As a social work professional, how do you know what you know? It can be difficult to pinpoint, particularly if you have years of experience in a given field. You might gather knowledge from a supervisor or a more seasoned colleague, from what has happened in the past, from intuition, or from logic, among other sources. All of these ways of knowing can inform the decisions and actions of a social work professional and feed into evidence-based practice (EBP). What EBP demands also, though, is “evidence,” meaning the documented findings of scientific research studies.

In this Discussion, you explore different ways of knowing and their relationship to EBP in social work.