Throughout the history of professional social work in the United States, the field has embraced a positivistic view of science, a view continuing to be held by the mainstream of the profession. All social workers, to some extent, embrace the fundamental tenets of positivism. However, the rhetoric espousing positivistic science has not been matched…

The purpose of this article is to place evidence-based practice within its wider scholarly contexts and draw lessons from the experiences of other professions that are engaged in implementing it. The analysis is based primarily on evidence-based medicine, the parent discipline of evidence-based practice, but the author also draws on evidence-based…