training literature review

hi everyone. my name is maric kramer. i’m the librarian for social work at wheelock college. and heather asked me to come speak to the swk 641 classes this week; because of the blizzards, that’s not possible, so i’m recording a video. i hope that you find it helpful, but i also encourage you to get in touch with me; via email, via skype, via phone, or if you’re based in boston, just drop by in person. so what we’re going to be talking about to day is evidence-based social work practice, and how librarians can help you to locate evidence. um. so let’s get started.alright, um. step 1 of evidence-based practice for social work is to frame your questions. you’re going to want to convert your practice information needs into answerable questions that are client-oriented and specific. um, you’re going to want to consider the type of intervention you might want to do, and the outcomes that you intend.

step 2, and this is where librarians can be most helpful, is locating evidence. so you’re going to want to locate empirical evidence pertaining to your question from sources such as books & journals, systematic reviews, lists of effective programs, which can often be found from government agencies, or practice guidelines, which often come from professional organizations. now in steps 3 and 4, you’re going to evaluate that evidence critically, and you’re going to apply it to your practice situation. so you’ll want to use your critical thinking skills to evaluate the evidence, whether it is a journal article, a book, etc. you’re going to want to determine: are the researcher’s conclusions valid? was their study well-designed? do you agree with the methodology, and do you agree with the conclusions that they’re drawing? and then most importantly, can their conclusions be applied to your own practice situation?

what worked in a particular practice situation might not work in another, so you’re going to want to use your critical thinking skills to evaluate the evidence in itself; and then you’re going to want to evaluate for its fitness to your own practice situation. and step 4 is to apply that evidence to your practice situation. step 5 is really important, and you don’t want to skip this. it’s to evaluate the process. an evidence-based practitioner continually assesses her own knowledge of current scholarly literature; of her familiarity with electronic databases; and of research methodology. so therefore, she also knows when and how to seek assistance. so i wanted to point out that librarians are your evidence-based practice allies! we’re trained in database search techniques. and obviously we work in colleges and universities,

but we also work in hospitals, in government agencies, in ngos, and at your local public library. and we love to help! so come and talk to us about finding evidence for your practice. alright, so, today i’m going to discuss two databases where you can find evidence to answer the question that you have about your practice situation. the first one i’m going to discuss is psycinfo. it was put together by the apa. that’s the american psychological association, the same one whose style book you use to write your paper in social work. so because it’s apa, the main focus is psychology, but also the behavioral sciences and mental health more broadly, and that includes social work. one of the major benefits of using psycinfo for evidence-based social work practice

is its powerful search features. so today we’re going to focus on four kinds of search limiters that will help you find the evidence that you need. so the first search limiter i want to make sure you know about is publication type. if you're looking for empirical studies, you’re probably going to want to limit your search results to peer-reviewed journals. the second kind of limiter is actually two different limiters in the advanced search features of psycinfo, and that’s age and population groups. because you’re looking for client-centered evidence, you’re going to want to limit your search to the appropriate age and population group. psycinfo has these things called classification codes.

they’re specific to psycinfo, and they’re designed to describe the primary subject matter of the article that is under discussion. you can find a full list of these classification codes on the apa website, or you can browse through them from the search features. finally, and this one is going to be very important for you, is the methodology limiter. there are four kinds of methodologies i might suggest for you, if you’re looking to be an evidence-based practitioner. the first one is empirical studies. that’s a very broad category, and includes a wide variety of kinds of empirical studies, but basically it means that these studies are based on observable evidence. the second kind is a systematic review.

the third is a meta-analysis, and the fourth would be a treatment outcome or clinical trial. these final three kinds are more narrower. empirical studies is a very broad category; systematic review, meta-analysis, and treatment outcome are going to be more specific and are going to get you fewer results, but they’re going to get you very valuable results. and hopefully you’ll see that when we take a look at them in the database. alright, so let’s hop into psycinfo. on the wheelock college library homepage, we’re going to click on the databases a to z tab. in the drop-down list, i’m going to choose psycinfo. it’s alphabetical, so it’s down in the p’s. and click “go.” so this is the initial search screen of psycinfo; it might look familiar to you already.

i’m going to ignore the boxes at the top of the screen right now, and i’m going to focus farther down on the screen where it says “limit your results.” this is where we apply those four different kinds of limiters that i talked about earlier. as a quick demonstration, i’ll just show you down here, you can see publication type on the left side, and age groups, and where i want to focus is down in those ‘classification codes.’ so i discussed classification codes very briefly, and i wanted to let you know that you can scroll through them here, but you can also take a look at the whole list of classification codes on the psycinfo website, and i’ll provide the link for that. it’s a very long list; it’s grouped by subject—so again, this is the primary subject matter of the article under discussion. one that i thought might be useful to investigate for this group is the code 3313, which stands for group and family therapy.

so i’m going to input that into the search, just so it’s an example of what we can do. so 3313, group and family therapy. before i search, i’m also going to add in a methodology. so one of the things, um, one of the types of studies i talked about earlier was a systematic review. so, again, the apa has a whole list, along with definitions, of what they mean regarding different kinds of methodologies. i definitely recommend taking a look at this. it’s not too long. um, but you can see down here, a systematic review. the definition they give is “a form of literature review that comprehensively identifies, appraises, and synthesizes all relevant research on a specifically formulated question.” so, systematic reviews can be really valuable for evidence-based practice.

so again, just to do a demonstration, i’m going to use the methodology limiter, and i’m going to choose “systematic review.” you’re going to see that it’s nested under “literature review,” because as it said in the definition, it’s a type of literature review. so all i’m going to do is search for systematic reviews about group and family therapy. so i click “search,” and you can see that we come up with only 44 results. so again, all of these results are going to be systematic reviews about group and family therapy. you can see from the first couple of titles; we’ve got a “systematic review and meta-analysis of parent and family-based interventions for children and adolescents with chronic medical conditions.” the second one that we see here is “the development and evolution of family therapy research:

its impact on practice, current status, and future directions.” so these are a couple of examples of, these systematic reviews are taking stock of the current state of knowledge in a specific area. they’re looking for best practices. so from here you can actually add some search terms. because some of you are going to be discussing children or adolescents with behavior problems, i am going to search the phrase “behavior problems,” and you’re going to see that we come up with six. so again, these are six systematic reviews, dealing with group or family therapy about behavior problems. so you can see here that if i’m looking for best practices for family therapy for children and adolescents with behavior problems, these systematic reviews could be quite helpful.

so i actually want to encourage you at this point to just try pausing the video. and see if you can replicate this search on your own, and take a look through the results. so first limit to “systematic review.” second, choose the classification code 3313, for “group and family therapy.” and then try inputting the search terms “behavior problems.” and take a look and see what you can come up with, and see if this is a valuable method for you to use. so i’m going to take us through one more search. i’m going to clear out the current search, and i’ll try a different topic. so, let’s say for example that my practice situation, if i were a social worker, is working with female adolescents with depression or anxiety.

so in this case, i would probably want to choose “age group: adolescents,” and “population group: female.” and then i’m going to want to choose a classification code that makes sense. let’s say i’m really interested in looking for cognitive therapy for female adolescents with depression and anxiety. so i would choose classification code 3311, “cognitive therapy.” and for methodology, let’s give it a shot and see if there are any systematic reviews out there about using cognitive therapy with this population. so i’ve input all my limiters, so up at the top i’m going to input “depression” or “anxiety,” since those are my areas of interest, and let’s click “search.” okay, so we can see that we’ve got a pretty limited number of results.

“acceptance and commitment therapy in the treatment of anxiety: a systematic review.” and the second is “treatment-resistant depression in adolescents: is the addition of cognitive behavioral therapy of benefit?” um, so that one might be an interesting one for me to take a look at if my practice situation is a female adolescent who is showing treatment-resistant depression, and i’m interested in doing cbt with her. this would give me basically an overview of what do therapists and social workers know about doing cbt in this situation? so this is just a second example, and again, if you have some questions or would like some help in putting together a search in psycinfo or finding systematic reviews on your topic, i definitely encourage you to get in touch with me. for now we’re going to jump into socindex, a second database that might be useful to you. alright, so next we’re going to take a look at socindex. so first a few brief words about what we’re searching when we look in socindex.

socindex is a database that is built and maintained by ebsco, which is a privately-held company. so unlike apa which is a professional organization, ebsco is a company that provides information services. and the primary focus of the socindex database is sociology. however, it also covers a wide variety of related disciplines, including social work, criminal justice, social psychology, gender studies, marriage and family, and many other different kinds of databases [sic]. socindex is a database that by this point in your msw program, you’re probably familiar with already. so let’s take a look and see what we can find in there. so to get to socindex from the library homepage, i’m choosing “databases a to z,” and i’m going to scroll down to “socindex with full text,” and click “go.”

and so one thing to know about socindex is that it doesn’t have quite the same amount of robust search limiters as psycinfo does, as you can see down here. there definitely are a few, and i encourage you to take a look at them, but in this database, it’s going to be really important to you to know how to use subject terms. so, i’m going to take a look up at the top of the screen here where it says “subject terms,” and click on that. so these subject terms are the phrases—the words or phrases—that describe the main ideas of the articles under discussion. so we can take a look before we get started searching, even, to make sure we are using the right terminology. so we’re going to use the search box that says “browsing: sociology thesaurus,” and let’s just take a quick look for “child welfare” as an example. so i’m going to click where it says “child welfare.” as you can see it says “click a term to display details,” and i’m just going to scroll down a little bit here.

there is a lot of information on this page, and i want to make sure you know what you’re looking at. so up at the top, it says “child welfare,” and underneath that it says “scope note.” so this is where it’s going to tell you exactly what they mean by “child welfare” when they use that subject term in this database. so this one says: “here are entered works on organized social work aimed at improving children's health and lives. works on persons who work in this field are entered under ‘child welfare workers.’ works on agencies providing this kind of service are entered under ‘social work with children.’” so this tells us exactly what they do mean by “child welfare,” and exactly what they don’t mean by “child welfare.” so if you were primarily interested in finding works about child welfare workers, you would use that term instead. underneath the scope note, you are going to see “broader terms.”

so as you might expect, these terms are broader than “child welfare.” as you can see “public welfare,” for instance, is a much broader term than “child welfare.” “child welfare” sort of fits underneath the umbrella of “public welfare.” underneath “broader terms,” you are going to see “narrower terms.” so these terms are going to get you a smaller number of results but if one of them describes your topic, they’re going to be much more targeted results. so let’s say for instance if you’re interested in child welfare, and you discover that “foster home care” is the narrower term that you need, you’d be better served to choose the narrower term “foster home care” because it’s only going to return you results about foster home care. under “narrower terms,” you’re going to see “related terms.”

these are neither broader nor narrower, but are somehow related to the topic of child welfare. and you can see that some of those preferred terms, that were referred to in the scope note, are listed down here, such as “child welfare workers.” finally it tells us what this term is “used for.” so it’s saying that the term “child welfare” is preferred to the term “protection of children.” so this is a lot of information. basically, what you want to do, if you decide that “child welfare” is the term that is most suited to your topic, you click the box next to “child welfare,” and you click “add.” so you’re going to see it at the top of your screen, and we’re going to click search.

the “de” before “child welfare,” is just to tell the database that you want it only to be looking in those subject terms. de is short for “descriptor,” which is a term you don’t necessarily need to know, but just if you’re interested in why it’s including that “de” in your search box, that’s why. okay, so we can see over 13,000 search results about child welfare. this is way more that you’re ever going to want to look through. so at this point, you’re going to want to add another search term to your search box in order to get the results that you’re looking for. so let’s say that the area that i’m really interested in is working with families in need of family preservation and reunification services. so i would say that “child welfare” is still an important search term for us, but i’m also going to want to put in a search term such as “family preservation.”

the reason that i’m putting it in quotation marks is it’s going to search for the phrase “family preservation” instead of the word “family” or the word “preservation.” so as you can see here we went from over 13,000 to 202. that is a much more reasonable number. we still could narrow it down here. you could use limiters such as if you only wanted peer-reviewed journals; if you only wanted articles published in the last decade, for example; those would be two easy ways to limit down this number of results. this way you could see that by combining the subject term “child welfare” with just the keyword, the search phrase “family preservation,” we’ve come up with a much more reasonable number of results.

okay, so just to wrap things up with a little summary. so again, the five steps of evidence-based social work practice are first: to formulate specific, client-focused questions. second: to locate evidence to help you answer your questions. third: to evaluate evidence. fourth: to apply evidence to your practice situation, and fifth: to reflect on the process. so again, librarians are especially helpful at step number two: locating evidence to help you answer your questions. so i just wanted to show you ways to get in touch with us.

from the library home page, you’ll want to click on “research help,” and then on the left-hand side, “research guides,” and then scroll down to the guide for swk 640/641. this might be familiar to some of you from last semester when you took swk 640 in the fall. i wanted to let you know that i’ve updated it since then, so you’ll see some of the same familiar resources, in addition you’ll see my contact information there on the side. but in addition, i’ve added a couple of ways to search for books and ebooks about evidence based practice. in the “find articles” section, you’ll see socindex and psycinfo, the two databases that we looked at today. and down under “selected websites,” i added three new websites that i think are going to be helpful for you. first, the “blueprints for healthy youth development,”

second, the “campbell collaboration library of systematic reviews,” and third, the “nrepp, the national registry of evidence-based programs and practices.” definitely take a look at these three websites; they’re going to be really interesting for you when looking for systematic reviews or evidence-based practice; different interventions that might be useful for client populations you might be working with. so again, up at the top you’ll see my contact information there; please give me a call, send me an email. i’m especially helpful in this step number two, locating evidence, but i can also help you out if you’re not exactly sure what your practice question is yet. working together, maybe we can formulate a question, and then go into databases to do some research about it.

so that’s all, thank you so much for watching the video today. i hope to see you all at some point this semester, if the snow ever ends. and i encourage you to get in touch with me! and good luck on this project.