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What type of research then is needed in social work? Philip Klein suggests the following five categories:

1. Studies to establish, identify and measure the need for service.

2. Studies to measure the services offered as they relate to needs. (Both these types of studies would clearly have an orientation towards planning of services and planning of agency structure. With these we might include also administrative studies and cost studies.)

3. Studies to test, gauge, and evaluate results of social work operation.

4. Studies to test the efficacy of special techniques, be it casework procedures of one school versus those of another, probation versus institutional care, child guidance by teamwork versus guidance by casework or psychiatrist, group therapy versus individual therapy, etc. (In this Dr. Klein includes differences in organizational patterns, merger of agencies or multiple function within a casework agency, intake, etc.)

5. Studies and methodology of research.

In order to gain some measure of objective data for presentation to you here today, a request was made to the Clearing House for Research in Child Life, recently organized within the United States Children's Bureau for a list of the projects registered last year with the Clearing House within the broad field of child care.

Time does not permit here to give a detailed analysis of the 69 reports of projects which ware made available to me by the Clearing House. Neither would such a detailed analysis be particularly valuable because the Clearing House is keenly aware that it has at the present time only a very incomplete and spotty list of such projects since it is merely in the beginning stage of collecting this information.

However, it would seem appropriate to check the types of projects submitted to the clearing house with the just-mentioned types developed by Dr. Klein, and such comparison has the following results:

The largest number of the 69 reported research projects fell in the first two categories, that is, they were either studies on child welfare needs or studies to measure the adequacy of service as related to needs. Most of then did not go beyond a general survey and seemed to have but little significance outside of the particular community in which the study was made. There were a good number of administrative studies testing in general the adequacy of the service of a particular agency. It is significant that there was only one cost study, and this was a nation-wide study undertaken by the United States Children's Bureau with regard to its own program of child welfare services.

There was but one study which corresponded to the third type developed by Dr. Klein, namely, a study to test and evaluate results of social work operation. This study was also the only one in the group of 69 which dealt directly with preventive child welfare services. It was a project by a public agency.

There was, of course, a large number of projects falling into the fourth type -- studios to test the efficacy of specific techniques. A large number of these dealt with problems of adoption and the second largest number with child placement in general while other studies related particularly to the field of child guidance and the final group dealt with institutional adjustment. Most of these studies were extremely limited in nature so that one might well question whether the term "research" could be applied to them. Quite a few of them violated the caution of Dr. Angell; namely, they attempted to test a simple hypothesis in a complex field with too small a number of cases, thereby leaving unanswered the suggestion that similar results might have been achieved perhaps by simply relying on the healing factor of time itself and on the adaptability of the average human being in adjusting to a difficult social situation.

There was not a single project which would fall in Dr. Klein's fifth category, "Studies in methodology of research."

Recognizing once more that we are dealing here with a group of projects which cannot be taken as a representative sample of research activity in child welfare throughout the country, it might, nonetheless, be advantageous to add to our analysis of this group of studies some suggestions for future work in this area.

It has been said so often that it hardly bears repeating and yet must be stated here once more that, before we can proceed farther in social work research, we will need to agree on a definite terminology. As it is, much time and money-consuming effort is lost because the findings of one study are not transferable to another because the two do not employ the same terminology. I think we must clearly differentiate between the danger that we all might be made to think alike and the necessity that we all should be able to express our thinking in terms which are understandable to the rest of the group. The least we should be able to find out is wherein and to what extent we are in disagreement.