Incubator Stay Florian Spensberger
Hosting Institution: University of California in Berkeley
International Advisor: Prof. Elieen Gambrill
As a member of the Elite Network of Bavaria and the REASON program, I was able to visit my international supervisor Prof. Eileen Gambrill at the University of California in Berkeley in the context of my PhD. This incubator stay took place from July 2 to August 3 2018.
Research
My research is about the education of Evidence based Practice (EBP) of social workers and social work students. EBP and its implementation in social work is one of Eileen´s core interests. She transferred the approach from medicine to social work in 1999, thereby strongly influencing the scientific community in social work.
The focus of my incubator stay was to finalize one of my studies – a systematic review on educational interventions to teach EBP to social workers and social work students – and to write the article. Due to Eileen´s work, the study takes the vital distinction between evidencebased interventions (EBPs) and the process of EBP into account. The implementation of EBP in social work practice faces numerous barriers, one of which might be the lack of EBP knowledge and education of social work students and social workers. I hope that an overview of systematically compiled, analyzed and assessed studies on educational interventions to teach EBP in social work will contribute to the improvement of EBP education in social work.
Eileen offered me a lot of her time. We even met on weekends to use as much of our limited mutual time as we possibly could. We spent up to two hours every other day to discuss questions with regards to content, coding and data extraction. Specifically, Eileen suggested making codes more clear and we discussed the operationalization of certain codes in order to avoid misleading interpretations. Eileen suggested additional codes to assess the quality of the studies and strived for a detailed elaboration on the reliability (e.g. internal consistency, retest) and validity (e.g. construct, content, predictive) of their applied measurements. I learned a lot from our consequential labor-intensive assessment of their various criteria. Furthermore, Eileen shared helpful thoughts on the differences of social work education in the US and Germany.
Parallel to the procedure of these aspects, I set up a draft for the article. We frequently discussed its structure, content, tone and conceptual direction and Eileen edited it on a regular basis. At the end of my incubator stay, I had conducted all the remaining work which was necessary to finalize my study. Furthermore, I left Berkeley with a meticulously elaborated draft for the article of the systematic review.
Networking
Regarding networking, especially worth mentioning is a lunch in the faculty club of the university with Eileen and the dean of the social work faculty, which was arranged by Eileen. Furthermore, Eileen introduced me to the staff of the social work department and connected me with one of her former students, Aron Schlonsky, who is internationally known for his research on EBP and Professor and Head of Department of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. I will meet him personally at a conference in Australia in October 2018.
Florian Spensberger is conducting research on educational interventions for social work students and social workers that address reasoning fallacies and evidence-based practice under the supervision of Prof. Sabine Pankofer (KSH), Prof. Ingo Kollar (University of Augsburg) and Prof. Eileen Gambrill (University of California in Berkeley).