Building Up Your Knowledge

Social Science and Evidence-based Practice

Evidence-based practice is built around the scientific process, and more specifically the social-scientific process. 

Social science

In general terms, the scientific method is an ongoing and cyclical process of observation, hypothesis testing, analyzing data, and creating and refining theory. The benefit of the scientific method is that by focusing on observation, we protect against our innate and often-invisible biases about what we think we're going to see. 

The physical sciences like chemistry or physics are concerned with subject matter that is relatively stable. Things like chemicals, atoms, energy, and other physical phenomena are pretty much the same all over. So, for example, pure water is always going to be a liquid at what we would consider room temperature. The physical properties of water are dependable. 

The social sciences are different than physical sciences because human behavior is the subject matter. There are two things you need to know about human behavior: 

1. People have their own minds. Each person has a very unique and complicated brain, and everyone's decision-making process is different. Any given individual's behavior is difficult if not impossible to predict. 
2. Human behavior, when looked at in the aggregate (meaning, when you look at the general behavior patterns of lots of people) will have patterns to it. So we can understand human behavior probabilistically. This means that we can watch how people act when they experience a general situation and note probabilities of types of responses. 

Point 1 above tells us that we're never going to be able to predict any particular person's behavior. However, Point 2 allows us to create strategic approaches to certain types of behavior based on the general probability of success.

 

Example: Helping people with heroin addiction

It's probably easiest to understand this if we put it in more concrete terms. 

Let's say we have a goal for an offender population. We want to help heroin-addicted adults to stop using heroin.

For any given person, there is a lifetime worth of history that led to their heroin use. We could spend a lifetime teasing all that out, and learning every single detail of their history, and making a comprehensive assessment of why s/he uses heroin and what we could do to try to get him/her to stop. But that's a tremendously resource-intensive approach, and we simply don't have the time or resources to devote to doing that for every single heroin-addicted human out there.  

But when we look at the whole population of heroin users, we are going to start to see patterns in how people, in general, become addicted to heroin. These factors would include: untreated mental health issues, chronic physical pain, heroin-using friend groups, etc. So once we identify these general predictors, we can develop approaches that allow us to address those predictors for lots of people at a time. For examples: 

• for people with untreated mental health issues, we can place them in mental health care facilities and help address those issues. 
• for people with chronic physical pain, we can connect them witrh medical professionals or services that can help alleviate that chronic pain. 
• for people with heroin-using friend groups, we can find ways to extract them from their social surroundings and help them get a fresh start. 

The social-scientific process is going to help us identify these risk factors, create interventions, and assess the effectiveness of those interventions. It can also help us identify which interventions are most likely to be effective for which people, so that we can get people the help they need and not waste time or resources "helping" in ways that don't actually help very much. 

That process of learning about issues, developing interventions, and determining effectiveness is what we call evidence-based practice, and is an important principle for corrections.