For the past 25 years, I have led multiple group-randomized trials, each focused on a specific underserved population of youth and each one evaluated health effects of complex interventions designed to prevent high-risk behaviors. I share my reflections on issues of intervention and research design, as well as how research results fostered my…

This article provides an overview of international translation of health behavior interventions. The ideas expressed in this article serve to provide direction when developing a health behavior program for a host country, utilizing previous programmatic knowledge from elsewhere. First, the authors discuss constituents of country-level variables…

Intervention research is essential to help Hispanic American adolescents avoid drug use. This article describes an intervention research program aimed at preventing drug use among these youths. Grounded in salient epidemiological data, the program is informed by bicultural competence, social learning, and motivational interviewing theories. The…

Behavioral social work is the application of behavior analysis to the field of social work. There are behavioral social work interventions for individuals, groups, and communities. Nevertheless, behavioral social work is far from a widely adopted approach among social work practitioners. A reason for the underuse might be seen in the fact that…

Social and psychological interventions are often complex. Understanding randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of these complex interventions requires a detailed description of the interventions tested and the methods used to evaluate them; however, RCT reports often omit, or inadequately report, this information. Incomplete and inaccurate reporting…

This paper is a reaction to Marsiglia and Booths' paper, "Cultural Adaptation of Interventions in Real Practice Settings." In their paper, Marsiglia and Booth present the difficulty of implementing and replicating evidence-supported treatments, such as randomized clinical trials, among culturally diverse clients. Practitioners working in…

Schizophrenia is a leading cause of disability and health expenditure worldwide and is associated with homelessness, substance use, familial and social isolation, unemployment, involvement with the criminal justice system, stigma, and excess mortality. Prevention may be feasible through intervention with help-seeking "clinical high-risk"…

This article addresses key challenges posed by critical realism, proposed by Longhofer and Floersch, as a philosophical underpinning for a science of social work. As a response to Longhofer and Floersch, it is argued that critical realism may be instructive in debates about structural conditions that dictate more inclusive interventions and…

Integrating practice and research is vital in all helping professions in order to offer the most ethical, evidence-informed interventions to clients. This article describes some avoidable distractions that hinder integration, discusses controversies related to integration, and describes options for moving forward, including making wasted resources…

This article examines problems in the clinical utility of the diagnosis of schizophrenia including reliance on questionable data, arbitrary criteria and categorization, inadequate precision for assessment and treatment evaluation, and omission of information on causal current and historical environmental factors. Some alternatives to the…

This article presents recent refinements to implementation constructs and frameworks. It updates and clarifies the frequently cited study conducted by the National Implementation Research Network that introduced these frameworks for application in diverse endeavors. As such, it may serve as a historical marker in the rapidly developing science and…

Social work is a profession that draws (or should draw) on available knowledge in the disciplines as well as other sources including other professions in the pursuit of "the betterment of life conditions of individuals, groups, and communities." An historical perspective illustrates opportunities taken and lost to harvest knowledge in pursuit of…

This keynote address discusses previous and ongoing efforts to reduce the persistent gap between research and practice in social work and offers recommendations for further bridging that gap. Key among those recommendations is the need to conduct descriptive outcome studies of efforts to adapt research-supported interventions in everyday practice…

Social workers provide more social services to populations across the life span than any other human service profession, including psychiatry, nursing, and psychology. The scientific methodologies and the scientific knowledge relevant to social services have expanded dramatically in the last 30 years. Using the two indicators of the total number…

Treatment manuals are increasingly being used to guide interventions with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. However, little is known about best practices in designing manuals. We describe a process that provides for the development of manuals and specifies the means by which manuals can be adapted for practice…