The heuristic paradigm: A unifying and comprehensive approach to social work research

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Abstract
Social work should adopt the broadminded, up‐to‐date heuristic paradigm of research in place of the overly restrictive, outmoded logical positivist paradigm. In a misguided attempt to become as scientific as the natural sciences, social work has embraced the logical positivist paradigm since the 1950s. But contemporary philosophy of science has undercut conclusively logical positivism's claims and demonstrated that the logical positivist paradigm places unnecessary limitations on scientific endeavors. Unlike the logical positivist paradigm, the heuristic paradigm welcomes the complex, ill‐structured, substantively important problems that have been social work's abiding focus. The principles of the heuristic paradigm facilitate rather than obstruct cooperation between researcher and practitioner and between researchers in different fields. Most importantly, the heuristic paradigm makes research user‐friendly by expanding rather than restricting the operation of human judgment in the knowledge‐building process. The principles, applications, and common misunderstandings of the heuristic paradigm are described.
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