The Literature Review as a Practice Skill: A Batterer's Intervention Case Example

Overview: This presentation will discuss an Alaskan effort to re-envision Batterer’s Intervention Programs (BIP) using community practice knowledge and the existing body of peer-reviewed literature. In particular, we will discuss the process faculty & students used to organize and evaluate the quality of evidence to aid in workgroup decision making.Proposal text: While literature reviews are ubiquitous in social work curricula, the practical application of this skill is not always evident to students. This presentation will discuss the applied use of a literature review as a component of an Evidence-Based Practice Process (EBPP) (Spensberger, et al., 2018).
In the spring of 2021, Alaska began a process of re-envisioning its statewide approach to providing services to individuals who have been violent toward their intimate partners. State leadership convened a task force of criminal justice professionals, program providers, and government leaders to explore what types of assessments are most helpful, what therapeutic programming is most effective, and what monitoring options make sense for Alaska. This task force began their process with a series of guest speakers and presenters, each one arriving with peer-reviewed literature that painted a confusing and complicated landscape effectiveness evidence. After several meetings, it became evident the workgroup was struggling to make useful meaning of existing literature, and social work faculty and students were invited in to implement an evidence-based practice process (Spensberger, et al., 2018; Drisko & Grady, 2019, along with providing the workgroup education and technical support to make meaning out of the complex findings that exist in the field.
Presenters will share their process, the products produced for the workgroup, and an overview of how the workgroup ultimately used the literature review and practice knowledge to envision a new range of services for Alaska.