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If I, thus, may submit for the purpose of our discussion today that indeed we do need research, the second question immediately develops: "Who should do the research?" In defense of many people who have in the past given thoughtful service to social work in leadership positions, it should be pointed out here that their failure to press for social work research was not due just to negligence or pre-occupation with their particular realms of function but, rather, was due to their conviction that their profession merely had the task of transforming into action, for the sake of community welfare, the findings developed by the social and biological sciences. Only recently this viewpoint that social workers are practitioners and not researchers was brought up once more at a meeting of a national committee of experts in the field of child life.

I want to submit here that we either must relinquish the claim of constituting as social workers a professional group, or else we must acknowledge that one of the basic criteria of a profession is its use of scientific analysis in constant self-evaluation. This is not meant to be a declaration of our independence from the research activities of other groups, rather, we must ever develop what Philip Klein calls our partnership with the social and biological sciences. We must freely acknowledge the basic support we have acquired by utilizing the findings of other sciences, but with it we must also emphasize our own competence to apply the scientific approach to problems of human relationships.

There will undoubtedly be some who, while acknowledging the general responsibility of the field of social work to do its own research, will, nevertheless, point out that they hardly would be in a position to participate in this endeavor as the very specialization and smallness of their agency would not make it possible to conduct large-scale inquiries which, after all, would be a criterion for research. That this is a wrong premise was quite clearly developed by Robert C. Angell, the distinguished sociologist, in a symposium on research at the 1942 meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. Dr. Angell pointed out that the number of new cases which are necessary to the verification of an hypothesis varies with its character and that a simple generalization in a complex field, such as an hypothesis that broken homes produce delinquent children, obviously has to be submitted to a large number of tests, whereas, if a complex hypothesis is put forward to cover a not-too-complex situation, it may be verified by a relatively small number of cases. Applied to our situation in the child welfare field, does this not mean that there is indeed a place for the small children's agency specializing in the placement of children with difficult behavior problems, to make a substantial contribution to social work research through a careful analysis of the factors operative in the agency function if only this inquiry is conducted in keeping with the principles of scientific research.

But who in our agencies should do the research? Is it not true that we must turn to other professions to carry out our research because our own casework staff shows lack of interest, if not outright aversion toward research activities?

I think the answer to this is given emphatically by David French in his editorial foreword to the American Association of Social Workers' newest pamphlet "The Contribution of Research to Social Work" when he says, "We confront a need for clear recognition that research is a specialization in social work -- a specialization centered around skills, process and knowledge of research methods as applied to the areas of social work practice."

If we accept this dictum of Mr. French, then we must raise our next question of our discussion "How do we train social workers for research?" The interim reports of the Study of Social Work Education which is being undertaken at the present time indicate that this study will indeed arrive at the conclusion that our schools of social work should develop courses which will provide training for specialized research work as the concern of all aspects of social work just as it does now provide for a specialization in medical or psychiatric social work. However, our problem will not be solved by asking our schools of social work to turn out each year a (hopefully) adequate number of specialists in social research. Once more we must say that, if we are to be considered a profession, then every member of the social work profession must be prepared to understand, accept and apply scientific methods of analysis. This is how Dr. Youngdahl last year put this problem squarely before the schools of social work; "A graduate degree in social work should mean...that the individual knows enough about the scientific method in research to be able to recognize errors or validity in conclusions and to suggest study projects which may be helpful in the functioning of his agency or his work."