Situated knowledge-making in dynamic collaboration: A reflexive case study of social work practice research in mainland China

In recent decades, vibrant Western scholarship has focused on exploring “practice research” frameworks and approaches, aiming to generate social work knowledge more directly from, by, and for practice. Relatively little is known about the processes and characteristics of practice research in places where the social work profession is a foreign import. This study employed the case study methodology to examine the interactive dynamics of a 5-years practice research project in mainland China, utilizing participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis to collect empirical evidence primarily from the researchers and social work practitioners involved in the project. Through noncoding-based reflexive thematic analysis, our study reveals that the formation of the practice research project was profoundly shaped by local sociopolitical conditions, where research and practice were not two sides of a binary, but different-yet-interconnected types of actions along one continuum of China’s social work development. Moreover, the interactions between the research and practice teams revealed a pattern of divergent dominance, with the former leading openly while the latter subtly influenced the collaboration. This dynamic was further complicated by the internal hierarchies within each team. This study provides implications for future practice research endeavors in contexts of global social work, and for promoting more social structurally-informed inquiries on practice research.