail because the literature of social science lands on both sides.

There’s enough data to suggest that it’s not true, so what I end up doing with the trauma-

informed writing is I get into the nitty-gritty, awful, terrible, disgusting, revolting details

of the offense, on the trauma. Then I present that, and then it’s harder for them to say this

had nothing to do with it; you know, there was no re-enactment of these behaviors,

especially if somebody went and sought treatment, and the treatment didn’t work out.

Adam was then asked about what those experiences meant to him in terms of advocacy in court:

I mean for me, you know, it’s been incredibly enjoyable, meaning as a source of

intellectual stimulation. To be given a case, and said—whether it was from…directly or

…in these cases the lawyers say this is our dilemma. This is the problem. Can you figure

out something that’s meaningful to the defense? I enjoy the challenge, and I’m drawn to

it because it’s intellectually and otherwise strategically interesting.

Cam added that the boundary between opinion and advocacy can be a function of a

perception between neutral conveyor of facts and the practical knowledge of judge or jury that

the expert is present for one side in a courtroom:

I’m very aware that I'm being watched pretty closely by the jurors in particular. I pretty

much focus on them. I don’t focus on the defendant much at all, because I don’t want to

—they already see me as biased, so if I'm sittin’ there waving and being friendly, in a

sense. I don’t—I would never do that, but I really—I try to be just very professional. I

come in and be very matter of fact. I really don’t have much interaction with the

171

defendant, if any at all, on the stand. I try to make a connection with the defendant when

I’m not on the stand, by just nodding my head and recognizing them or something.

For Diana, the distinction was defined by self-acquired knowledge about the limits of her role,

which she describes in revealing detail below:

Well, I read this little book the first time I went to testify because I was scared to death.

The thing that I learned from that book that was just invaluable was don’t say anything if

you don’t know what you're talking about. The attorneys would try to get me to say

something that I wasn’t able to support. Like they would say, “In your opinion, will this

parent be able to parent their child?”

Forever.

Yeah, and I would say, “I don't know the answer to that. I will tell you what I have

learned about the interactions between this parent and this child. I will tell you what the

impact has been on the child. I will tell you the challenges the child faces as a result of

living in that parent's home. But I'm not going to tell you whether that parent will one day

be able to be a good parent to this child. I don't know the answer to that.…

Well, filling in the knowledge gaps in testimony and in reports. It’s not just a

hypothetical. You’re able to give it texture. I guess would be the best word I could come

up with.

Right. I always made a point of saying, “This is what I saw.” I would tell stories like I’ve

been telling you stories. This is what I have observed, black and white. I have observed

this. Then this is my opinion about what I saw within the context of my role, which is to

diagnose and treat the—I won't say mental illness— diagnose and treat the problems so

that the child can move forward and be more effective.

172

Dwayne likewise described his role as maintaining the integrity of the facts he is trying to

deliver without seeming to argue. In that context, he was asked, in the researcher’s colloquial

language, whether he thought that “jazzy, clinical language and other things that are brought to

the table” were useful in his role as expert, to which he said “Yeah. I don’t really use lingo,

psychobabble” but prefer “to give examples of how it is interfering with the person’s daily life

functioning.” For Emily, even when there is advocacy, there may be positive outcomes but that

skill, like a rookie hitter the first time around the league, can catch up as reputations spread:

Because of my experience, I know they’re aiming in a certain direction, but it is hard

when you have somebody testifying as an expert because it’s more of a monologue than a

yes and no, black and white answer. It’s interesting. I know—I remember early testifying

in misdemeanor cases. What I have found is oftentimes the defendants are just as

enthralled with my testimony cuz I’m explaining to them why they do what they do and

giving them some understanding….I remember in one case, the attorney started coming

after me in kind of a sarcastic way and very pointed. I remember his client just shot him a

dirty look. It was like, “Knock it off I like hearing what she has to say [laughs].”

The rapport and respect which comes with experience may affect the line between

advocacy and neutrality (or the perception of neutrality). This does not make each mutually

exclusive, nor is there any duty to do so. The conundrum is acknowledging the differences so

that advocacy is premised on accurate knowledge of the facts, description, and not speculation or

spin. For clients and consumers the differences are important because integrity may guide the

outcome in court. Thus, Kate thought insight comes from understanding that her expert role is

one of helping others gain accurate information. To do so mean improving one’s own filter first.

173

This is not an easy skill to learn for any professional but is a sign of humility which a privileged

professional should possess. As Kate so insightfully described:

Every day, I walk out of the courtroom. Any day I’m in there, I turn to the attorneys. I’m

like, “I gotta take you to lunch. Please critique.” If I go to myself, I’m sure I can nitpick it

to pieces. Worst time? It’s all—working in child custody and divorce cases, it’s all pretty

difficult. You’ve got the client sitting right there, and you’re sharing some pretty raw,

difficult information that you have to deliver to these people. When you’re testifying, it’s

not as—you can’t soften it as much as you can, sitting in a meeting. You have to be direct

and concise and professional. It lacks the emotion. I think, any time I’m having to expose

areas where a person could use improvement, or is not faring well, it’s hard. Those are

my hard times. Where did I really just blow up? Where did I flub?

At the urging of the researcher, Dwayne was willing to share his methods for the role of

advocate or neutral when he has to testify:

I don’t mind. First, one of them is I prepare well. I can cite by memory when I first saw

someone, when I saw them, what I think is—well, if it’s a clinical case, what’s my

diagnostic opinion, etc. I’ll have kind of a—I’ll go through the file, my memory, write

some important things down, make a plan that—here’s some basic data that I should

know. I prepare myself—the only one that is important in the room at the court is the

judge. He’s the only one I’m talking to. He’s the only one that matters.

You’d be amazed how often that's lost on lawyers. You’ve probably observed it.

Yeah. Oh, seen people go down in flames many times. It’s like, “What are you doing

here?” Nobody else matters. I have some personal practices that I use in that role. I use

some self-calming, self-soothing things; some visualization practices that just help keep

174

me right there. I’m all safe. I’m protected. When I’m in the waiting area before, I don’t

talk to anybody, just by myself. People will come up, especially lawyers, and wanna talk

to me. I don’t. I just wanna stay focused. The only thing on mind is this, absolutely only

thing.

Actually that—that’s an interesting tip I’ve said at some seminars, because clients are

hyper vigilant about stopwatch time and perception. That’s interesting that you—not just

for personal reasons, but for a professional one going in. You’re not there to negotiate a

different deal or to do anything else with the lawyers.

No, I’m—no, I'm not there to argue the case, one of the big things. I have found that

pitfall in colleagues. I talk a lot about this with colleagues, that big trouble—you’re not—

I'm not on anybody’s side. I’m there to say—to be as helpful to the court as I can be

which means saying what I think as clearly and understandably as possible. I have no

forecast of where this goes, what happens.

As described in the prior domain concerning poverty, wealth or poverty impact outcomes.

As Abigail attested, even skilled experts can be skewed (and skewered) by lawyer quality:

Clients who had deep pockets—and part of the success, as you know full well, had to do

with the quality of their representation in court, meaning we all played a role. She did, I

did, other experts did, but without the attorneys that they had the money to hire, it

wouldn’t—I mean you would need a very savvy and sophisticated attorney to be able to

orchestrate all of these reports and use them, even with…guidance, but they had top flight

representation, all of them did.

This point is hardly novel but it bears special comment when the profession must teach

and train social workers to understand the influence of neutrality and advocacy on outcomes and

175

the different ethical and legal duties which flow may bridge or inhibit each role. Jackie suggested

that the courts would benefit from a policy solution which accounted for the quality of experts in

all cases: “courts should develop expert groups of people who are qualified to do that work and

they should regularly refer to them instead of to just who happens to be around or who happens

to come up and offer, which is how apparently it’s happened. It’s very random. It’s random how

it happens.” This is a fair and important point but until that time, the key is teaching and training

expert social workers before they appear before a judge or jury, because the wrong choice has

serious consequences to client and community.

Theme 4: Judges and Juries Judging

Individuals and family systems that enter a relationship with social work frequently have

a forced connection with adjudicatory systems. This is simply a reality of life today in a culture

that uses courts to resolve disputes or enforce public policies (immigration, divorce, crime,

domestic violence) from the mundane to the horrific. Care must be exercised, however. For

purposes of this research, no effort was made to distinguish between jury and nonjury trials. In

criminal law, and with certain limitations, any crime that can result in imprisonment implicates

the right to request a jury trial. Juries of lay people from the community decide the facts based

upon instructions about the law from the judge. In civil (non-criminal) cases, that right to a jury

is more restricted by tradition and law. Most family court matters are nonjury, which means one

judge decides the facts and applies the law.

Yet the impact of adversarial systems on families should not be lost here. Adam was

asked about that point and noted the “psychosocial impact of family law, I think it’s hard to

describe. I think most families that have been through a lot of litigation feel truly traumatized by

the litigation itself, independent of all of the stuff that’s gone on. The way in which the system

176

here in…, which is not simply adversarial, but sanctioned adversarial, there’s no checks and

balances on the level and degree to which it becomes adversarial.” Another preliminary point of

importance is that judges are lawyers who become judges; a fact of life often forgotten or even

unknown by the public. The professional indoctrination of the players is a critical point in the

dissection of any interdisciplinary relationship.

Theodore captured his “dealings with lawyers” as against social workers with these

words: “Lawyers are great. Lawyers are great, because lawyers aren’t ideologues. They’re

practical. They’re always open to what I have to say, if it benefits their clients.” Whether one

accepts this premise so broadly is a subject for another discussion. Assuming it is true for

purposes of this paper, and the same could be said of judges trained as lawyers, institutions

change people and professionals are people subject to the forces of institutions when empowered

to judge others. Nevertheless, the art and act of judging is beyond the scope of this paper. Yet,

this very act, repeated many thousands of time annually in the United States, is not a benign act

but occurs within a litany of social constructions, rules, social norms, and laws. Kate noted that

clients rarely understand what that really means until the door opens and the expert appears:

The courtroom’s a little different, because—and you raise an interesting point that I’ve

reflected on, but I actually hadn’t asked anybody. I should’ve. That is, when you’re

sitting, working with the couples…you need to understand, this is a much kinder, gentler

place than the courtroom. In the courtroom, any guardian ad litem or child custody

evaluator sitting on the stand is gonna hafta tell it like it is. The message gets delivered.

There are two human beings sitting there. A lot of them feel like they get betrayed. You

see it in their face when you’re sitting on the stand. I’ve been there. That message, in a

kind way, didn’t get delivered on the stand.

177

Understanding the rituals of courts, however, is precisely the challenge when LICSWs

enter the courthouse to proffer the knowledge to label, to categorize, and to interpret. By itself,

this is an extraordinarily powerful function. As an expert, Janet framed her response to the role

of a judge as a matter of language; an important lesson that is too rarely discussed:

I have several things I wanna say about that. In the context in which I was working, and

also in that I was serving as an expert witness, I needed to be cautious to stick with the

language of my profession—the malingering language—rather than using the term

credibility. Because that, of course, was the purview of the judge or …—to make a

credibility determination. I found, however, that some of my clients’ attorneys would ask

me, “Did you find so-and-so credible?”

Sometimes the judge would let it go; other judges would get really upset, and so I

would suggest, when the attorney was open to this, that they might consider—could

report the same kind of information, but to ask me instead about did I do a malingering

assessment, et cetera. Some judges, however, would directly ask me did I find so-and-so

credible, but that being said—and this is something that I weave into my role—I was a

supervisor of other social workers for many years, and also now in my social work

students—is that often you may never know.

In response to a similar question concerning language, Paul explained that because “the

court, being the judge, is a lay person with respect to diagnosing personality disorders and

mental illnesses. I’d rather describe it in laymen’s terms, which is, ‘Here are the behaviors I’ve

been seeing.’ Rather than saying, ‘This person has a borderline personality disorder.’ I think it

means more and is more helpful to the court, and is less stigmatizing of the person.” Emily

explained that the reason for an expert was to translate thoughts that others may not understand:

178

I just testified—it was a child homicide case. The defendant was the male; he had killed

the child. At issue was the fact that the child lingered with injuries for several days. The

mother did not take the child to get medical treatment until right at the very end….What

the DA needed was for me to—for me to help them understand why a mother would not

protect her child by being in those circumstances, and she was so unlikable, the DA was

concerned that the jury would almost buy the defense argument, which was, well, maybe

she did it; you know, create that doubt that maybe she did those injuries because she was

so unlikable. My job was kind of to help the jury understand the dynamic, so that maybe

they wouldn’t have such a personal animosity toward her, and they might better

understand why she didn’t seek medical care for the child that died.

Emily summarized her experience as: “I think by having an expert up there it does help

get the truth out. From the very first time I testified, I thought, wow, I have 12 citizens that I get

to educate to help them understand better about domestic violence. It’s funny when you watch

the jurors’ faces because you’ll see some that just are taking furious notes and they’re nodding in

agreement.” With insight tempered by experience, she proceeded to explain why:

It’s almost like you wonder, “Am I describing your Aunt Betty?” I mean, “Am I

describing your sister’s relationship?” Then you have others that just have this stoic look

on their face like, “oh, please don’t let her figure out that I’m actually living that.” In fact,

I started to call the DA on this last one and say, “I think you have a couple batterers on

your jury. There were some that were very uncomfortable with what I was saying and

physically turning away.”

Nevertheless, there is the darker side to any institution so dependent upon the

predilections of a judge acting with virtually unlimited power in that moment. (A myth is that the

179

right to appeal is the same as winning an appeal. Appeals take years, cost substantial amounts of

money, and trial judges are accorded deference for their rulings).This does not mean that the

human beings who choose to become judges are not, by vast majority, ethical and intelligent,

conscious of their power and acting with restraint and respect for the rule of law. However, any

system (social work or law) is dependent upon protecting others from the worst not the best.

Abigail told her story from this experience:

I’ve seen a county in…, where the judge is the king, and the fiefdom is his town, his

community, and he runs everything, from shutting down the jail, to keeping the jury

sequestered until midnight, to doing whatever he wants to do. It’s his own little fiefdom.

Unbelievable, it was shocking, some of the things that went on. Then I’ve seen judges

who I felt were very fair and supportive. I’ve had judges that do not know anything about

how to do a capital case, and I have to testify before them, to just explain who I am and

what my role is, even here in…. There’s just a wide variety.

In contrast, Jackie described her observation of judges during chamber conferences,

which is the phrase used to describe when the judge meets with lawyers and other persons

outside the courtroom and usually off-the-record. Even within the legal profession there is a

dearth of literature or training on this topic. For lawyers, this practice can be intimidating or

enlightening. For LICSWs, it is as if they fell down the rabbit hole between perception—

generated from television and the movies—and some other reality. Jackie shared her opinion of

how positive outcomes may be enhanced in court:

I mean, number one, a judge who is well versed in the reasons for the interdiction

guardianship and the possible pitfalls and kinda the overall, what the judge needs to put

in place to make it work well, that would be one thing, just a well-oriented judge who’s

180

careful. Second of all, the time and the format of doing something like case conferences,

meetings in chambers, to plan well what the motions and the judgments ought to be on

behalf of the client, a collaborative work style, a collaborative backdrop to it. Third of all,

competent attorneys who aren’t overwhelmed, burned out, or completely biased, of which

I’ve worked with some, and just making it—I would say more than almost that is a good

attorney guardian relationship so that there’s a sense of what work needs to be done and

get it done efficiently….

More recently, pertaining to another judge who had recently been moved up to an appellate

court, Jackie noted that these same “chambers meetings were useless because he really just

wanted to get ‘em over with. He didn’t really put any thought into it. I really have just no respect

for how he handled the end of this case. I mean I’ve had both excellent experience of a meeting

that really meant something that was making—almost like—almost really like a social work case

conference, planning what should happen with the family and the brain-injured patient until the

next status conference six months later.”

One of the key reasons for exploring these research questions is sharing the experience of

LICSWs so as to facilitate changes between disciplines, or at least share experiences as a

warning that this is a human system with human variables and human foibles. Erin shared this

powerful experience in court as an expert:

The judge was female, a woman. I think I was naïve and, again, went in there, my first

experience, having trust—cuz I’d been told by the attorneys that the judges respect the

expert witnesses. That was not my experience.

Is that experience the same today, or was that one, and then not at all?

181

I think it was—I found out later that this particular judge—in fact, the guardian ad litem

was shocked by her treatment of me. On the last day, she ended up discontinuing the trial

because she had her nephew’s baseball game to go to. When the trial was resuming, I was

out of town. I’d already had this—I was going for training. I did not finish my testimony.

The guardian actually stood up and confronted the judge on how she treated me. She

admitted she says, “I am not proud of that.” Find out later, she was having some extreme

problems of her own, marital problems, and other things. She retired shortly after. I

understand now that that was a particular, just a—but, to have my first exposure as an

expert witness was—I was in shock.

Even with the random walk through any courthouse in any part of the country, most

participants had positive things to say about judges, but with the caveat that more education

should be done. Zeta, for example, responded to this question, as follows:

One of the problems at the top is educating judges, the way judges are appointed to

understand the difference too because they’re the gatekeepers.

They are the gatekeepers. Some of them are wonderful gatekeepers, and I don’t always

agree with what they’ve decided. They use sound logic when they explain why, and you

go, “Well, I don’t like it, but okay.” It certainly makes sense, and others are clueless, and

—

That’s a lot of danger out there in the community to have clueless—

It is, and trying to educate judges is difficult on a good day.

Theodore shared Zeta’s point at least in one area of practice: “My experience with the

family court system in general is that it is incredibly dysfunctional, incredibly dysfunctional.”

Sandy believed, however, that judges respect the need for expertise and want input to help make

182

the decision making process more effective: “Most of the time I feel like the judges are hearing

me and getting what I’m saying and really appreciate the input. Here they are, like the judges at

our conferences sometimes say you don’t want me making family decisions from the bench. We

want people like the therapists in there.” Paul framed his experience this way:

The positive is, I walk into the court with the assumption that, the assumption by the

court that I’m walking into that I’m respectful, that I’m competent, that I have something

to offer the court, and that I will be cut a whole lot of slack. I think as a social worker

guardian that is especially true. I don’t know the lawyer. I know I’m not a lawyer. I can

sometimes really and sometimes strategically get away with some slack there. It’s a good

—that’s a positive for me to walk into a place that assumes that wants me there and

assumes I’m competent.

Paul reflected on his experience with outcomes in court but with this metaphor:

I had called that my coin tosses case for quite a while, [laughs] it really was. The judge

was it was helpful to me actually to understand that. It’s one of the first times I did

understand that. He ruled by point of law. That’s what he used as the basis for the ruling

rather than anything else, which told me it was probably a coin toss for him too after

hearing the evidence. He was maybe gonna have to back it up within a feel or things that

I don’t really understand. Well I understand them better now, but so that was how he

wrote the decision. Was based on the point of law, the burden of proof that there had

been a change of circumstance was not met.

Dwayne actually had “very little, if any, criticism for the court system. Sometimes I find,

and I guess the—what I would suggest would be taking someone like me, not me, but in the

position, and asking them. I've been sitting there hoping to get asked certain kinds of questions,

183

like what you've just asked, and haven't been, so I don't. I'm not gonna impose or infer my

thoughts on that in the process.” When asked if judges know “nothing” about most of these

topics, Dwayne rejected that statement from his experience:

I don’t agree that they know nothing. I think our judges are pretty savvy for the most part.

About mental health as much as anybody outside their own discipline. I think how

parents present themselves plays a huge role. Perhaps more than the facts and that may be

my bias as a social worker where I’m saying 90 percent is the rapport that you create with

a person. I am aware of that, of how people present themselves. I think judges are too. I

can’t tell you one specific thing.

Indeed, Dwayne has been consistently impressed with the judges “I've worked with on their

demeanor, their contemplative nature, the questions they've asked. I always love it when—I

know I'm in sync if the judge tells everybody to sit down and he or she wants to talk to me,

which happens. My job there is to be as clear in communication, as specific as possible….I work

on my detachment to the outcome. I’m—that's not my job. That’s the judge’s job….[it is] not

personal, no. If it was personal, then I couldn’t do this. Being detached then is kind of freeing.”

Diana, however, shared an opinion between that of Paul and Dwayne when asked about

her observations of judges inside the artifice of a courtroom:

He would genuinely question, like he wanted to know from the foster parent how things

were going, what they were seeing, what they thought the child needed. He was

genuinely, genuinely concerned about that. Really, really would, if the child was old

enough, and not be too intimidated, he would speak with the child. My role with that

judge, though he was always respectful and he listened, I always had the sense that I was

just a cog, a piece of the puzzle but certainly not the most critical [emphasis added].

184

Yet, as Abigail sagely observed, there is hardly a sense of equity in some court circumstances

when being that cog may fail to change outcomes:

I just did a federal alternate sentencing case, to try to get a young woman a lighter

sentence who was quite desperate. Had three children, currently an infant nursing, and

this judge still gave her more time than—he upwardly departed from the guidelines, the

sentencing guidelines unnecessarily. He was harsher than—

Was it another drug case?

She was a…agent. Yeah, it was a drug case, but it was—she was just a sort of—the least

culpable, ignorant, young mother. It was—of all the people, she’s going to raise kids.

This is not the person that you probably want to punish. That’s the next generation, it’s

perpetuating the cycle. That’s my bleeding heart social work perspective.

No, it’s—well, but—

He thought she was a national security threat. I thought she was just a desperate young

mother because I interviewed her and her family. I could see the situation. She was a

victim of domestic violence, and he was—he thought she was the worst—one of his

worst defendants ever. It’s a different perspective.

The federal court system.

He read my report, and he said, “Oh, I would have given her five years, but I’m only

going to give her two years, because of your report.” We all still thought that was shitty,

because we really just wanted her not to have to do jail time, while she had a baby at

home.

One of the lessons from these experiences is that outcomes really do depend upon the

randomness of the judge selection, which may include the court system (federal or state),

185

geography (which state), the unique factual and demographic elements of the case, and the skills

of the lawyers and experts. The influence on the judge that the person may harm someone on his

or her watch (particularly in IPV cases) is frequently an unspoken factor. In a sentencing case,

Adam found that the judge respected his clinical licensure when that role was based upon science

and fact rather than just opinion but with that caveat:

Absolutely. He wanted to know if there was a departure from the sentencing guidelines.

He was pretty clear. I don’t want to have this kid come back to me. He was a young man

at this point in his…, and he was obviously elected. You know, I don’t want to come

back and have people say to me, you know, Danny Blank did X, Y, and Z. He was very

clear. He said, look, I don’t want this coming back, so if it’s not gonna come back, you

need to tell me, or if you think it’s not gonna come back, you need to tell me why. Why

should I do something in this that’s different from the sentencing guidelines?....

He was a conscientious judge, but I think in part, because he was a term [not

lifetime appointment] judge, he was extremely conscientious. It didn’t matter ultimately,

lifetime appointment, you know, but he asked great—in fact, at least half of that two and

a half hours was just responding to him. He was very conversational. I mean I was here

and he was here, and he made good eye contact, and if I said something he didn’t

understand, or that he didn’t believe was true, he’d say, I don’t get it, or I don’t think that

makes sense, or why should I believe that, or is there any science on that.

That case we also had a SPECT study done, and so we had some real hard science

about his brain. Because I’m a social worker, if I talk about it, I can talk about it in a way

that’s more conversational. If they put a doctor up, saying the exact same thing, then

people start glazing over.

186

Adam suggested that on balance, in criminal cases and unlike family law, judges have

been better overall in his experience because “these are judges that have excellent defense

representation in front of them, so they’re probably on their game more than they would be

otherwise, but my overall impression is they’re conscientious. They read what’s been written,

and that they’re prepared, and that sometimes they’re willing to take testimony as you know, and

sometimes they’re not.” He then added this warning for others:

I think it’s truly a crap shoot, the chances of getting a good judge versus a bad

judge….It’s just literally, roll the dice. You can get a judge that didn’t read anything, read

stuff and made up his mind, or her mind, within minutes, people who favor fathers,

people who favor mothers, people who don’t want to do anything, that are status quo

judges. There are a lot of those that elicit lots of professional opinions so they don’t have

to make up their own minds, and then when they get it, still have trouble making up their

minds. The criminal system, especially the federal judges, are just much more competent,

and to my mind, do their jobs.

Victoria shared an empathetic view of judges on balance: “I think judges…get burned out

after a while and he was just sort of ruling later or not ruling at all toward the end. There was a

case I was involved in, a terrible alienation case. I think the court guide just had had it. Nothing

happened for a long time. Judge….I think worked so hard at being—really doing the right thing.

He really did. There were a couple of others. I think it's a hard job. I mean, I think in general they

do their best but if I lost sleep I can't imagine what it was like for them.” At the same time, Kate

expressed an important sentiment which plays off Victoria’s words: respect between the burden

and role of judge and expert should be one of reciprocity not dominance. Ultimately, each shares

187

the common root as filters for the thoughts and behaviors of other humans. As Kate eloquently

summarized from her experiences:

I think, on that same token that I say, “Please know I’m doing my best, and that I’m not

just bilking clients out of money,” we need to see the commissioners and judges as

working as hard as they can. They also take this seriously. We, as professionals, get the

ins and outs. We get the specific details. We ask for it. We get that. We get to talk to

other people. We get to do all of that stuff that they don’t have the ability to do, because

of the time constraints and their role, simply their role. They are trying to make the best

decisions with the limited amount of information that they have. That’s what I think that

they are truly trying to do. I think, unfortunately, they too get burned out, and stop caring,

and stop wanting to be a part of the process, and just sort of—….

I’ve been very lucky, very lucky with the judges I’ve been before. In the moment,

I’ve thought they’ve been a little dismissive and just not interested. In retrospect, after

reading the findings and everything, they were listening the whole time. I didn’t read 'em

right. The other ones have not. They’re protective and kind. I love that they have follow-

up questions, if I didn’t say something that they’re wondering. They always ask. I think

that’s great, cuz it tells me that they’re putting effort into the case. That’s important. I’ve

felt very fortunate with the judges we’ve had.

At present, judges are restricted by ethics and law to sitting on the bench with rituals in

place: witnesses testify, get cross-examined, and a judge or jury renders a decision. Sandy

recognized that there limits to what one person can discern as truth in such a rigid setting. One

risk is that the expert will be seen as compromised or biased for testifying to a narrative which

may be factually accurate but appears skewed to the fact finder:

188

One thing I find very peculiar, ‘cause I specialize in domestic violence at least in my

mind; I like working with domestic violence, is that it doesn’t always get perceived the

right way as you said, and sometimes they don’t hear what we’re saying. You try to

insulate a person that’s having the coercive control, and it—then you get accused of not

being impartial. If you think about impartiality the way I do it’s—you’re impartial, you

look at the components that you have and you deal with them the way they are. I’ve seen

people try to be so impartial that they put the victim at risk.

On a similar note Emily observed “an interesting phenomenon with judges that is very

similar to law enforcement officers, and that is they see enough DV, enough victims recanting,

they get very jaded and hardened in their responses. It’s kinda like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah….Okay,

that makes sense, but we have all these other cases,” so it’s harder to convince them that, you

know, taking a different tack....I mean they—what you find is most in domestic violence, and

this is one of few crimes where everybody gets mad at the victim, and they do. They blame the

victim for this continuing to go on, and so they tend to be a little hard to talk with.” Theodore

suggested that any such bias may be from the other direction as judges reflect societal beliefs

rather than the actual facts or research data:

Judges need to just have some morality check about—yes, if there’s a valid

documentation of domestic violence, of course that impacts kids. We know it does. Does

it impact kids in every case more than child abuse, direct child abuse, or alcohol abuse?

There are parents that are very domineering. There are parents that are just flat-out crazy.

They affect their children in all kinds of dysfunctional ways. Should their parental rights

be put above maybe a parent who occasionally gets angry and throws things? It’s a

189

legitimate question. I can’t answer all those, but I think judges need to have some

guidelines for dealing with that.

For the most part, many social workers enter court with impressions shared by Victoria:

“I think I had a very idealized view of a Solomon-like person sitting on a bench and that

everybody would be there to support the best interests of the child. What I really saw, whoever

had the best lawyer—and by best I mean who could make things appear a certain way—they

won. The child didn't win, in my opinion.” Abigail offered her view in the same vein as Victoria:

“No, it’s not effective in getting the truth out. Whoever’s the better lawyer usually wins, and the

truth doesn’t necessarily come out. The common person who’s before the court doesn’t

understand the lingo and most of what’s going on. It’s a power, there is a power structure.”

Adam merged several of these themes: the intersection of available money and the lack of

creative resources for managing caseloads:

Where you really see this sort of kind of carnage of bad lawyering, and bad judging….if

you have two combatants who have money, and they fall into the high conflict

category….It just engenders and fosters more, and more, and more ridiculous crazy

litigation. Often judges don’t set firm limits with these families, and say, I don’t want to

see you back here with this kind of garbage in front of me. It goes on and on.

What the public often misses is that court orders are not self-executing documents but

pieces of paper that require the government to enforce by reward or sanction. As Maggie points

out, “I would like the judges to know that a ruling from the bench may sound good in theory, but

the practicality of implementing it with my client may be difficult.” On this point, Dwayne was

asked to consider what he thought prevents folks from implementing orders: “courts not a

solution. It can order all kinds of things, and does every day, that people aren’t gonna do. What’s

190

gonna happen? Only in extreme cases might there be something that happens. Plus, people don’t

know how to do that. Now, they’re still mad. Well, they lost and so I’m mad. When I’m mad I

don't think….Well, the courts on a rational, logical level and people are on emotional, behavioral

level.” This point blends a reality that needs to be shared because the classroom is quite different

than reality in the courtroom as reflected by these experiences.

Summary

The experience of being an expert in court, with all its nuances and permutations, may

well begin with an observation that the expert role is connected to the profoundly complex

universe of lawyers and judges. While this may seem axiomatic, it is not. Unlike television

shows, which capture a beginning and end in an hour, actual court cases occur within over years,

not hours. Professionals holding the metaphorical skull of some parent or child may whisper

“Alas, poor Yorick” in generous sympathy but that feeling is insufficient by itself. (Not to carry

the jester metaphor from Hamlet too far but the skull can also be the unprepared expert, the

bumbling lawyer, or the burned out judge). As Judge Jerome Frank wrote more than eight

decades ago, “The essence of the basic legal myth or illusion is that the law can be entirely

predictable. Back of this illusion is the childish desire to have a fixed-father controlled universe,

free of chance and error due to human infallibility” (Frank, 1930, p. 34). These myths and

illusions create great risk of harm to the public and the professionals. Ignorance of the functions

and structures of this constitutional institution, ignorance of the rules and norms that guide the

hidden hand of judgment, ignorance of the potential distortion of values and ethics, all should be

the subject of critical analysis by social work, including the emergent themes described below.

191

Fourth Domain: Emergent Themes

Theme 1: Interdisciplinary Experiences

In many respects, interdisciplinary collaboration begins with respect for the boundaries of

each profession. Erin gains her control by imposing conditions that must be accepted by the

lawyers and clients before she will act as a reunification therapist, for example, including the fact

that she will not testify. As she explained:

The attorneys went crazy when I imposed my conditions and argued with me. I’m like,

“You don’t have to use me. Go find someone else to do it, then, but this is how I do it. If

you can’t agree to it, then I’m the wrong person.” Ultimately, they decided to use me, and

use my model that I use. That’s—yes, absolutely my work with the courts and with

attorneys, I have—I’m at a place in my career where I don’t have to take every case that

comes along. I’m selective anyway. That sounds maybe terrible, but it depends if the

attorneys will support me.

In similar fashion, Erin is “constantly educating attorneys” when they would “call and

say, ‘Hey, I have this case, would you just see this kid in therapy and let us know if he should be

with dad?’ I’m like, “No, I won’t. This is what it needs, this kind of evaluation.’ They’re like,

‘Really? Why can’t you just do that?’ Cuz it’s unethical, and this is such an important—this is so

important.” Thus, learning to establish boundaries for the social worker expert begins with an

understanding of professional hierarchies in a host environment like the courts. This invokes the

need for cross-discipline training, which may provide a common language for exploring and

explaining ethical and evidence-informed interventions. As Tammy succinctly stated, “social

192

work education is good for lawyers.” A plausible argument could be made that the inverse is

equally true before any professional is exposed to an environment operated by another discipline.

It is also important, however, to avoid too many generalizations. Some professional

specialties may already encourage the implementation and integration of interdisciplinary

practices more than other specialties. In geriatrics, for example, Jackie explained, “there’s much

more of a culture around interdisciplinary [practices because] there’s a lot of post graduate

school education going on.” Jackie specifically conceded that it “was more difficult to be

collaborative in those legally based cases because that’s not in general how the court system

apparently works. In those situations I mentioned, sometimes it did and that was great when it

was at its best, where the judge was working with the players and trying to get some movement

going and some goals, really.” Likewise, in Janet’s field, she had “worked across my whole

career, worked as part of an interdisciplinary team” and that:

Key teammates have tended to be physicians, both people from a variety of different

specialty areas, including psychiatry, psychologists, some other professionals as well….I

needed to be careful to stick within the scope of my expertise in what I would

present….What I have found is that often, on the teams that I’ve worked with, it’s the

social worker who is able to spend the most time with the client. I feel like we have a lot

to contribute to the forensic work. We have some very valuable and relevant things—

each case varies—but many relevant things that we can contribute to the record. This

conversation also has been, in part, about how—or, in my mind, anyway—how we as

social workers need to and should frame that, and how that knowledge and evidence

should be presented, even in terms of being conscious of our own role; the limits to our

role and demeanor as we present that.

193

The conversation with Janet continued with the researcher posing the declaration that,

“There’s a lot of power in saying somebody’s a liar, too” to which she responded: “There’s a lot

of power. This is where it was very valuable to be part of an interdisciplinary team, with multiple

professionals who had also spent, in my context, a lot of time with the individual; being able to

consult as treatment team members and/or forensic evaluators of the person—their independent

opinions about that.” When Abigail was questioned about what she thinks influences positive

outcomes, she responded like Janet in that, “Yeah, well when the team is a strong team that

works well together, and meets regularly, communicates, sees the client regularly and there is a

lot of strong, positive leadership and communication.” Sandy shared a similar sentiment:

When you’ve observed people across disciplines and across fields is there a common skill

set that you see in the people that do it well?

Yes, let me think of how to put it into words. I think you need to be compassionate and

responsive and very assertive all at the same time. Be able to validate people; I

understand that you see a pink elephant. Nobody else really sees that pink elephant, so

we’re gonna go on the assumption that it’s not there kind of thing. Be able to work with

people that are really, really upset and hostile without making them feel really small

Maggie agreed that “one of the advantages that a social worker has as opposed to some of

the other clinicians on that team, is that we generally have a real good read of the family system,

the dynamics within the system that we can hear about, learn about, push through to come to the

reality of what’s happening for the client. Social workers, I think have a good skill package to be

able to do that.” Maggie also acknowledged, however, an experience common to LICSWs in

other host environments in that, “let me tell you my frustration in the medical community.

194

Unfortunately, social workers are not thought of very highly and when there is an attempt to

openly disagree the medical community, specifically doctors, discounts social work.”

Sandy recalled a common enough (and often frustrating) experience, similar to what

Maggie mentioned, when LICSWs find themselves appointed to interdisciplinary committees

intended to generate change in practices or procedures:

I was on a committee to help define relative or friend supervision of visits, and I may

have been the only social worker. There were attorneys, judges, psychologists; some

people were judges—or lawyers and psychologists. We just kind of get thrown in with

multi-disciplinary teams. It’s not a social work thing. We don’t get set aside—we don’t

get noticed independently.

Victoria opined, from her experiences across disciplines that “one of the problems for social

workers, being on an equal standing in these environments….Oh, I know. We’re seen as sort of

these touchy-feely—I would try really hard, that’s why I did the research, because I know social

workers are viewed sometimes in this—we’re these ooey-gooey people who just want peace,

love and brotherhood. I’ve run into that. I think any social workers run into that.”

Paul suggested that “you very rarely see an LICSW in the kind of forensic work I do. It’s

mainly dominated by clinical psychologists and psychiatry. Frankly there’s no question in my

mind, if I couldn’t write as well as I do, then I would never have this access to these cases.” Paul

went on to explain that social work may begin by teaching its own knowledge rather than

investing so much on other disciplines:

Do you think that the social work, there’s a burden of sort of establishing itself on an

equal plane with those other two disciplines you mentioned?

Yes. I think, you know….

195

Does that go back to the critical thinking and chronology?

Yeah. I think if you look at it from the standpoint of who does most of the writing in

terms of the articles and books that…uses, at least 50 percent are from psychology and

psychiatry—and maybe as much as 60 to 70 percent, depending on the concentration

you’re in—so their own selection of material comes from outside their own discipline.

How they feel about that—you know, I mean to me, I was always surprised that they

couldn’t generate a full curriculum out of MSW or LCSWs. It didn’t seem to bother other

people very much.

Paul’s point is important in the context of the experiences of other participants. It may be

re-framed as engaging critical thinking skills which integrate social work knowledge without

subsuming that knowledge beneath other disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach that shapes

informed policy requires effective collaboration which, by its nature, encourages unified

perspectives toward research and practices (Satin, 2009; Satterfield, Spring, Brownson, Mullen,

Newhouse, Walker, & Whitlock, 2009). Collaboration within the court system, in particular,

requires the complex integration of individual skills, professional disciplines, and organizational

sensitivity. Few studies have even attempted to understand these dynamics. The experiences of

the participants with IPV practice yielded an emergent example of differences to be waged

within social work before these become fodder for the courtroom.

Theme 2: Evolution of the IPV the Experience

The inclusion of IPV in the interview guide was informed by the knowledge of the

researcher because social workers frequently offer expert testimony in both the civil and criminal

arenas concerning IPV: Why did she stay in the home? Why did the defendant do what he did to

her? Why should the sentence be mitigated by past biopsychosocial history? Each of these

196

questions, and many others, implicate training, education, and values. What was not anticipated

was the range of opinions which emerged concerning evidence-informed practice and courts.

Theodore started with his experience in “social work school,” in which “we all learned

about psychoanalytic theory, which is just malarkey. Freud was—we know now that Freud’s

cases were primarily women that had actually been sexually abused. He was a fraud, in many

ways. We still celebrate Freud in many ways. He told us about the unconscious, so that’s good.

He’s also perpetrated fraud, so what about that?” Theodore then added these experiences:

For years and years, I’ve really struggled to be very accommodating with the advocates,

and try to reason with them. I’ve decided, they’re like climate deniers, or scientologists.

They’re ideologues, and they’re really not interested in learning anything new. What I tell

them is, “I’m on your side. I wanna reduce domestic violence in our communities. I

happen to think that the best way to do that is to get the facts, and to base treatment on

research. If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine. I would encourage you to read the

research and make up your own mind.” I just leave it at that….I don’t waste a lot of

energy trying to argue with them anymore, cuz they’re just—especially the worst, the

most hardened ideologues are the ones in the family court system who are convinced that

all these dads who batter their wives are getting custody of their kids. They keep citing

journal articles that supposedly show that all these dads are getting custody of their kids

who are violent. Turns out that these articles don’t really say that.

Sandy somewhat recognized this point in that “we know, like with domestic violence, it

can’t all be science. There’s a lot of art to it. Yes, we can look at the books and say okay, this fits

here, but there is something that you have to be able to recognize as a clinician that can’t be

taught.” Kate shared her experience based upon her observations:

197

I have a personal bias, I guess I would have to call it, regarding the—at least in…, or

maybe even just the…—the approach that our domestic violence groups have taken, in

the sense that it is always the women who is the victim, and it is always the man who is

the perpetrator. When confronted that with, or challenged with that, they struggle to even

realize that men can be victim. They say that they can. Yes, of course men can be

victims, but—that kind of an approach. When I’m working with clients, I really try to—

that there is some kind of dominance, whatever that may be, if it’s emotional, physical,

financial, isolation, whatever it may be—I try to look at it openly. That’s the key thing. I

don’t want to take either side, or find that I’m not appreciating the perspective of the

other person. I really try to be balanced in that. I talk to both sides about it, is one of the

things that I try to do.

Ultimately, Theodore argued that this conundrum or “huge contradiction” is, “Ironically,

a vestige of sexism. It’s benevolent sexism….It’s like treating women like children. That’s, in

fact, what’s going on. It’s like society has progressed in a bifurcated way in the field of domestic

violence. On the one hand, women are now in positions where they can enjoy greater economic

freedom, and be working outside the home and contributing, and working in jobs they could

never work at before. When it comes to the family court system, it’s like the 1950s” In contrast,

Emily shared her view of the way women are treated and understood within the court system

through words which reflect the tension between getting women to advocate for themselves

without a risk of that backfiring in court:

I think what bothers me for the victim advocacy part is if you really listen to the victims

you’re dealing with, in most cases; they just want the violence to stop. They’re not trying

to kick him to curb; they just want the violence to stop. Who are you serving, and who

198

wants to go into a shelter? You know, who wants to go into a—like one of the shelters

I’ve seen is like a duplex. Me and my screwed up, emotional self and my screwed up

emotional kids hooking up with you in the other side of the room and we have to share

these living quarters.

There’s a lot—and then I’ve seen for some in the victim advocacy a very best at

role in maintaining the victim advocacy instead of stopping family violence, and so

there’s that resistance. I think, well—and to kinda bring us back to the family law, so she

leaves him. He’s still the father of these children. She leaves him. Now she has to go to

family law and, especially if there’s no criminal support, now she has to try to fight for

custody of her kids in the emotional state that she’s in. More often than not, loses them or

gets really strange visitation that isn’t in the best interests of the kids. How did we help

her by not doing something with him, by not helping him?

Emily reminded us that these differences of opinion should not cause social work to lose

sight of the core objective of reducing IPV and finding ways to engage positive change:

I’m very much pro family. I think that is the—that is the foundation of a society is

healthy families. If we believe what we say, which is 80 percent of batterers come outta

homes of domestic violence, then that means most of this violence has been learned and

it’s just passing generation to generation. Being able to break that generational cycle,

realizing that when you look at some of the violent crimes that take place, oftentimes it’s

by people who’ve come out of these homes of violence and it’s the only language they

know to resolve conflict or to deal with their own internal issues.

Because demonizing consumers, colleagues, or other professionals is not a strategy consistent

with social justice values, Emily described how she helps engage positive change:

199

A lot of acceptance. A lot of helping them understand why they did what they did. One of

the men was paroling at I think it was like the 18th session. He said, “I wish I could come

back just for this class because I’m learning so much.” I said, “What you guys taught

me,” which is why I have a different curriculum than most of what’s out there.

I said, “What you guys taught me was how could I expect you to love and respect

somebody else when you don’t know what love and respect looks like or feels like? How

could I expect you to appreciate you hurt somebody else’s feelings when you don’t even

know what your own feelings are?” Just as the social worker has to start where the client

is, that’s exactly what I learned was I had to start where they were….

We get to talking about their own emotions and why that’s difficult. What I have

found in this work is I meet their needs first. You know, let’s deal with your trauma; let’s

deal with your loss. We’re gonna identify that; we’re gonna validate it. Then, the victim

empathy part is, “So, what do you think your partner would answer on this? What do you

think the mother of your children would answer if we give her this questionnaire?” It gets

them to move into that section.

What became apparent, at least from the perspective of these participants, was their

passion for understanding and remediating IPV as a social problem. For Theodore, “domestic

violence is not a gender issue. It’s a human issue.” Paul likewise expressed the need to address

both the cause and effect of IPV because he “didn’t believe that only putting band aids on

individual women was the answer to the problem. We needed to address how men were feeling,

and why they were behaving that way in the first place. That was more interesting to me

frankly.” For these participants, an effective approach to IPV which emerged, albeit in limited

form because of the limitations of the researcher’s approach, should encourage a drift from

200

ideology, which categorizes who gets helped and who gets punished by the courts and society, to

a deeper means of prevention and safety.

For social work the past five decades, IPV theory implicated patriarchal control and

violence within the domains of family intimacy, conflict (overt, verbalized, or oppressive),

gender differentiations that are contextual and situational, and elements of domination and

oppression (Gilfus, Trabold, O’Brien, & Fleck-Henderson, 2010). By itself, differences of

opinion in the context of treatment, punishment, and fact-finding may portend a change on the

horizon for social work. What kind of change to the world and how the profession constructively

and ethically integrates that change from the classroom to trainings remains a challenge?

Theme 3: Changing the World (or at Least the System)

Given the diverse and extraordinary experiences and credentials of the participants, the

researcher began to ask a “Harry Potter” question after several interviews. The purpose was

curiosity, a respect for their acquired wisdom, and the sense that any research of this type should

be careful to find the positive in the experience. What a transcript can never reveal is the sense of

humor (dark or not), the look of wistfulness, or the momentary pause that overcomes

professionals who have served others for so long. Debbie shared her belief that “A family’s not a

corporation. It can’t be divided” and her response reflected that core belief:

There’s so much emotional stuff that, when I’m queen of the world [laughter], divorce

will not go through courts. Laws should not end families. I understand sometimes

financially, and things like that, maybe the court needs to be involved in, and sometimes I

guess the parents just cannot work it out. But I think the vast majority of the times, if

there was someone there to help them through the emotional stuff that they would be

better prepared to work it out….

201

I wanna take it one step further than you do. I wanna put parenting classes in the

schools. Under stress, we go back to what we do, which is how our parents parented. We

don’t know that there are other ways. When I worked in the schools, the vast majority of

parents wanted what was best for their kids, but they had no idea, especially the low-

income that had to work so hard just to get food on the table. They didn’t have a lot of

time to deal with the other issues, let alone the expertise….What they need—what I mean

by therapy is teaching them how to communicate. We are not taught how to

communicate. We are taught how to talk.

From her experience with the elderly, Jackie shared a similar viewpoint when asked what

she would do if she had a magic wand:

I would say that who should be sought after and delegated to those positions ought to be

well trained and—not new social workers, but people with expertise….And that the court

system should expect those professionals to give—to be thoughtful about reasons for care

decisions, that there should be a high quality of expectation on where those decisions

come from when people are that vulnerable. There should be a high expectation of—that

it takes a certain amount of training and objectivity to do that….Courts should develop

expert groups of people who are qualified to do that work and they should regularly refer

to them instead of to just who happens to be around or who happens to come up and

offer, which is how apparently it’s happened. It’s very random. It’s random how it

happens.

Janet was asked what she would change if she had that power in the context of her

experiences with cases which may take years to resolve in an adjudicative system overwhelmed

202

with complex cases, law, and policy. Her words capture this sad reality, common to other court

systems managing trauma and adult conflict:

We talked briefly about how re-traumatizing this whole process can be for the applicants,

right? When they have prepared and they get there and you wait around, and they can’t

find the person’s file, or you are now—it’s been three years since you first started going

to court, and maybe you’ve had the same trial attorney for all that time. You’ve had,

maybe, four appearances in the last four years, and now, suddenly, when you’re again

appearing for merits, the trial attorney says, “Your honor, I’d like another continuance so

that I can send this document”—which was available three years ago—“for forensic

examination.” It depends a lot on how busy your particular court is, but in the court I was

involved in, “Okay, come back in a year and a half.”….

Then, the loved ones back there—I’m gonna say two very different kinds of

things: one, may no longer believe—cause it’s very hard for me to understand why the

immigration system has to be as it is, not to mention my client, but to people back home

who are like, “Well, I don’t think they’re really trying to bring us over here. They keep

saying they’re going to court, but they’ve been ten times already, I don’t really think

they’re going to court.” The worst of it—that’s just the tip of the iceberg—there’ve been

many occasions, where the loved ones, including grandparents, including children,

siblings, spouses, et cetera, have been interrogated by the authorities, have been detained,

have been tortured, have been assassinated, have been disappeared—presumably killed,

or forced into hiding—because they’re trying to get at their primary target, who has left.

That must bring some survivor guilt pieces to it for the person here, walking the streets,

while it’s going on.

203

It totally does. I remember once, one of our physicians, who is not shy about being an

advocate in many realms, but we were in court—I think it was our seventh time with this

particular person—with testimony taking another delay of a year, and people like us,

we’re not supposed to approach the bench or anything, right? She couldn’t take it

anymore; she went up there. “Your honor, this can’t go on. Her son was murdered in the

last five years that we’ve been coming here. A couple of months ago her son was

murdered. Her other kids are in hiding now. I don’t wanna see it again. She won’t be

alive anymore if we have to keep waiting.” Anyway, the judge in this particular case

allowed us to have the testimony taken.

A fundamental aspect of being an expert is expressed by Cam’s words concerning what

he would want a court to really know. These last quoted words were purposefully chosen:

Well, to make this individual, who at one moment in time did this horrible—these

horrible acts, really despicable things, that the humanity—to be able to see their

humanity, and to see their family, and what they experienced, and what was sort of

passed on to them. To understand that it wasn't necessarily random or it wasn't

necessarily fair that they—the slice of the pie that they got and the experiences they had,

and it wasn’t—the other piece that I’d like to see, that I would like them to understand

and to be able to see is—‘cause I experience this in every—almost every case, but every

case is….Just my role as a social worker in doing this work, and spending time, it

transforms a family in a positive way, beyond the criminal justice, just beyond the trial,

beyond anything. It just—the process brings this—puts this family back together in a way

that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. I’d like them to be able to see and appreciate

that—the quality of that and what that means to the family.

204

Summary

Wearing the accouterments of king or queen, or grasping and wielding a wand or gavel as

a symbol of power and authority, may be different than wielding a license conferred by the state.

For the public, the license can be as much a means for legerdemain as that wand or gavel. The

power is in the belief that there is magic to a solution and authority to define and label. This

transformative process occurs in a rule-based system which itself is meaningful as expressed by a

saying found on t-shirts on law school campuses in the 1980s: “If you want to play the game,

you’ve got to know the rules” (Barnes, 1985, p. 23).

What was unforeseen by the researcher was the passion with which a few participants felt

the social work profession excluded them or refused to hear different voices concerning IPV.

When I teach MSW students, I remind them constantly to historically situate social problems and

policy solutions. Nothing human occurs in a vacuum of time or knowledge. Only a few decades

ago, “family privacy” meant the right to abuse without government action, courts and legal

systems protected the property rights of men by men, and intervention services meant an

emergency room or a morgue.

In many fields, not just IPV, positive change has occurred through the passionate and

extraordinary efforts of social workers and lawyers and courts and law enforcement and doctors

and nurses and psychologists and lay advocates and the public and political figures. Yet there is

still a need for a mature, interdisciplinary discussion about models for identification and

interdiction, or ideology, across fields of practice, may trump what we know or need to know

more effectively. The challenge from these emergent themes is finding a balance that reflects the

sharing of knowledge, policy and politics, science and experience, the human condition and

organizational authority to the benefit of victims and society.

205

Chapter 6: Discussion of Findings

Aim of the Study

The aim of this study was to understand the lived experiences of licensed clinical social

workers who had experienced becoming and being an expert and transferred that knowledge to

courts. Specifically, the researcher was interested in learning from, and hearing the voices of,

these experts and understanding their interpretation of those experiences within the domains of

an MSW education, licensure and practice, and evidence-informed research. By utilizing a

hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, these experiences may generate connections and

implications that may, in turn, inform the education, training, and well-being of LICSWs. Of

equal importance, themes that evolve from these experiences may improve the delivery of social

work expertise in a manner that is consistent with the tenets of social justice.

Key Findings of the Study

Phenomenology adapts a constructivist approach to the “science of interpretation” (Jones,

Torres, & Arminio, 2006, p. 46). Phenomenologists argue that multiple realties exist and are

socially constructed yet susceptible to an essence or reduction (not reductionism) by common

understanding of language and beliefs, of experiences and worldviews (Muehlhausen, 2010).

Within this intellectual and philosophical tradition, it is posited that LICSWs have a unique

worldview, but it is a worldview that is, at least, dualistic. What this means is that this choice of

research methodology explores, in Heidegger’s terms, an ontological viewpoint or “what it

means to be a person in a particular situation at a particular time” (Sloan, 2002, p. 124).

From a circular or helical reading and re-reading of the transcripts, the most prevalent

negative and positive patterns may reveal themes, within the three general domains and one

206

emergent domain, as the questions and answers were organized into similarities, contrasts, and

constructs of the participants’ realities. By combining their entry into the world of social work

through the portal of an MSW program, the acquisition of licensure with the authority to label

and diagnosis, and choosing (with that term somewhere between accident of life and intentional

opt-in) the role of expert, these social workers blend their journey within the manifold forces of

host environments. What these experts thereby share as “journey companions” (Muehlhausen,

2010) is the knowledge that what they do and how they act embodies our access to the world and

our interpretation of more than “brute facts” (Leonard, 1994, p. 52). Their own words then

became the embodiment of their intellectual and emotional experiences.

More specifically, the results of this research led to frameworks for interpreting and

understanding these experiences. First, the education and training of clinical social workers

requires a more precise understanding of the insights acquired by those LICSWs who have

actually engaged in forensic practices. Second, social work trainings should facilitate a deeper

understanding of the transformation that occurs when LICSWs become expert witnesses in

courts. Third, social work’s proud history has itself been transformed by the very act of being an

expert, which implicates deeply rooted core values and ethical obligations. Finally, the social

work profession has explored the need for self-care and self-reflection but those connections

need to be much more precisely related to courses, field placements, and trainings.

As each of the domains unfolded, themes were shaped by the experience and

interpretation of the researcher. Table 3 describes the three general and one emergent domain

and the themes identified within each domain. Tables 4 through 7 provide a selective sample of

the participants’ lived experiences with key words in the left hand column and a sentence for

207

reference on the right as a means to illuminate for the reader the essence of those experiences.

The First Domain in Table 4 discloses that connective experience for the participants.

Table 4

The First Domain: Becoming and Being an LICSW

208

The

evolution

of the Second

Domain

became,

in many

respects,

the bridge

from education

to actually

being that expert

in court.

Social

workers

enter the field

with their life

Traitors It’s interesting because we were told frequently social workers do social work, case management. There was always the students that whispered I’m going into private practice. They were like the traitors.

Cocktails Or when we get together we have cocktails afterwards and that’s when most of our good training and education and sharing comes up, and we learn from one another that way.

Kinda Thrown In

I’d been in graduate school two weeks. It was like, what do I do? I think the whole social work model is really interesting, how they just kinda throw you into it without literally any education.

Threw Me In They really didn’t give me any tools. They just kinda threw me in there, and told me to work with these really, really, really psychotic individuals. I would ask, “What should I do?” They said, “Just use your skills that you’ve learned.”

It was Okay My training as a social worker was, as I said, it was okay. It wasn’t great. It was okay. It got me a degree, and it gave me a certain amount of knowledge that was good.

No Trainings I don’t remember ever having any kinds of training with respect to what does it mean to be an expert witness and what are the ethics involved, what are strategies. No, I didn’t get any training.

Mentoring I was fortunate to be able to sit in with a seasoned colleague, my clinical director, who had done hundreds of these things, and also to get some training and mentoring from her.

Hard Knocks I came outta graduate school just trusting the system. It’s the school of hard knocks, I guess.”

Prophylactic Roles

In order to establish a reason for doing away with the prophylactic roles, to a certain degree, you have to prove that the people who are gonna be doing your jobs are going to do it with ethical conduct, with boundaries, with evidence-based research.

Stepping-Off Point

I think the whole generalist training in social work was a good foundation for somebody like me, who may need a stepping-off point to learn everything I need to learn to do a particular job well.

More Deference

I think, there again, and this is where good, solid MSW training is critical, is to recognize that you're being asked to be an expert on this narrow piece of the case. You’d better do it the best you can do. You better stick to that because people are gonna give you more deference than they should.

209

experiences, beliefs, biases, strengths, and vulnerabilities. As the participants were asked about

their own experiences and perceptions, certain divergent and convergent sets of language,

including the influence of values and poverty, emerged as set forth in Table 5.

Table 5

The Second Domain: Power, Ethics, Self-Care, and Poverty

Really Powerful

I’ve chosen social work type positions where I could be an expert because I don’t like generic stuff. I felt really powerful.

Smarter?I couldn’t m I know best. Aren’t I smarter? The answer to that is no.Not Over for Tea

I’m not to say that I crossed ethical boundaries or invited them over for tea or anything, but my way is being friendly. It’s also a good way to get information. People let their guard down. I don’t like operating that way, but that’s part of what I’m there for.

No Dog in the Fight

I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t want you to think one way or the other. I just want to know what you know.

Dominant Position

There’s people that I’ve encountered, empathy? You’ve gotta be kidding me. We roll into somebody’s house and are obviously in the dominant position.

Wielding Power

I don’t feel like I’m wielding any kind of a power. There’s no, I don’t have any sense of that at all.

My Values I have whatever my standards are and my values, and I live by those. I have to be able to step back from that. When I look at someone else’s family, imposing my values and my standards on them is very unfair.

Brutal Social work is hard. It’s emotionally traumatic. It’s low-paid. I’m tired of it. [CP] was brutal. And I’m just tired.”

Not Have Feelings

The parents, because they’re crying and sobbing, and I have to just not have any feelings about it. I did have feelings, but I had to try to act like I didn’t or pretend I didn’t.

Gatekeeper I just think I took such a verbal and emotional beating by these people who never respected or wanted to go along with the limits that the court set on them, and that I represented that—I was the gatekeeper. I have really disliked that.

Not Wield the Sword

You’re not at war with anybody. You’re not up there to wield the sword and the right or wrong; it’s up to the jury to make that decision, so you have to understand your role as an expert.

210

To Direct Somebody

I think I was terribly naïve about what I as a social worker could do. I’m not being glib. I’m not being funny. I really thought that I would be able to direct somebody, and tell them the right way and how to behave and how to act and what to do, and that they would listen to me.

Gory Details I have to do a lot of life/soul-enhancing activities, to counteract all of the time I spend in prisons and jails, and hearing about the gory details of trauma.

Isolation I can’t imagine doing this job isolated. I think I’d be sitting in a corner with my blankets, sucking my thumb.

Counter-transference

I think counter-transference is a big issue. People need to be aware of their own issues as they approach this work.

The Great Equalizer

I think poverty is the great equalizer, and that’s what brings CPS to your door, whether you’re white or black or whatever.

Disdain I feel I always treated mothers and fathers with equal respect, but I don’t know. We saw moms all the time, and probably, there was some disdain or contempt for women in that, which is sad.

Inner DemonsYou k Just cuz you go to school, get a degree, and put a nice black robe on doesn’t mean you’ve gotten rid of those inner demons as far as relationship issues.

This last phrase (“inner demons”) in Table 5 reflects the common knowledge of social

workers: that privilege and power does not mean there are no demons. What social workers

should learn early is that self-protection is not merely an internal dial tone intended to warn the

LICSW but a reciprocal alarm intended to protect those too vulnerable to protect themselves

from institutional and individual power. Arrogance carries a price in both directions for LICSWs,

lawyers, and judges. The critical point, as summarized by the quotes selected for Table 6, is that

immersion in a host environment may have consequences for the privileged professionals and, of

course, the client who often has no choice but to stay and be judged.

Table 6

The Third Domain: The Dimensions of the Host Environment

My RoleI think the m…Most important thing for me was to not try to know more than I knew and to be clear about what my role as an expert

211

is.Humility It’s really important to just continue to try to be a learner, and

not—and maintain that humility. I mean it’s fun to be an expert, but really none of us are experts. We always have to be open to learning new things.

Stay Grounded

You must really stay grounded, and present, and level-headed. Practice some compassionate indifference, if you will, to just trust that it’s not all on our shoulders, because it’s really not.

Imposter Syndrome

Yeah, well, after I got over the imposter syndrome. When I was in my early 20s and I worked for CPS, I was one of the youngest case managers and I remember thinking I can’t believe they’re listening to me.

Zealously Defended

Every client deserves the right to be zealously defended in advocacy. That’s what their attorney’s job is. It’s not personal. That has helped me a lot, in working with attorneys.

Thinking Differently

We think so differently from the attorneys. I don’t like that part of this job.

Traumatized by Litigation

I think most families that have been through a lot of litigation feel truly traumatized by the litigation itself, independent of all of the stuff that’s gone on.

Lawyers are Great

Lawyers are great because lawyers aren’t ideologues. They’re practical. They’re always open to what I have to say, if it benefits their clients.

Language of My Profession

I was serving as an expert witness I needed to be cautious to stick with the language of my profession….

Understand the Dynamic

My job was kind of to help the jury understand the dynamic, so that maybe they wouldn’t have such a personal animosity toward her, and they might better understand why she didn’t seek medical care for the child that died.

Get the Truth Out

I think by having an expert up there it does help get the truth out.

The Judge is King

I’ve seen a county…where the judge is the king, and the fiefdom is his town, his community, and he runs everything, from shutting down the jail, to keeping the jury sequestered until midnight, to doing whatever he wants to do.

Hearing Me Most of the time I feel like the judges are hearing me and getting what I’m saying and really appreciate the input.

Just a Cog My role with that judge, though he was always respectful and he listened, I always had the sense that I was just a cog, a piece of the puzzle but certainly not the most critical.

Ruling by Coin Toss

I had called that my coin tosses case for quite a while. It really was.

Roll of the I think it’s truly a crap shoot, the chances of getting a good

212

Dice judge versus a bad judge….It’s just literally, roll the dice.In Sync I always love it when—I know I’m in sync if the judge tells

everybody to sit down and he or she wants to talk to me, which happens.

Judge Burn-Out

I think judges…get burned out after a while and he was just sort of ruling later or not ruling at all toward the end….I think it's a hard job.

Solomon-Like I think I had a very idealized view of a Solomon-like person sitting on a bench and that everybody would be there to support the best interests of the child.

The Better Lawyer Wins

No, it’s not effective in getting the truth out. Whoever’s the better lawyer usually wins, and the truth doesn’t necessarily come out.

From the development of the domains and themes outlined in Tables 4, 5 and 6, there was

data set aside which did not fit because of incompleteness or a lack of connection to the research

questions. This emergent domain is consistent with what Creswell (2013) warned may occur as a

research plan changes or shifts after the researcher enters the field and begins to collect data. The

researcher has a duty to adapt within the conceptual framework and methodology but still remain

sufficiently positioned within the study to retain the connections. The risk otherwise is that the

researcher becomes distracted by the preferred “analysis of the role of sources, voice, or method”

such that the data may become “hijacked” (Bazeley, 2009, p.20). What emerged from the data

was a matrix of significant experiences: the past (IPV theory and practice), the present

(interdisciplinary relationships), and the future (the Harry Potter wand) as set forth in the sample

language of experience in Table 7 below.

Table 7

The Fourth Domain: Emergent Themes

Good for Lawyers

Social work education is good for lawyers.

Relevant What I have found is that often, on the teams that I’ve

213

Contributions worked with, it’s the social worker who is able to spend the most time with the client. I feel like we have a lot to contribute to the forensic work.

A Lot of Power There’s a lot of power. This is where it was very valuable to be part of an interdisciplinary team, with multiple professionals who had also spent, in my context, a lot of time with the individual; being able to consult as treatment team members and/or forensic evaluators of the person—their independent opinions about that.

A Good Read on the Family

One of the advantages that a social worker has as opposed to some of the other clinicians on that team is that we generally have a real good read of the family system, the dynamics within the system that we can hear about, learn about, push through to come to the reality of what’s happening for the client.

Not Thought of Highly

Unfortunately, social workers are not thought of very highly and when there is an attempt to openly disagree the medical community, specifically doctors, discounts social work.

Not Noticed Independently

We just kind of get thrown in with multi-disciplinary teams. It’s not a social work thing.

Oooey-gooey People

We’re seen as sort of these touchy-feely—I would try really hard, that's why I did the research, because I know social workers are viewed sometimes in this—we’re these ooey-gooey people who just want peace, love and brotherhood.

Ideologues and Learning

I’ve decided they’re like climate deniers, or scientologists. They’re ideologues, and they’re really not interested in learning anything new.

Science and Art We know, like with domestic violence, it can’t all be science. There’s a lot of art to it.

Queen of the World

There’s so much emotional stuff that, when I’m queen of the world divorce will not go through courts. Laws should not end families.

How to Communicate

What they need—what I mean by therapy is teaching them how to communicate. We are not taught how to communicate. We are taught how to talk.

The selection by the researcher of these quotes, and even the creation of the tables,

reveals both the strengths and limitations of this research. These results and findings, therefore,

214

must be understood within the context of the significance of the study and its strengths and

limitations as informed by theory and methodology.

Significance of the Study

LICSWs do not testify about others in a vacuum. The significance of this study is (and

was) to enhance the future capacity of students, practitioners, and researchers in social work to

actively and cohesively engage the promise of social justice, across the domains of the

profession, as more than an ephemeral promise to individuals and community. Whether the

forensic role is framed as a child custody evaluator, future risk of a crime, recurrence of domestic

violence, an explanation for a victim’s thoughts and behaviors, biopsychosocial history as

mitigating factors for the imposition of the death penalty, or the competency and safety of a child

or elderly person, all of these events are subject to mechanisms, contexts, and outcomes.

Beginning with the essential experiences of those LICSWs who for decades empathically

and at personal sacrifice dedicated themselves to the science and art of their profession, these

mechanisms, contexts, and outcomes are observable and measurable. Thus, and as described in

more detail above, the underlying methodologies for the interview guide (Appendix C) and the

evolution of the interviews themselves was not a random selection of qualitative or

organizational methodologies but reflects ongoing collaboration between the researcher and

committee. The court, as host environment, was the shared primordial event between researcher

and participants. The participants’ voices the data organized and delivered to the reader.

The significance of this study is, however, found in a realistic description of the

participants’ experiences. Indeed, Pawson and Tilley (1997) engaged the distinction between

some phenomenologists who, they suggest, reject “arcane positivists with their hygienic,

215

dehumanizing, pseudo-scientific measuring instruments” and those phenomenologists who argue

that there “is no single reality to report upon,” such that “hermeneutic dialectic circles (not

surprisingly) go around in circles rather than constituting a linear advance on the truth” (p.21).

Pawson and Tilley asserted with wry amusement that, “funders of evaluations might also be

somewhat surprised to have paid for the privilege of entering a world which denies the privilege

of any particular point of view” (p. 22).

Chevalier and Buckles (2013) take a more pluralistic view (to borrow their phrase), and

one consistent with the core values of social work, by structuring PAR as the “art of doing

research ‘with people’, in lieu of doing it ‘on them’ or ‘for them’” (p. 10). Methods and

technology implicate “the logic of inquiry—whether the inquiry should be qualitative or

quantitative, value-free or value-laden, positivist or phenomenological, and so on” (p. 41). The

choice of the researcher requires transparency and authenticity if the researcher and the research

is to avoid a knowledge gap between what we seek to understand and the means by which we

seek that understanding. The eventual triangulation of the experience of the experts, the

experience of the organization, and actively “doing with them” may yield worthwhile change.

The tensions within forms of philosophical inquiry carry little benefit to anyone at the

extremes. Tools like technology, which can process vast amounts of data (at increasing volume

and noise) and impose tests of significance on virtually any matrix of data are no less

troublesome or, in context, than the notion that we can never know another’s truth so why

bother? We need to know precisely what works and for whom because we, as the insiders, act as

privileged experts who survey and measure others who are powerless to stop us from imposing

labels and consequences. In point of fact, they need us even more when the choice is punishment

within host environments imbued with the authority of government. Thus, the significance of this

216

research project is the opportunity to squint deeply down to see privilege as an organic thing to

dissect and test within the experiences and knowledge of our own kind.

As Uncle Ben famously said to his nephew, “With great power comes great

responsibility.” A corollary is that with lesser knowledge, comes even greater responsibility.

With the ongoing development of accreditation standards in 2015 by the CSWE and the

evolution of new forms of knowledge which social workers must integrate with rigor (Appendix

G), knowledge of the actual lived experiences of those who passed through the realms of

academia, practice, and evidence-informed research is a paramount obligation of the profession.

From that information, it is possible to design the kinds of measures required to determine if,

when, and how expert knowledge influences, or is influenced by, host environments.

Major Limitations of the Study

A key limitation is that the number of codes developed using NVivo to organize the

transcripts transcended any unified application of the interview guide. Coding is a means of

organizing not interpreting or, by itself, providing a deeper explanation for meaning (Bazeley,

2009). In this phenomenological study, the interview guide eventually provided more of an

outline than a precise set of questions to be asked like a script and from which responses could

be uniformly compared and contrasted in response to that script. Preliminary contact with

participants suggested that each of them had much to say and all were experienced at expressing

their ideas. The possibility of rigidly controlling these interviews was not only remote, but

seemed itself a rather arrogant approach, which might diminish the essence of experience.

By itself, such a limitation is not a critical flaw given the tenets of hermeneutic

phenomenology. If, however, the researcher had chosen to apply another qualitative

217

methodology, such as grounded theory, this lack of fit and cohesion may have been much more

problematic (Creswell, 2013). Although it was possible to consider the variance in the number of

codes a negative case analysis (Bazeley, 2009; Creswell, 2103; Lincoln & Guba, 1985), a refined

research project in the future implicates a more structured interview path. This is particularly true

if the research is extended to other host environments unfamiliar to a researcher such as

hospitals, prisons, or schools.

Of course, even the selection of portions of the transcripts or the organization of the

material engages the researcher as a filter with all of the attendant limitations of selection bias.

Another limitation is that the domains and themes may not cohesively link to an explanatory

model but instead engage in what Bazeley (2009) refers to rather amusingly but accurately for

the novice researcher as a “garden path analysis” or (“Here are the roses, there are the jonquils,

and aren’t the daffodils lovely today!”) (p.9, quoting Richards, 2005). For that reason, Bazeley

suggests that there are five signs of sufficiency in qualitative research:

• Simplicity– a ‘small polished gem of a theory,’ rather than ‘a mere pebble of truism;’

• Elegance and balance–it is coherent;

• Completeness–it explains all;

• Robustness–it doesn’t fall over with new data; and

• It makes sense to relevant audiences.

By way of explanation rather than excuse, the integration of quotes (from actual

questions and answers) in Chapter 5 follows from the connections made by the participants as

expressed by their experiences and is polished only to the extent necessary to provide balance

and organization to the account. The research does not fit completeness, as more questions arose

than “all” the answers. What is, hopefully, a fair extrapolation is that this research robustly

218

describes the data in a way that makes sense and generates thoughtful consideration for the

reader. More importantly, the reader finds sense in these experiences from which to generate new

and more precise research across the domains of social work education, practice, and research.

In addition, and though some scholars argue that generalizability holds little meaning for

qualitative researchers (Creswell, 2013), the results may be limited by the study design itself,

such as the number and length of the interviews, the means of acquiring the sample, and the

ability to exhaustively describe the phenomenon. The LICSWs who volunteered as participants

are a relatively diverse group in terms of specialty; it is not a diverse group relative to the

diversity of social worker experts nationally, including race, GBLTQ, geography, court systems,

ethnicity, political persuasion, or other demographic or socioeconomic differences.

Thus, the self-selection of the participants and the snowball effect for obtaining some

participants is an important limitation. There is no way at this juncture to know if these

experiences would be shared by another group of LICSWs acting as experts in the courts or if

those experiences would be shared in other host environments, like schools, hospitals, or prisons.

Without additional research, these experiences may not even be shared by different forensic

specialties or even different federal and state court systems. From the interviews described in the

results, however, readers may decide whether there is sufficient rich, thick detail to at least

consider the transferability of the data or methodologies (Creswell, 2013).

Moreover, the retrospective experiences of the participants, often decade as ago, may, as

with all human memory, be shaded or influenced by the passage of time. Participants who chose

to be interviewed may have particularly strong feelings (either positive or negative) about their

experiences as against a random sample. Of similar limitation is my role as a researcher. All the

self-reflection and self-disclosure is itself incomplete because we cannot know all of our biases

219

in a particular moment. Moreover, I have the experience of questioning and cross-examining

many hundreds of people over the past thirty years. Yet I still read these transcripts and found a

missing moment in which I should have followed up with a question more precisely, or listened

more mindfully. This limitation becomes recognizable when listening to the recordings because

with the nuance of speech and the tone of the participant it is possible that a better response by

the researcher might have led to an additional insight by the participant.

Major Strengths of the Study

Despite the limitations of this research, its strengths may be found in the participants

themselves and the essence of their experiences. Many of these strengths have already been

described throughout this paper in various sections. It was an extraordinary journey to be

allowed in their homes and offices. There is a certain faith required between any researcher and

any participant that the information disclosed will be treated with dignity when shared with

audiences. To be fair, if somewhat immodest, the strength of this research was the fact that the

researcher and the participants shared experiences and that the participants were willing to reveal

those experiences to someone who could be trusted to understand that peculiar context.

By seeking a much deeper understanding of those experiences the research may add to

the knowledge of teaching and training social workers. The primary strength of this proposal is

its timeliness in the context of recent efforts by the CSWE to refine accreditation and

competency standards, as well as current debates concerning the connections between social

work ethics and values and the efficacy and availability of evidence-informed research. The

strength of this research, therefore, is that it is original in part, that it uses a methodology that

future social work researchers may find beneficial, and that it explores a topic that should matter.

220

Although difficult to measure, the research may have benefitted participants who had an

opportunity to reflect and explicate upon their own experiences for the first time in careers that

spanned decades. The choice to eliminate some portions of their testimonial experiences was a

function both of protecting privacy and recognizing that some disclosures, much like in a lawyer

or social worker’s office, requires discretion over the self-interest of the researcher.

Implications of the Study for Social Work

The efficacy of any form of intervention requires a model for the design and assessment

of these interventions (Marston & Watts, 2003; Small, Cooney, & O’Connor, 2009). Expert

witnesses are, by dint of operation and employment, an intervention. This role implicates the

professional identities and expertise of LICSWs within an organizational environment with

universal and statutory duties (see Moran, Jacobs, Bunn, & Bifulco, 2007, for example). Pawson

and Tilly (1997) argue that “the experimental paradigm constitutes a heroic failure, promising so

much and ending up in ironic anti-climax. The underlying logic (as above) seems meticulous,

clear headed and militarily precise, and yet findings seem to emerge in a typically non-

cumulative, low-impact, prone-to-equivocation sort of way” (p. 8). In PAR, as described by

Chevalier and Buckles, the researcher begins by arguing that science “ is at a cross-roads: either

it continues to strengthen ivy towers and serve the interests of the few, or it embraces a firm

orientation to society and the common good on a global scale” (p. 1).

In both instances, RE and PAR are organizational approaches to the design,

measurement, and assessment of social service agencies and the efficacy of the intervention from

the experiences and perspectives of the organization, its elements, and consumers. For social

work, these experiences, gathered through the phenomenological method, may guide future

221

research concerning the interrelationship of social work expertise and efficacy in organizations.

In practice, these methodologies are coextensive with the CSWE’s efforts to develop educational

policy and accreditation standards in its proposed amendments for 2015:

Social work competence is the ability to perform complex practice behaviors in the

delivery of professional service to promote human and community-wellbeing. EPAS

recognizes a holistic view of competence; that is, performance of practice behavior as

guided by knowledge, values, skills, and cognitive and subjective processes that include

the social worker’s critical thinking, subjective reactions, and exercise of judgment in

regard to unique practice situations. Overall professional competence is multi-

dimensional and composed of interrelated competencies. An individual social worker’s

competence is seen as developmental and dynamic, changing over time in relation to

continuous learning. (CSWE, Educational Policy-Draft One, 2013, p. 2)

Because competency-based education has an outcome approach to curriculum design

(Holden, Anastas, & Meenaghan, 2005), teaching future social workers has a relationship to the

experiences of these participants in host environments. An MSW grafts the right to licensure

onto the privilege to interpret and opine about disciplinary knowledge. Certainly, the unpacking

of the complex relationship between evidence-informed education and practice is one which

requires careful study. The criticism that two years of a social work education cannot

conceivably engage intellectual rigor commensurate with this power is not a matter to ignore

lightly (Adams, Lacroix, & Matto, 2009). Likewise, cultural competence, also a fundamental

tenet of social work, raises the concern that social work knowledge must be sensitive to poverty,

historical oppression, and socioeconomic status when transferring expert knowledge to the

courtroom (Abrams & Moio, 2009).

222

One recent survey concluded that the two disciplines “with the largest number of students

and emphasis on training for clinical practice (PsyD. and MSW) required the lowest percentage

of gold standard training in EBT” (Weissman et al., 2006, p. 930). The comparison of the

teaching and training of social workers in the clinical arena, compared with other professions, is

(ironically) precisely the value-laden argument proffered by Flexner in 1915. The fact that this

subject is still of considerable discussion after nearly a century is hardly surprising. The

challenge is organizing systematic evaluation, criticism, and change so as to enhance the values

and duties at the core of social work as the professional discipline that it is and always was.

Implications for Future Research about Social Work

The implications of this research for social work begins with recognition that my

experience viewing the end-game, wherein LICSWs offer expert opinions weighted to make a

judgment about the future of others, provided me the impetus to seek this information from those

who lived that experience. With a sardonic loop back to Flexner as the source for viewing social

work as a useful hand-servant but not a professional discipline, the importance of capturing a

greater truth for social work encouraged this research as a means to inform scholars, educators,

and practitioners. An underlying purpose was to try and respond to arguments which continue to

percolate from other disciplines about social work.

Flexner began by arguing that being a professional discipline derived from quality of

responsibility because “professions are intellectual in character; for in all intellectual operations,

the thinker takes upon himself a risk” (p. 6). After disposing of pharmacists and nurses and

plumbers, he moved in favor of medicine, law, engineering, literature, painting, and music which

he says “without exception” involved “personally responsible intellectual activity” (p. 13). For

223

Flexner, one can “draw a clear line of demarcation” about medicine in particular but not social

work because it does not engage aspects of these professions and the “field of employment is

indeed so vast that delimitation is impossible” (p. 17). Flexner argued, in a strangely compelling

way given that he is still cited, that the social worker may at times be too self-confident:

the differences between the accepted professions and social work reminds the social

worker at crucial moments that he is, as social worker, not so much an expert himself as

the mediator whose concern it is to summon the expert, whom ought his observation be

calmer, his utterance more restrained, be the difficulty he encounters economic,

educational, or sanitary? [p. 21, emphasis added]

The implication, of course, is that the multiple tiers of knowledge possessed by the social

worker are a limited means to observe and report but not act. Flexner argued that “He [the social

worker] will, I mean, be conscious of his dependence, and this consciousness will tend to induce

caution, thoroughness and moderation” (p. 21). It is fair to conclude that he was quite wrong

about the path social work would take in the ensuing century but not wrong about the self-doubt

that would inhibit a profession which keeps reading his words as having content worthy of

absorption. Where Flexner was quite prescient, however, is that “the battles that social work

wages will not be won by phrases which too often serve as a substitute for experience and

knowledge, but by trench warfare carried on by men and women who have learned every inch of

the ground over which they must fight” (p. 22).

And it is precisely that point which should drive more research in the future. The

explication and precision of social work knowledge engages the “urgent need for social work to

clarify its role and function in society” (Bisman, 2004, p. 109). To accomplish such an objective,

social work education and practice has shifted, as has medical education ironically, to

224

competency-based education. Indeed, a recent medical journal described this occurrence as a

“paradigm shift from the current structure–process–based curriculum to a competency-based

curriculum and evaluation of outcomes” or, in other words, “the Flexnerian revolution of the

Twenty First Century” (Carraccio, Wolfsthal, Englander, Ferentz, & Martin, 2002, p. 361).

The implications of this “revolution” for social work research are rather plain within a

social work tradition which tries to find concrete ways to connect knowledge in the academic

world with diversity of perspectives and outcomes in the real world. In this manner, a vacuum of

knowledge about social workers’ experience is problematic if there is any intent to link

competencies to practice to research and then to the ethical and evidence-informed exercise of

power and authority. Although the design and implementation of research to measure the

efficacy of expert testimony is hindered by confounding, mediating, and moderating variables as

well as the opaqueness with which courts prevent much study, these limits do not excuse the

profession from asking its own, through systematic research across methodological platforms, to

explore and explain their experiences.

For the social work profession, there is meaning to becoming and being an expert. In

many cases, LICSWs are the gatekeepers who, often with integrity and grit, prevent harm and

enhance the exchange of knowledge between disciplines and institutions by creating reflection

and pause. Thus, future quantitative and qualitative research, guided by the experiences of

LICSWs and formed in the minds of skilled researchers, is needed to determine how to better

teach and train social workers and connect competencies within academia to trainings to

evidence-informed expert opinion in various host environments These points are particularly

applicable to the courts with which so much of the population of the United States and the social

work profession intersects today.

225

226

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Although the social work and legal professions may share an obligation to deliver social

justice through the empowerment of groups and individuals (Brooks, 2005; NASW Code of

Ethics, 2008; Reamer, 2006), expert testimony often becomes uncomfortably entangled with the

functional and structural strengths and limitations of the judicial system. This conundrum is not

new (Weil, 1982), nor by substituting “social work” for “psychology”—or any other social

science—will these tensions between law and social work be easily resolved:

In 1908, the director of the Harvard psychology laboratory, Hugo Münsterberg,

complained that the “lawyer and the judge and the juryman are sure that they do not need

the experimental psychologist…They go on thinking that their legal instinct and their

common sense supplies them with all that is needed and somewhat more”….For much of

history, laws were passed and cases decided with little more than intuitive knowledge

about how the mind works. A judicial attitude of suspicion verging on hostility toward

psychology–just as toward statistics–can still be found. Yet a territorial instinct to

maintain disciplinary seclusion conflicts with the natural attraction of ideas. (Engel &

Gigerenzer, 2006, p. 1)

More than a century later, this lesson should encourage the cohesive and collaborative

development of evidence-informed knowledge and assessment measures for any intervention and

any organization rendering judgment about individuals or groups (Proctor & Rosen, 2008).

Whatever the complexity and constraints of a particular host environment like the courts, the

application of evidence-informed practice by social workers should not be isolated from the

rigors of scientific and ethical self-discipline; especially when the target is without the power or

autonomy to object (Regehr, Stern, & Schlonsky, 2007; Rice, Hwang, Abrefa-Gyan, & Powell,

227

2010). Foucault, and others, recognized many the years ago that governmental surveillance over

professional disciplines, themselves grafted power and privilege by the same institutions, could

justify or enhance the risk of harm to the vulnerable and oppressed.

Moreover, this intimate intersection occurred within courts selected by the other branches

of government to hear and define guilt or innocence; right or wrong; normal or pathological;

healthy or dysfunctional. This weaving of science and social construction is unavoidable in a

civilized society because the absence of a “decider” to hear these stories and employ the “rule of

law” may look like too much of the world today where guns trump gavel. Rome (2013)

summarized this point, as follows:

The gist of the law is justice, and its purpose is the common good. The content of social

work is the correction and prevention of injurious social relations, and its aim, in

common with that of the law, is the public well-being. It is strange at first sight, therefore,

that they should be looked upon as separate fields, only now converging toward a

common method with a common goal. (p. 1)

This quote reflects an important optimism. The reality is that social workers have served

not only as a conduit between disciplines but a primary source of decision making in which

knowledge is transferred to others with the power to medicate children, terminate parental rights,

assess risks such as suicide or end-of-life, impose mental health labels which follow for decades,

or the loss of autonomy through imprisonment or guardianships. What makes social work

different from the law and other licensed disciplines is that it formally and professionally is

expected to connect knowledge from other disciplines to its own voice so as to be employed by

others sitting in judgment (Appendix G).

228

Foucault well understood the consequences of service and subservience without critical

thinking skills, ethical empowerment, and professional training. This can be strength not

weakness. If, however, the social work profession intends to continue to perform that function, a

much keener awareness and understanding of the lived experiences of its own professionals

should guide and inform the domains of education, practice and research. In that sense and much

like law school education, the generalist social worker is a function of academia and licensure

but modern professional practices are a function of specialization. Social work was never just

clinical psychotherapy. For a century, social work connected to and on behalf of government and

private organizations in profoundly complex and synergetic ways, including executive directors,

case supervisors, researchers, quality control specialists, and advocates. The conundrum is that a

two-year MSW program has the duty to assure that graduates have sufficient intellectual rigor to

exercise that kind of power and authority.

A few years ago, and just before I entered Simmons College, I wrote about my own legal

profession and the lessons it could derive from social work’s teaching about mindfulness and

self-care. My observation was that any “profession which absorbs emotion risks a haunting lack

of optimism about the capacity for human change. In any humane sense, this is depressing and

debilitating to the metaphysical or tangible soul of the professional” (Prescott, 2009, p. 191). It is

difficult for me now to imagine that teaching social work students’ self-care, ethical

responsibility, and critical thinking could be disconnected from the experiences shared by the

participants in this research. An examination of the strengths and the flaws of this research may

yield a means to design more effective interview and survey tools for connecting the experiences

of LICSWs to the domains of education, practice, and evidence-informed research. The point

that matters is that the research be done and shared by the social work profession.

229

References

Abrams, L. S., & Moio, J. A. (2009). Critical race theory and the cultural competence dilemma

in social work education. Journal of Social Work Education, 45(2), 245-261.

Adams, K. B., Matto, H. C., & LeCroy, C. W. (2009). Limitations of evidence-based practice for

social work education: Unpacking the complexity. Journal of Social Work Education,

45(2), 165-186.

Adams, R. E., Boscarino, J. A., & Figley, C. R. (2006). Compassion fatigue and psychological

distress among social workers: A validation study. American Journal of

Orthopsychiatry, 76(1), 103-108.

Aiken, J.H., & Wizner, S. (2003). Law as social work. Washington University Journal of Law

and Policy, 11, 63-82.

Adrogue, S., & Ratliff, A. (2005). Care and feeding of experts: Accountants, lawyers, investment

bankers, and other non-scientific experts, South Texas Law Review, 47, 881-918.

Allnutt, S. H., & Chaplow, D. (2000). General principles of forensic report writing. Australian

and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 34(6), 980-987.

American Psychiatric Association (Ed.). (2012). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental

disorders (5th ed.).Washington, DC: Author.

Aronoff, N. (2008). Interprofessional and partnered practice. In Encyclopedia of Social Work

(20th ed., vol. 2) (pp. 503-536). Washington DC: NASW Press.

Arnd-Caddigan, M. (2011). Toward a broader definition of evidence-informed practice:

Intersubjective evidence. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social

Sciences, 92(4), 372-376.

230

Arredondo, P., & Rosen, D.C. (2007). Applying principles of multicultural competencies, social

justice, and leadership in training and supervision. In E.Aldarondo (Ed.), Advancing social

justice through clinical practice (pp. 443-476) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Publishers.

Badger, K., Royse, D., & Craig, C. (2008). Hospital social workers and indirect trauma

exposure: An exploratory study of contributing factors. Health & Social Work, 33(1), 63-

71.

Banerjee, M.M. (2011). Social work scholars’ representation of roles: A critique. Journal of Social

Work Education, 47(2), 189-211.

Barker, R.L., & Branson, D.M. (1999). Forensic social work: Legal aspects of professional

practice. New York, NY: Routledge.

Barnes, T. G. (1990). Introduction to Jerome Frank, Law and the modern mind (1930).

Birmingham, AL: The Legal Classics Library.

Baron, J., Beattie, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Heuristics and biases in diagnostic reasoning: II.

Congruence, information, and certainty. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision

Processes, 42(1), 88-110.

Barsky, A. E. (2010). The virtuous social work researcher. Journal of Social Work Values and

Ethics, 7(1), pp. 1.0-5.0.

Barusch, A. S. (2009). Foundations of social policy: Social justice in human perspective (3rd ed.).

Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning.

Bazeley, P. (2009). Analyzing qualitative data: more than ‘identifying themes’. Malaysian

Journal of Qualitative Research, 2(2), 6-22.

231

Bellamy, J.L., Bledsoe, S.E., & Traube, D.E. (2006). The current state of evidence-based

practice in social work: A review of the literature and qualitative analysis of expert

interviews. Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work, 3(1), 23-48.

Benveniste, D. (2012). Relational quandaries in the treatment of forensic clients. Clinical Social

Work Journal, 40(3), 326-336.

Berger, L.L. (2009). How embedded knowledge structures affect judicial decision making: The

rhetorical analysis of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in child custody disputes.

Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, 18, 259-308.

Berger, R., & Rosenberg, E. (2008). The experience of abused women with their children’s law

guardians. Violence Against Women, 14(1), 71-92.

Bisman, C. (2004). Social work values: The moral core of the profession. British Journal of

Social Work, 34(1), 109-123.

Blanchette, O. (2003). Philosophy of being: A reconstructive essay in metaphysics. Washington,

DC: Catholic University of America Press.

Bogenshneider, K., & Corbett, T.J. (2010). Evidence-based policy making: Insights for policy-

minded researchers and research-minded policy makers. New York, NY: Routledge.

Boumil, M.M., Freitas, C.F., & Freitas, D.F. (2011). Legal and ethical issues confronting guardian

ad litem practice. Journal of Law & Family Studies, 13, 43-80.

Bradshaw, W., Armour, M. P., & Roseborough, D. (2007). Finding a place in the world: The

experience of recovery from severe mental illness. Qualitative Social Work, 6(1),

27-47.

232

Brakel, S. J., Goldstein, D. S., & Wilson, R. M. (2004). Independent lawyer consultation: A

practicum of ethics for the forensic mental health expert. Journal of Psychiatry & Law,

32, 169-189.

Brandell, J.R. (Ed.). (1997). Theory and practice in clinical social work. New York, NY: The Free

Press.

Bronstein, L.R. (2003). A model for interdisciplinary collaboration. Social Work, 48(3), 297-306.

Brooks, S.L. (2005). Practicing (and teaching) therapeutic jurisprudence: Importing social work

principals and techniques into clinical legal education. St. Thomas Law Review, 17, 513-

530.

Burton, A. O. (2004). Cultivating ethical, socially responsible lawyer judgment: Introducing the

multiple lawyering intelligences paradigm into the clinical setting. Clinical Law Review,

11, 15-41.

Byng, R. (2011). What makes a realistic evaluation. Family Medicine, 43(2), 112-113.

Carraccio, C., Wolfsthal, S. D., Englander, R., Ferentz, K., & Martin, C. (2002). Shifting

paradigms: from Flexner to competencies. Academic Medicine, 77(5), 361-367.

Caudill, D. S., & Redding, R. E. (2000). Junk philosophy of science: The paradox of expertise

and interdisciplinarity in federal courts. Washington & Lee Law Review, 57, 685.

Cervone, F.P., & Mauro, L.M. (1996). Ethics, cultures, and professions in the representation of

children. Fordham Law Review, 64, 1975-1990.

Chambon, A.S. (1999). Foucault’s approach: Making the familiar visible. In A.S. Chambon, A.

Irving, & L. Epstein (Eds.). Reading Foucault for social work (pp. 51-81). New York,

NY: Columbia University Press.

233

Chambon, A.S., Irving, A. & Epstein, L. (Eds.) (1999). Reading Foucault for social work. New

York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Chevalier, J. M., & Buckles, D. J. (2013). Participatory action research: Theory and methods for

engaged inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge.

Coffey, K. (2004). Inherent judicial authority and the expert disqualification doctrine. Florida

Law Review, 56, 195-241.

Compton, B.R., & Galaway, B. (1999). Social work processes (6th ed.). Pacific Grove, CA:

Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

Council on Social Work Education. (2001). Educational policy and accreditation standards.

Alexandria, VA: Author.

Council on Social Work Education. (2008). Educational policy and accreditation standards.

Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education.

Council on Social Work Education. (October, 2013). Draft 1 of the 2015 Educational Policy and

Accreditation Standards (EPAS). Retrieved from http://www.cswe.org/File.aspx?

id=69943

Council on Social Work Education. (n.d.). Examples of social work competencies (Expected

outcomes). Retrieved from http://www.cswe.org/File.aspx?id=32288

Creswell, J.W. (2009) Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches

(3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Creswell, J. W. (2013). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five

approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Culp, J.M. (1991). Autobiography and legal scholarship and teaching: Finding me in the legal

academy. Virginia Law Review, 77, 539-559.

234

Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceutical, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).

Denzin, N.K., & Lincoln, Y.S. (2005). The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.).

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Despard, M. R., & Chowa, G. A. (2013). Training social workers in personal finance: An

exploratory study. Journal of Social Work Education, 49(4), 689-700.

Dominelli, L. (2003). Anti-oppressive social work theory and practice. London: Palgrave

McMillian.

Dybicz, P. (2010). Mimesis: Linking postmodern theory to human behavior. Journal of Social

Work Education, 46(3), 341-355.

Earls-Larrison, T., & Korr, W. S. (2013). Does social work have a signature pedagogy? Journal

of Social Work Education, 49(2), 194-206.

Elster, J. (1990). Solomonic judgments: Studies in the limitations of rationality. New York, NY:

Cambridge University Press.

Gigerenzer, G., & Engel, C. (Eds.). (2006). Heuristics and the law. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Epstein, L. (1999). The culture of social work. In A.S. Chambon, A. Irving, & L. Epstein (Eds.).

Reading Foucault for social work (pp. 3-26). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Faigman, D. L., & Monahan, J. (2005). Psychological evidence at the dawn of the law's scientific

age. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 631-659.

Felkner, W. J. (2009). Poor rigor and political obduracy: Which is the horse and which is the cart

in social work education? Research on Social Work Practice, 19(1), 121-123.

Fine, M. (2006). Bearing witness: Methods for researching oppression and resistance—A

textbook for critical research. Social Justice Research, 19(1), 83-108.

235

Finlay, L. (2009). Debating phenomenological research methods. Phenomenology & Practice,

3(1), 6-25.

Flexner, A. (1915). Is social work a profession? New York, NY: The New York School of

Philanthropy reprinted Cornell University Library Archives. Retrieved from

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014006617

Fossey, E., Harvey, C., McDermott, F., & Davidson, L. (2002). Understanding and evaluating

qualitative research. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 36(6), 717-732.

Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and punishment: The birth of prisons (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New

York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality, vol. 1: An introduction (trans. Robert Hurley).

(Vintage Books Edition). New York, NY: Random House.

Frank, J. (1930). Law and the modern mind. New York, NY: Coward-McCann, Inc.

Freud, S. (1947). Leonardo da Vinci: A study in psychosexuality (trans. A.A. Brill). New York,

NY: Random House, Inc.

Friedman, M.L., Friedlander, M.L., & Blustein, D.L. (2005). Toward an understanding of Jewish

identify. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52(1), 77-83.

Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923).

Gadamer, H-G. (1997). Truth and method (2nd rev. ed.) (trans. rev., J. Weinsheimer & D. G.

Marshall). New York, NY: Continuum.

Gambrill, E. (2005). Critical thinking in clinical practice: Improving the quality of judgments and

decisions (2nd ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Gambrill, E. (2012). Social work practice: A critical thinker's guide. New York, NY: Oxford

University Press.

236

General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997)

Gergen, K.J. (2009). An invitation to social construction (2d ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Publications, Inc.

Ginn v. Penobscot Co., 334 A.2d 874, 883 (Me. 1975)

Gleiss, E. (2010). The due process rights of parents to cross-examine guardians ad litem in

custody disputes: The reality and the ideal. Minnesota Law Review, 94, 2103-2135.

Golafshani, N. (2003). Understanding reliability and validity in qualitative research. The

Qualitative Report, 8(4), 597-607.

Goodman-Delahunty, J., & Foote, W. E. (2009). Forensic evaluations advance scientific theory:

Assessing causation of harm. Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, 5(3), 38-

52.

Gould, N. (2010). Integrating qualitative evidence in practice guideline development: Meeting the

challenge of evidence-based practice for social work. Qualitative Social Work, 9(1), 93-

109.

Grinnell, R.M., & Unrau, Y.A. (2008). Social work research and evaluation: Foundations of

evidence-based practice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Gray, S. W. (1990). The interplay of social work licensure and supervision: An exploratory

study. The Clinical Supervisor, 8(1), 53-65.

Graybeal, C. (2001). Strengths-based social work assessment: Transforming the dominant

paradigm. Families-in-Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Sciences, 82(2), 233-

243.

237

Greenberg, L.R., Martindale, D.A., Gould, J.W., & Gould-Saltman, D.J. (2004). Ethical issues in

child custody and dependency cases: Enduring principles and emerging challenges.

Journal of Child Custody, 1(1), 7-29.

Grove, W.M., & Barden, R.C. (1999). Protecting the integrity of the legal system: The

admissibility of testimony from mental health experts under Daubert/Kumho analysis.

Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 5(1), 224-242.

Gumz, E.J., & Grant, C.L. (2009). Restorative justice: A systematic review of the social work

literature. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 90(1), 119-

126.

Hand, L. (1901). Historical and practical considerations regarding expert testimony. Harvard Law

Review, 15, 40-58.

Hartley, C.C., & Petrucci, C.J. (2004). Practicing culturally competent therapeutic jurisprudence:

A collaboration between social work and law. Washington University Journal of Law and

Policy, 14, 133-181.

Heineman-Pieper, J., Tyson, K., & Pieper, M. H. (2002). Doing good science without sacrificing

good values: Why the heuristic paradigm is the best choice for social work. Families in

Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 83(1), 15-28.

Heron, B. (2005). Self‐reflection in critical social work practice: subjectivity and the possibilities

of resistance. Reflective Practice, 6(3), 341-351.

Hoefer, R., & Jordan, C. (2008). Missing links in evidence-based practice for macro social work.

Journal of Evidence Based Social Work, 5(3/4), 549-568.

Hoffer, E. (1951). The true believer. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

238

Holden, G., Anastas, J., & Meenaghan, T. (2005). EPAS objectives and foundation practice self-

efficacy: A replication. Journal of Social Work Education, 41(3), 559-570.

Howard, M. O. (2010). Social workers as public intellectuals. Social Work Research, 34(3), 131-

133.

Howard, M. O., McMillen, C. J., & Pollio, D. E. (2003). Teaching evidence-based practice:

Toward a new paradigm for social work education. Research on Social Work Practice,

13(2), 234-259.

In re Soriah, 8 A.3d 1256 (Me. 2010).

Irving, A., & Young, T. (2004). ‘Perpetual liminality’: Re‐readings of subjectivity and diversity

in clinical social work classrooms. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 74(2), 213-227.

Iversen, R.R., Gergen, K.J., & Fairbanks, R.P. (2005). Assessment and social construction:

Conflict or co-creation? British Journal of Social Work, 35, 1-20.

Jones, K. (2004). Mission drift in qualitative research, or moving toward a systematic review of

qualitative studies, moving back to a more systematic narrative review. Qualitative

Report, 9(1), 95-112.

Jones, S. R., Torres, V., & Arminio, J. (2006). Negotiating the complexities of qualitative

research in higher education: Fundamental elements and issues. New York, NY.

Routledge.

Kazi, M.A.F. (2003). Realist evaluation in practice: Health and social work. Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage Publications.

Kisthardt, M.K. (2006). Working in the best interests of children: Facilitating the collaboration

of lawyers and social workers in abuse and neglect cases. Rutgers Law Review, 30, 1-55.

239

Koontz, H. (1961). The management theory jungle. Academy of Management Journal, 4(3), 174-

188.

Leonard, V. (1994). A Heideggerian phenomenological perspective on the concept of person. In

Benner, P. (Ed.). (1994). Interpretive phenomenology: Embodiment, caring, and ethics in

health and illness. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

LaRue, L., & Caudill, D. (2004). A non-romantic view of expert testimony. Seton Hall Law

Review, 35, 1-44.

Laverty, S. M. (2008). Hermeneutic phenomenology and phenomenology: A comparison of

historical and methodological considerations. International Journal of Qualitative

Methods, 2(3), 21-35.

Leckey, R. (2008). Contextual subjects: Family, state, and relational theory. Toronto: University

of Toronto Press.

Lee, M., & Fortune, A.E. (2013). Do we need more “doing” activities or “thinking” activities in

the field practicum. Journal of Social Work Education, 49(4), 646-660.

Levin-Ruzalis, M. (2003). Evaluation and research: Differences and similarities. The Canadian

Journal of Program Evaluation, 18(2), 1-31.

Lewis, K. (2009). Child custody evaluations by social workers: Understanding the four stages of

custody. Washington DC: NASW Press.

Lichtenwalter, S., & Baker, P. (2010). Teaching note: Teaching about oppression through Jenga:

A game-based learning example for social work educators. Journal of Social Work

Education, 46(2), 305-313.

Lincoln, Y.S., & Guba, E.G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Publications, Inc.

240

Lindseth, A., & Norberg, A. (2004). A phenomenological hermeneutical method for researching

lived experience. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 18(2), 145-153.

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. New

York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Littrell, J., & Lacasse, J. R. (2012). Controversies in psychiatry and DSM-5: The relevance for

social work. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 93(4),

265-269.

Lopez, K. A., & Willis, D. G. (2004). Descriptive versus interpretive phenomenology: Their

contributions to nursing knowledge. Qualitative Health Research, 14(5), 726-735.

Luftman, V., Veltkamp, L.J., Clark, J.J., Lannacone, S., & Snooks, H. (2005). Practice guidelines

in child custody evaluations for licensed clinical social workers. Clinical Social Work

Journal, 33(3), 327-357.

Lykes, M. B., Hershberg, R., & Brabeck, K. (2011). Methodological challenges in participatory

and action research with undocumented Central American migrants. Journal for Social

Action in Counseling and Psychology, 3, 22-34.

Lyons, K. (2010). Doctoral studies in social work: Exploring European developments. Social

Work Education: The International Journal, 22(6), 555-564.

Madden, R. G. (2000). Legal content in social work education: Preparing students for

interprofessional practice. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 20(1-2), 3-17.

Madden, R.G., & Wayne, R.H. (2003). Social work and the law: A therapeutic jurisprudence

perspective. Social Work, 48(3), 338-347.

Madsen, W.C. (1999). Collaborative therapy with multi-stressed families: From old problems to

new frontiers. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

241

Meenaghan, T.M., Kilty, K.M., Long, D.D., & McNutt, J.G. (2013). Policy, politics, and ethics: A

critical approach. Chicago, IL: Lyceum Books, Inc.

Marston, G., & Watts, R. (2003). Tampering with the evidence: A critical appraisal of evidence-

based policy-making. The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs, 3(3),

143-163.

Marx, J. D. (2004). Social welfare: The American partnership. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Mason, M. (2010). Sample size and saturation in PhD studies using qualitative interviews.

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(3), 1-5.

Mather, L., McEwen, C.A., & Maimon, R.J. (2001). Divorce lawyers at work: Varieties of

professionalism in practice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Maschi, T., Bradley, C., & Ward, K. (Eds.). (2009). Forensic social work: Psychological and

legal issues in diverse practice settings. New York, NY: Springer Publishing Co.

Maschi, T., & Killian, M. L. (2011). The evolution of forensic social work in the United States:

Implications for 21st century practice. Journal of Forensic Social Work, 1(1), 8-36.

Masson, J. (2012). ‘I think I do have strategies’: Lawyers’ approaches to parent engagement in

care proceedings. Child & Family Social Work, 17, 202-211.

Mattison, M. (2000). Ethical decision making: The person in the process. Social Work, 45(2),

201-212.

McBeath, G., & Webb, S. A. (2002). Virtue ethics and social work: Being lucky, realistic, and

not doing ones duty. British Journal of Social Work, 32(8), 1015-1036.

Macgowan, M. J. (2012). A standards-based inventory of foundation competencies in social

work with groups. Research on Social Work Practice, 22(5), 578-589.

242

Merriam, S.B. (2002). Qualitative research in practice: Examples of discussion and analysis.

Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.

Mitchell, M.L., & Jolley, J.M. (2010). Research design explained (7th ed.). Belmont, CA:

Wadsworth.

Mizrahi, T., & Dodd, S-J. (2013). MSW students’ perspectives on social work goals and social

activism before and after completing graduate education. Journal of Social Work

Education, 49(4), 580-600.

Moran, P., Jacobs, C., Bunn, A., & Bifulco, A. (2007). Multi‐agency working: Implications for

an early‐intervention social work team, Child & Family Social Work, 12, 143-151.

Muehlhausen, B.L. (2010). Dual degree programs in social work and diversity: Graduates’

experiences of “journey companies” (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). School of Social

Work, Indiana University.

Mullen, E.J., Bledsoe, S.E., & Bellamy, J.L. (2008). Implementing evidence-based social work

practice. Research on Social Work Practice, 18(4), 325-338.

Munhall, P. (2011). Nursing research A Qualitative Perspective (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Jones &

Bartlett Learning.

Munhall, P. (1994). Revisioning phenomenology: Nursing and health science research. New

York, NY: National League for Learning Press.

Murphy, W.F. (1964). The elements of judicial strategy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press.

Nachmann, B. (1960). Childhood experience and vocational choice in law, dentistry, and social

work. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 7(4), 243-250.

243

National Association of Social Workers. (2008). Code of ethics. Washington, DC: Author.

Retrieved from http://www.naswdc.org/pubs/code/code.asp

Naumburg, C.G. (2012). Email communication and the therapeutic alliance: The college

counselor’s perspective (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). School of Social Work,

Simmons College, Boston, MA.

Netting, F.E., & O’Conner, M.K. (2008). Recognizing the need for evidence-based macro

practices in organization and community settings. Journal of Evidence-Based Social

Work, 5(3/4), 473-496.

Norlyk, A., & Harder, I. (2010). What makes a phenomenological study phenomenological? An

analysis of peer-reviewed empirical nursing studies. Qualitative Health Research, 20(3),

420-431.

O’Neill, J. (2011). The disciplinary society: From Weber to Foucault. The British Journal of

Sociology, 37(1), 42-60.

Orme, J. (2002). Social work: Gender, care and justice. British Journal of Social Work, 32(6),

799-814.

Orme, J., MacIntyre, G., Lister, P. G., Cavanagh, K., Crisp, B. R., Hussein, S., ... & Stevens, M.

(2009). What (a) difference a degree makes: The evaluation of the new social work

degree in England. British Journal of Social Work, 39(1), 161-178.

Padgett, D.K. (2009). Qualitative and mixed methods in social work knowledge development.

Social Work, 54(2), 101-105.

Pascal, J. (2010). Phenomenology as a research method for social work contexts: Understanding

the lived experience of cancer survival. Currents: Scholarship in the Human

Services, 9(2), 1-23.

244

Patsios, D., & Carpenter, J. (2010). The organisation of interagency training to safeguard

children in England: A case study using realistic evaluation. International Journal of

Integrated Care, 10, 1-12.

Parton, N. (2007). Constructive social work practice in an age of uncertainty. In S.L. Witkin, &

D. Saleebey, Social work dialogues: Transforming the canon in inquiry, practice, and

education (pp. 144-166). Alexandria, VA: CSWE Press.

Patton, M.Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks,

CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997). Realistic evaluations. London: Sage Publication, Ltd.

Pepper, S.L. (1986). The lawyer’s amoral ethical role: A defense, a problem, and some

possibilities. American Bar Association Research Journal, 1986(4), 613-635.

Pettus, C., Grady, M.D., Cuddeback, G.S., & Shevett, A. (2011). A practitioner’s guide to

sampling in the age of evidence-based practice: Translation of research to practice.

Clinical Social Work Journal, 39(4), 379-389.

Porter, S. (2007). Validity, trustworthiness and rigour: Reasserting realism in qualitative

research. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 60(1), 79-86.

Porter, S., & O’Halloran, P. (2012). The use and limitation of realistic evaluation as a tool for

evidence-based practice: A critical realist perspective. Nursing Inquiry, 19(1), 18-28.

Posner, R.A. (1990). The problems of jurisprudence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Prescott, D. E. (2013). Social workers as “experts” in the family court system: Is evidence-based

practice a missing link or host-created knowledge? Journal of Evidence-Based Social

Work, 10(5), 466-481.

245

Prescott, D. E. (2009). Unified family courts and the modern judiciary as a street-level

bureaucracy: To what end for the mythical role of judges in a democracy. Quinnipiac

Law Review, 27, 55-112.

Preston-Shoot, M., Roberts, G., & Vernon, S. (2001). Values in social work law: Strained

relations or sustaining relationships. Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 23(1), 1-

22.

Probst, B. (2012). Diagnosing, diagnoses, and the DSM in clinical social work. Families in

Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 93(4), 255-263.

Probst, B. (2009). Contextual meanings of the strengths perspective for social work practice in

mental health. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 90(2),

162-166.

Proctor, E. K., & Rosen, A. (2008). From knowledge production to implementation: Research

challenges and imperatives. Research on Social Work Practice, 18(4), 285-291.

Reamer, F.G. (2006). Social work values and ethics (3rd ed.).New York, NY: Columbia

University Press.

Regehr, C., Stern, S., & Shlonsky, A. (2007). Operationalizing evidence-based practice: The

development of an institute for evidence-based social work. Research on Social Work

Practice, 17, 408-416.

Richards, L. (2005). Handling qualitative data. London: Sage.

Roberts, A.R. (Ed.) (2008). Social workers’ desk reference (2nd ed.) New York, NY: Oxford

University Press.

Rogers, R. (1987). Ethical dilemmas in forensic evaluations. Behavioral Sciences & the Law,

5(2), 149-160.

246

Rome, S. H. (2013). Social work and law: Judicial policy and forensic practice. Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Rompf, E. L., & Royse, D. (1994). Choice of social work as a career: Possible influences.

Journal of Social Work Education, 30(2), 163-171.

Rosenbaum, T. (2004). The myth of moral justice: Why our legal system fails to do what’s right.

New York, NY: Perennial.

Rubin, A., & Parrish, D. (2007). Challenges to the future of evidence-based practice in social

work education. Journal of Social Work Education, 43(3), 405-428.

Ruegger, M. (2001). Seen and heard but how well informed? Children’s perceptions of the

guardian ad litem service. Children & Society, 15(3), 133-145.

Rycroft-Malone, J., Fontenla, M., Bick, D., & Seers, K. (2010). A realistic evaluation: The case

of protocol-based care. Implementation Science, 5(1), 38-52.

Saldaña, J. (2013). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage Publications, Inc.

Sanders, J., Diamond, S. S., & Vidmar, N. (2002). Legal perceptions of science and expert

knowledge. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 8(2), 139-153.

Sanderson, I. (2000). Evaluation in complex policy systems. Evaluation, 6(4), 433-454.

Satin, D.G. (Ed.). (2009). Health management for older adults: Developing an interdisciplinary

approach. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Satterfield, J.M., Spring, B., Brownson, R.C., Mullen, E.J., Newhouse, R.P., Walker, B.B., &

Whitlock, E.P. (2009). Toward a transdisciplinary model of evidence-based practice. The

Milbank Quarterly, 87(2), 368-390.

247

Schepard, A. (2004). Children, courts, and custody: Interdisciplinary models for divorcing

families. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Schram, T. (2006). Conceptualizing and proposing qualitative research (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Pearson.

Scriven, M. (1994). The fine line between evaluation and explanation. Evaluation Practice,

15(1), 75-77.

Shaw, I. F. (2003). Cutting edge issues in social work research. British Journal of Social Work,

33(1), 107-120.

Shonkoff, J. P. (2000). Science, policy, and practice: Three cultures in search of a shared

mission. Child development, 71(1), 181-187.

Siegel, D. M. (2008). The growing admissibility of expert testimony by clinical social workers

on competence to stand trial. Social Work, 53(2), 153-163.

Small, S. A., Cooney, S. M., & O’Connor, C. (2009). Evidence‐informed program improvement:

Using principles of effectiveness to enhance the quality and impact of family‐based

prevention programs. Family Relations, 58(1), 1-13.

Smythe, E. A., Ironside, P. M., Sims, S. L., Swenson, M. M., & Spence, D. G. (2008). Doing

Heideggerian hermeneutic research: A discussion paper. International Journal of Nursing

Studies, 45(9), 1389-1397.

Specht, H., & Courtney, M.E. (1994). Unfaithful angels: How social work has abandoned its

mission. New York, NY: The Free Press.

State v. Black, 537 A.2d 1154 (Me. 1988).

State v. Irving, 818 A.2d 204 (Me. 2003).

248

Stavropoulou, A., & Kelesi, M. (2012). Concepts and methods of evaluation in nursing education

–a methodological challenge. Health Science Journal, 6(1), 11-23.

Stiles, W.B. (1993). Quality control in qualitative research. Clinical Psychology Review, 13, 593-

618.

Sullivan, R. R. (1989). Political hermeneutics: The early thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

London University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Sutherland, J. W. (1973). A general systems philosophy for the social and behavioral sciences.

New York, NY: George Braziller, Inc.

Swenson, C.R. (2006). Ideas of self and community: Expanding possibilities for practice. In A.

Lightborn, & P. Sessions (Eds). Handbook of community-based clinical practice (pp. 63-

74). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, M.C. (2001). The moment of complexity: Emerging network culture. Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press.

Thyer, B.A. (2011). LCSW examination pass rates: Implications for social work education.

Clinical Social Work Journal, 39(3), 296-300.

Tippins, T.M., & Wittmann, J.P. (2005). Empirical and ethical problems with custody

recommendations: A call for clinical humility and judicial vigilance. Family Court

Review, 43(2), 193-222.

Turner, F.J. (Ed.). (1996). Social work treatment: Interlocking theoretical approaches (4th ed.).

New York, NY: The Free Press.

Tyson, K. (1995). New foundations for scientific social and behavioral research: The heuristic

paradigm. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

249

Varcoe, C. (2006). Doing participatory action research in a racist world. Western Journal of

Nursing Research, 28(5), 525-540.

Webb, S.A. (2001). Some considerations on the validity of evidence-based practice in social work.

British Journal of Social Work, 31, 57-79.

Weed, D. L. (2007). The nature and necessity of scientific judgment. Journal of Law & Policy,

15, 135-164.

Weil, M. (1982). Research on issues in collaboration between social workers and lawyers. Social

Service Review, 56(3), 393-405.

Weissman, H. N., & Debow, D. M. (2003). Ethical principles and professional competencies. In

A. Goldstein (Ed.), Handbook of psychology: Forensic psychology (vol. 11). Hoboken,

NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Weissman, M. M., Verdeli, H., Gameroff, M. J., Bledsoe, S. E., Betts, K., Mufson, L., ... &

Wickramaratne, P. (2006). National survey of psychotherapy training in psychiatry,

psychology, and social work. Archives of General Psychiatry, 63(8), 925.

Weiss, I., Gal, J., & Cnaan, R.A. (2004). Social work education as professional socialization: A

study of the impact of social work education upon students’ professional preferences.

Journal of Social Service Research, 31(1), 13-31.

Wilcke, M. M. (2002). Hermeneutic phenomenology as a research method in social work.

Currents: New Scholarship in the Human Services, 1(1), 1-10.

Wilson, E.O. (1998). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. New York, NY: First Vantage Books.

Wimbush, E., & Watson, J. (2000). An evaluation framework for health promotion: Theory,

quality and effectiveness. Evaluation, 6(3), 301-321.

250

Witkin, S.L., & Saleebey, D. (2007). Social work dialogues: Transforming the canon in inquiry,

practice, and education. Alexandria, VA: CSWE Press.

Wood, M., & Welch, C. (2010). Are “qualitative” and “quantitative” useful terms for describing

research? Methodological Innovations Online, 5(1), 56-71.

Wong, J. (2001). The state of the profession. Research on Social Work Practice, 11(2), 217-222.

251

AppendicesAppendix A: Recruitment Letter

Dear Colleague:

I am a PhD candidate at the School of Social Work, Simmons College in Boston. Before entering this program at Simmons, I obtained my MSW and I have been a licensed attorney in Maine and Massachusetts for nearly 30 years. If you wish more specific biographical information, please visit my website at southernmainelaw.com.

For purposes of my dissertation, I am conducting a qualitative study about the experiences of licensed clinical social workers who are court-appointed or employed to testify as forensic expert witnesses in civil, criminal, or other judicial proceedings, serve as child custody evaluators, or represent and advocate as a guardian or guardian ad litem in child custody, juvenile, or abuse and neglect proceedings,, or on behalf of older, disabled, or incapacitated persons. To be included in this research, you must hold a clinical social work license in your state that is active, have graduated with an MSW, and provide your expertise, licensing, training, and practice experience to the courts.

In particular, my research questions concern your experiences as an MSW student and graduate, practice as a licensed clinician, and your use of evidence-based or informed research as these domains may relate to your functions as an expert or advocate.. The purpose of this research is to better understand how social workers connect their education and practice to the delivery of expert opinions within forensic “host” environments like the courts. This information will be used to prepare my dissertation. Once I complete the dissertation, a summary of this research will be made available to you. Your feedback is important and welcome.

I am, therefore, inviting you to participate in a one to two hour face-to-face interview with me. The interview will be digitally recorded and a transcript prepared for review by my dissertation committee and me. If you elect to participate, an informed consent form will be provided to you by mail or email in accordance with your preferences. I would also like to identify any other social workers you may know who meet the inclusion criteria so please feel free to share this email with my contact information.

To volunteer for this research proposal or to obtain additional information, please contact me by phone (207-229-7055) or email at dana.prescott@simmons.edu at any time. Should you have questions about the study or your participation in it, please contact my Simmons Committee Chair Hugo Kamya, PhD (617-521-3948).

Thank you for taking the time to read this communication. I do look forward to hearing from you.

Dana E. Prescott, JD, MSW

252

Appendix B: Informed Consent Letter

Dear Participant:

I am a P.D candidate at the School of Social Work, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts. I am conducting a qualitative study about the experiences of licensed clinical social workers who act as expert witnesses in the court system. In particular, I am interested in your experiences as an MSW student, licensed clinical practitioner, and research consumer as you may translate and apply evidence-based or informed research to your role as an expert. The information obtained from the study will be used to prepare a dissertation.

Because you are a social worker with an MSW and hold the highest clinical licensure status granted by the state in which you practice, I am inviting you to participate in a 1 to 2 hour face-to-face interview with me. During the interview, you will be asked to describe your experiences as a social worker acting as an expert witness in judicial proceedings, including your experiences conducting an investigation, writing a report to the court with recommendations that may be admitted as substantive evidence, and testifying in an adversarial or trial environment as to your findings, conclusions, and opinions. The interview will include your perception of your MSW education, practice, and research experiences as those domains may (or may not) connect, in your opinion, to rendering investigative, predictive, or diagnostic expert opinions about individuals or families subject to adjudication in a judicial or adjudicative proceeding.

The interview will be digitally recorded and a transcript prepared by a transcription agency for my dissertation committee and me for purposes of writing a dissertation. The primary risk of participation in this research is that the exploration of your perceptions and feelings may make you feel uncomfortable if the experience was unpleasant. I do not want you to feel any discomfort and will try to make the time and location of the interview comfortable for you. I am, however, interested in what you, as a social worker, may experience when acting as an expert so as to try and better inform our profession of the experiences of social workers working in court systems.

I will ask you to sign this informed consent document indicating that all matters discussed during the interview shall not be discussed, disclosed, or disseminated to anyone who has not participated in the session. Although there is no monetary compensation for participating, the potential benefits of participating include the opportunity to share your experiences, to reflect on your experiences, and to share your knowledge and what you may have learned with others in the social work profession. At the completion of this research, you will be notified that a summary of the findings will be available to you.

Your participation in this study is entirely voluntary. There will be no repercussions should you decide not to participate, not answer any question at any time, or should you decide to withdraw from the study. The transcription agency will also be asked to sign a pledge assuring research confidentiality. To ensure anonymity, any identifying information from the tapes will

253

not be included in the transcripts. All digital recordings will be labeled with a numeric code and the date of the discussion. The researcher, my Committee Chair, and a transcriber will be the sole handlers of the data. All data will be kept locked until the completion of the course which is likely to be the end of June, 2014. Storage will be consistent with Federal regulations and the Institutional Review Board [Human Research Subject Protection Office] regulations of Simmons College. After the dissertation is complete, the transcripts and digital recordings will be maintained in a locked storage unit for no more than two years and then destroyed.

If you have any questions regarding your rights as a research participant, you may call the Simmons Institutional Review Board at 1-617-521-2415. You may withdraw from the study at any time without repercussion. Should you have questions about the study or your participation in it, please feel free to contact my Simmons Committee Chair Hugo Kamya, PhD (617-521- 3911, ext. 3948) or me by phone (207-229-7055) or through email at dana.prescott@simmons.edu.

YOUR SIGNATURE INDICATES THAT YOU HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND THE ABOVE INFORMATION AND THAT YOU HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THE STUDY,

YOUR PARTICIPATION, AND YOUR RIGHTS AND THAT YOU AGREE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE STUDY.

Please keep a copy of this consent form for your records. Thank you very much for your willingness to participate in this research.

Dana E. Prescott, PhD candidate

Signature of Participant Date

Signature of Researcher Date

A PPR O VE DOctober 18, 2012

Approval good for 1 Year Simmons College IRB

254

Appendix C: Participant Interview Guide (Original Draft)

I. Opening Remarks

Introduction to Research Project:I am a PhD. student at Simmons College. I am interested in finding out what it is like to be a licensed clinical social worker appointed by a court as a guardian ad litem (GAL) and to learn about your experiences as an MSW student, a social worker practitioner, and consumer of social work research and the connections, if any, that influence your role as a GAL. The main thing we are going to do today is talk about your involvement and experience. I’ve written a few more details about my research in this leaflet and you can keep a copy if you like. Do you have any more questions about the research for now?

Some preliminary comments about the process:I would like to digitally record the interview so that I can listen to it in detail later and have it transcribed. I won’t let anyone else listen to the recording; except members of my dissertation committee. Your interview is confidential so you will not be named in any research report that I write, but I may use your words in the report. Try to ignore the recording, and please take your time answering. Please stop and ask me if you do not understand anything that I am saying.

II. MSW Contextual Information

Can you tell me about your decision to return to graduate school to obtain an MSW? Need to cover:

Involvement in MSW school Involvement in field placement Motivation to attend graduate school

Were you interested in child custody cases before you entered the MSW program? Knowledge Attitudes Behavior

Were you involved in any role with families who may be involved in child custody litigation before or during your MSW education?

Any involvement in other community-based organizations, like parent education, foster care, or social organizations that serve families

Any work-related experiences with families, like mediation, therapy, school-based advocacy, or employment with a government or private agency

Any other family-related projects before or when you were in school

255

III. Understanding of the family court system during your MSW program

What did you learn and what was your source of knowledge in your MSW program about family courts/lawyers/judges [courses/field/placement/other]? Please discuss specific information that you may have wished you had concerning:

Court functions Being a witness Rules of evidence How lawyers and judges think Ethical duties to clients, courts, and community Knowledge of divorce, cohabitation, and child custody? Knowledge of how the courts apply evidence-based or informed practices in custody

cases.

When did you first hear the term guardian ad litem? Please explain? What did you understand the role of a GAL to be? Did you feel prepared from your MSW education to work in child custody cases?

What influenced you the most (if at all) to become a GAL? Can you explain to me how that change came about? For example, was your interest influenced by your MSW education? If yes, what was it about the MSW that made you take on the role?

How do you think your MSW education could have prepared you better, if at all, to act as a GAL in the courts?

IV. Potential Impact of being a GAL

Did your attitudes toward the courts change during your involvement as a GAL?If yes or no, can you explain to me how that change did or did not come about? Was the change influenced by your role as a GAL or something else?

Did being a GAL have any other effects on your life, but only if you wish to respond: Health changes (mental or physical) Social changes Skills development Knowledge development Way time is spent Financial implications Political engagement Other

How would you describe the experience of being court-appointed as a GAL? Positives Negatives

256

Will you continue your role as a GAL in the foreseeable future? Can you see yourself continuing to act as a GAL in the future? If not, why not?

V. GAL Training

I would like some background information on your training as a GAL. Could you tell me a bit more about what you observed and heard about being a GAL, including the required certification course in your court system about being a GAL?

History Goals and objectives of role Ethics and values of GAL vs. SW Core activities of a GAL Current challenges for the courts and families, including multicultural issues Investigation (protocols, recording, accuracy, when and where) Mediation/ADR Dual duties to court and child Report writing Testifying

Was the term evidence-based or informed research included in your training?

In the training, what did you understand was your obligation to apply EBPs to your role as a GAL in the courts? Was any of this training consistent with or different than your knowledge of EBPs as a licensed clinical social worker?

What did you learn about the influence of a GAL in child custody litigation on resolution of child custody or the duration and intensity of parental conflict?

What kind of experience has being a GAL training had on you in the positive/negative? Can you explain?

Do you know of any other information available that may be of use to me in this research from your training? (e.g., documents, articles you wrote or read, material that influenced you).

V. Practice Experiences

How diverse would describe the families who you worked with in your community?

Do you have a particular SW theory that guides your approach to families in child custody cases?

What do you believe is the best (if any) parenting plan for children under 5, 6-10, 11-15 and is that opinion influenced by your clinical practice experience? If so, please describe.

Did your practice experience include IPV, child abuse and neglect, and/or diversity in families?

257

As you reflect on your role as a GAL, I am interested in your professional and personal experiences as a licensed clinical SW, so I am going to ask you a series of questions:

1. Did your practice experiences influence how you make your fact findings and recommendations as a GAL?

2. What domain(s) of SW knowledge (education, practice, or research experiences) influences that process from start to finish for you?

3. How would you describe your experiences of acting as an expert in the judicial system?

4. What does it mean to you to be court-appointed expert in a child custody case? Do you find you are an expert? If so, in what would you describe as your strengths?

5. Do you believe your licensing is an advantage or disadvantage or of no consequence to being a GAL?

6. What you would want other SWs to learn before he or she becomes a GAL?

7. In retrospect, what do you wish you learned before you became a GAL?

8. Do you believe that the experience of being a GAL have changed your view of SW? Of the courts? Of families?

9. Based upon your clinical experience, if you could change anything in the courts concerning child custody litigation, what would it be?

10. What do you hear from other SWs concerning their experiences as a GAL, if anything?

VI. Acting as a GAL in the Courts

Some people think that role of a GAL as an intervention in the courts for children and parents can help to encourage parents to improve parenting behavior and diminish litigation? From your education, training, and experience do you agree or disagree?

Since your training [when, how many days] how many CLEs have you attended specific to being a GAL?

What do you believe lawyers and judges should learn about SW education, practice and research, if any?

What is your opinion of how effectively interdisciplinary practices work in the courts?

258

How does diversity influence your role as a GAL? Do you believe that diversity of families is considered by lawyers and judges?

What would you change about the GAL role in the courts (e.g., GAL power, authority, recommendations, practices)?

VII. Preliminary Realistic Evaluation Questions

Outcomes

1. In your experience, do your efforts as a GAL influence positive changes for the families in which you are appointed?

2. What do you believe increases or decreases the likelihood that a GAL is an effective intervention for a family?

3. Have you ever seen any research concerning the efficacy of GALs?

Contexts

1. How do you believe that a history of IPV influences your cases, if at all?

2. How do you believe that gender of the parent, age of children (?), gender of children (?), may influence your GAL decision making and recommendations, if at all?

3. Do you believe that trauma influences the behaviors and attitudes of parents in child custody cases?

4. How does child custody litigation (lawyers, judges) influence the outcomes of your GAL work?

5. How do you experience your role as a GAL in ADR/judicial settlement conferences? [e.g. pressure, duress, respect, dignity, value of SW knowledge, conflict with Code]

6. How does SES/economics of family resources influence the role of a GAL or outcomes in the courts, if at all?

7. What is your experience as a GAL with military families?

Mechanics

1. What factors in the family court enables or disables you from implementing parenting outcomes or strategies for families?

2. Has a judge ever rejected your recommendations?

259

3. How did that feel? Do you believe, in hindsight, you were more correct or incorrect concerning your recommendations?

4. What do you believe influences a judge’s decision-making in child custody trials in your jurisdiction?

5. As a GAL, is there anything unique about SW experiences and knowledge that you believe helps parents and children through custody litigation?

6. Is there anything unique about SW experiences and knowledge that you believe helps you foster positive change for parents and children?

VIII. Closing Structured Questions

Interview Reference Number:______________

Background information

1. Gender:

FemaleMaleSelf-identification/Declined to answer

2. Age:

< 30>30-39>40-49>50-59>60-69>70+

3. Please state the number of cases in which you have been court-appointed as a GAL.

<5>6-10More than 10

4. Please state the number of times you have testified as a GAL.

260

<5>6-10More than 10

5. Please state the number of reports you have written as a GAL.

<5>6-10More than 10

6. What is the highest educational qualification that you hold?

MSW Degree or equivalentOther Graduate Education

7. What is your current working situation besides acting as a GAL?

Working part timeWorking full timeRetiredUnpaid Family worker (career or parent)UnemployedVoluntary worker

8. What is the continuing education for a GAL in your jurisdiction?

Do not know_____ hours per _____

9. In what state(s) did you attend MSW graduate school, obtain your licensed, and receive your GAL training and certification as a GAL?

10. For how many years have you held the status of licensed clinical social worker?

<56-10More than 10

11. Do you know of any social worker who was reported to a licensing board or sanctioned when acting as a GAL? What did you understand that experience was like?

12. In response to this question (“yes” or “no”), would you say that you trust…:

261

Parents in child custody casesThe judgeThe lawyerOther court workers, teachers, therapists, or licensed professionals

13. To what extend do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “By working

together, parents can influence decisions that affect their children?

Strongly agreeAgreeNeither agree nor disagreeStrongly disagreeDon’t have an opinion

14. Are your fees paid by the court system, private parties only, or a mix?

15. How often have you recommended psychological or child custody or substance abuse/alcohol evaluations as a % of your recommendations?

16. If you wish to answer, are you currently a member of any of the following?

Political partyParent/School AssociationReligious group or churchVoluntary services group in your communityProfessional organization (name)Other community or civic group (give details)Domestic violence or child abuse organizationParent education organizationResearch projects other than this one

17. Please tell me how much you agree or disagree with the following statements:

Strongly agree

Slightly agree

Neither agree or disagree

Slightly disagree

Strongly disagree

“The courts should improve the quality of life for parents and children”“There is little connection between parental behavior and child custody litigation”

262

“Research is helpful to my recommendations as a GAL”“My MSW education prepared me to work in court systems”“My MSW education prepared me to share my knowledge with other professionals and organizations”

S I M M ON S

263

Appendix D: Study Continuation Approval Letter

300 The Fenway, Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5898w w w . simmon s . ed

December 3, 2013Dana PrescottSchool of Social Work Simmons College Boston, MA 02115-5898

RE: Your continuing review application dated regarding study number 12-026: Licensed Clinical Social Workers as Court-Appointed Guardians as litem: The Experiences of "Being" an Expert (Retitled: Clinical Social Workers and Adjudicatory Systems: Toward an Understanding of the Experience of Becoming and Being an Expert)

Dear Mr. Prescott:

I have reviewed your request for continuing review of the study listed above. This study qualifies for expedited review under DHHS (OHRP) regulations.

This is to confirm that I have approved your request for continuation. The protocol is approved through your most recent continuing review application.

You are granted permission to continue your study as described effective immediately. The study is next subject to continuing review on or before 10119/2014, unless closed before that date.

As with the initial approval, changes to the study must be promptly reported and approved. Contact Valerie E. Beaudrault (617-521-2415; fax 617-521-3083; email: valerie.beaudrault@simmons.edu) if you have any questions or require further information.

Sincerely,

Jon KimballIRB Member and Primary Reviewer

264

Appendix E: Transcriber Confidentiality Agreement

DEC 1 0 2012I, Asher Consulting, LLC, transcriptionist, agree to maintain full confidentiality in regard to any and all audiotapes and documentation received from Dana E. Prescott related to his doctoral study on LLcensed Clinical Social Workers as Court-Appointed Guardians ad Lilitem: The Experiences of “Being” an Expert. Furthermore, I agree:

1. To hold in strictest confidence the identification of any individual that may be inadvertently revealed during the transcription of audio-taped interviews, or in any associated documents;

2. To not make copies of any audiotapes or computerized files of the transcribed interview texts, unless specifically requested to do so by Dana E. Prescott;

3. To store all study-related audiotapes and materials in a safe, secure location as long as they are in my possession;

4. To return all audiotapes and study-related documents to Dana E. Prescott in a complete and timely manner.

5. To delete all electronic files containing study-related documents from my computer hard drive and any backup devices.

I am aware that I can be held legally liable for any breach of this confidentiality agreement, and for any harm incurred by individuals if I disclose identifiable information contained in the audiotapes and/or files to which I will have access .

Transcriber’s name (printed) Karen E. Beckwitt ,Ph.D., CEO of Asher Consulting, LLC Transcriber's signature Date 11.26.12

265

Appendix F: Preliminary Conceptual Framework

266

Appendix G: Social Worker Knowledge

267

Appendix H: Phenomenological Experience and Categories

268

Appendix I: The General Domains

269

Appendix J: Emergent Themes