In this article, I show the connections between critical social work and the thought of Norman Denzin. The connection is pragmatist philosophy whose roots are European. Denzin came to pragmatism through C. Wright Mills’ notion of the sociological imagination whose focus is the intersection of biography and history. This notion is analogous to social work’s person-environment interactions. I illustrate the intersections of history and biography through telling stories about my first professional job teaching health and family life in a suburban Rhode Island high school. I analyze the stories through the perspectives of pragmatist principles and critical discourse analysis. I was naïve and blithely sailed into teaching human sexuality as I understood it and wanted others to, oblivious to what my teaching would mean to those who didn’t share my perspectives and oblivious to the consequences for me. Other faculty told me that students were spreading rumors that I was a slut who talked dirty in class. I became a sexualized joke at my hometown bowling alley. The principal asked me to resign at the end of the school year. A few years later, a friend of my brother’s decided I was rape-worthy. These experiences did not derail my life. I used several democratic discourses to define myself and to resist the definitions of hegemonic sexuality, such as slut. I carried on. Through stories and analysis, I show connections between my personal life, my career, and culture-wide beliefs and practices.

This commentary is a response to an invitation the editorial board of Qualitative Social Work extended to me to comment on an article that reports on my career interview as a qualitative social work researcher. The article appears in the present issue of the journal (Staller, 2024). The editors and I agree that Karen Staller did an exemplary job of interpreting the transcripts on which the article is based but that the transcripts were incomplete. In my enthusiasm for what I did say, I left things out. In this article, I added to the material that Karen had access to, such as laying out the principles of pragmatism that underlie qualitative social work research and practice and how I coped with the effects of hearing stories about violence and gained from it. I also added to the theory of violence that Karen wrote about and to her descriptions of my relationships with other feminists. I gave a brief account of deductive qualitative analysis that I did not mention at all in the interviews. I realize more than ever that there are differences between interviews, which are spontaneous utterances, and articles, that authors write over time, reflect upon, and revise countless times. Then editors have a go at them.

Social work qualitative research and the work of Norman Denzin have much in common. Norman's work was values-based, built on notions of justice, care, dignity, worth, equality, and self-determination with the purpose of identifying and describing problematic social conditions and, in turn, taking action to bring about social change and transformation. This statement fits social work perfectly. In this article, I describe the work of Norman Denzin, show how he promoted qualitative social work research, and how his suggestions for social work researchers to incorporate critical perspectives in our work was calling us back to ourselves. Most of all, he affirmed what we were already doing and want to do better.

This article reports on a study that tests whether concepts from the myth of redemptive violence, constructed for describing social and political violence (Wink, 1992, 1998), fit perpetrators' descriptions of their acts of interpersonal violence. In seeking the perspectives of persons who perpetrate interpersonal violence, in its life history method, and in its qualitative theory testing, the research is within the traditions of the Chicago School of Sociology. The life history interviews were with a sample of more than 140 men and seven women known to have committed felony level acts of interpersonal violence, such as sexual and physical assault, attempted murder, and murder. The approach was deductive qualitative research (Casula et al., 2020; Gilgun, 2019) that involved testing the fit between the principles and concepts of redemptive violence and the narrative accounts of the life histories. Results showed that the myth of redemptive violence fits many perpetrators' descriptions of their lived experience during acts of interpersonal violence, while at the same time showing unanticipated variations within the categories of the initial conceptual framework. Because scholars originally developed notions of redemptive violence for sociopolitical violence, its applicability to interpersonal violence increases its validity and thus its relevance to a range of applications, such as theory development, policies, programs, and prevention efforts.

This article proposes a four‐factor outcome model for case management services with children and families when the children have experienced complex trauma. The factors are relationships between service users and practitioners, personal characteristics of service users and practitioners, social service system influences, and external influences. The model is based upon research on the common factors model of psychotherapy outcomes, research that the first author conducted on case management services with children and families who have experienced complex trauma, the authors' practice experience with children and families who have experienced complex trauma, related research and theory, and ideas from evidence‐based practice. While the model is tailored to family case management, we believe it is applicable to other domains of social services, such as family and couples therapy, child and family mental health, family advocacy, and family policy formulation and evaluation.

This article describes analytic procedures that build upon one another and lead toward interpretation and theory construction in qualitative social work research. Using examples from my own research and the research of others, I show relationships between descriptions, analysis, interpretation, and theorizing. Analytic procedures that move researchers beyond description include reflexivity statements, fieldnotes, group analysis of data, creative thinking, and making conscious choices about when and how to add conceptual material in design and analysis. My thesis is that descriptions are the foundation of both interpretation and theory construction and that descriptions themselves are not simple to do.

Grounded theory and deductive qualitative analysis share an intellectual heritage with social work. Common roots include a focus on lived experiences of research participants, who in social work typically are service users and service providers. They also incorporate other qualities associated with social work, such as understanding persons in context, action orientation, and focus on understanding multiple perspectives through immersion in the field. Research findings, therefore, are useful and usable to practitioners.

This article reports on case study research with four mothers who asked for help from their pastors when they learned, or had reason to believe, that their husbands had sexually abused children in their families. In their own words, mothers gave accounts of how the pastors responded. Some were helpful and knowledgeable, some appeared bewildered, and others were hostile and blaming toward the women. This article will sensitize pastors and other pastoral counselors to issues that child sexual abuse raises. In addition, the research responds to Mahoney’s (J Marriage Fam 72:805–827, 2010) observations about the scarcity of knowledge on whether religion helps or harms families during times of stress.

During investigations of child sexual abuse, forensic interviewers must maintain a delicate balance of providing support for the child while collecting forensic evidence about the abuse allegation required for credible evidence for court purposes. The use of narrative practice techniques can achieve both goals by creating conditions that facilitate the possibility that children will feel safe enough to provide detailed descriptions of the alleged abuse. This article reports findings from an evaluation of a change in practice using the CornerHouse Forensic Interview Protocol in which narrative practice techniques were incorporated into the interview format. Findings show that children provided more detailed accounts of abuse when interviewers used open-ended questions and supportive statements through narrative practice.

This chapter provides guidelines for writing journal articles based on qualitative approaches. The guidelines are part of the tradition of the Chicago school of sociology and the author’s experience as a writer and reviewer. The guidelines include understanding experiences in context, immersion, interpretations grounded in accounts of informants’ lived experiences, and research as action oriented. The chapter also covers writing articles that report findings based on ethnographies, autoethnographies, performances, poetry, and photography and other graphic media.

Child sexual abuse can be difficult to detect. Most children tell no one, and they often show no signs of abuse. This article reports on interviews with mothers of survivors of child sexual abuse. The purpose of the interview research was to understand mothers' experiences of the signs, the lack of signs, and the signs that made sense once the abuse came to light. This article is relevant to practice because, first, it shows how difficult child sexual abuse can be to detect, and second, it shows the shock and devastation that some mothers experience when child sexual abuse occurs in their families. Service provider sensitivity and attunement are shown to be key to effective practice in this area.

In this special issue, we present four articles that illustrate some of the contributions that qualitative approaches can make to intervention research and thus carry forward social work’s commitment to effective practice. We intend these articles to illustrate possibilities and to stimulate other researchers and funders to take seriously the usefulness of qualitative approaches to the design and development of interventions. From the inception of intervention research until now, researchers have emphasized the importance of qualitative research to the design, development, testing, and reformulation of interventions. From our points of view, the contributions of qualitative approaches are unique and indispensable. Social work intervention research is significant to the extent that it informs practice in constructive ways. In the call for papers for this special issue, we defined intervention research as:

Contemporary qualitative family research has a rich intellectual heritage that provides researchers with ideas and language that guide them in the procedures of their work and helps them to explain to themselves and to others the traditions on which their work is based. The characteristics of qualitative research that I discuss in this article are understanding experiences in context, immersion, interpretations grounded in accounts that individuals provide of their experiences, and research as action oriented. These characteristics have a strong philosophical base that extends from 19th century German philosophy to American pragmatism and interactionism to contemporary research. This article examines this heritage and shows that today's qualitative family researchers stand on the shoulders of giants.

While humour is prevalent in social services, discussions of humour are rare in social work journals. The present article discusses the uses of humour among a team of service providers in a child and family service agency where the families are among the most high-risk in the county that the agency serves. We viewed humour as the amusement at incongruity, which appears to be its essential feature, and recognised that humour can foster effectiveness but also can be cruel (Morreall, 2010). The present research provides case examples of situations a team of service providers found amusing. We found that case managers use humour to regulate negative emotions, to express frustration that led to tension relief and then to creative problem solving, to diffuse anxiety and to express liking and admiration for service users. This article contributes to practice and policy by highlighting the potential advantages of humour in high-stress service situations and by recommending that the use of humour be evaluated in terms of the ethical imperative of doing no harm.