Using substance use research tools to promote learning and teaching

The following research tools were used in research to evaluate how child and family social workers talk to parents about alcohol issues and child welfare concerns. As such they have a number of potential advantages as teaching resources:

• They were carefully developed and generally rated by social workers as highly realistic.
• Practitioners can relate students' experiences directly to research findings (e.g. demonstrating what social workers said they would do in similar situations). This helps build links between research teaching and practice.
• The resources could be used as a way of introducing critical approaches to research or discussions of evidence informed practice.

Two tools are presented here. Resource 1 is quite a long and complex case study for a role play which could be edited or adapted for the classroom. Resource 2 is an adapted version of the Helpful Responses Questionnaire (HRQ) - a brief pencil and paper questionnaire to explore responses to alcohol or drug use and misuse issues.