Rafael J. Engel (PhD, University of Wisconsin; MSW, University of Michigan; BA, University of Pennsylvania) is associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He coordinates the graduate certificate program in aging and is the principal investigator for the Hartford Partnership Program for Aging Education. Dr. Engel has written Practice of Social Work Research (with Russell Schutt) and Measuring Race and Ethnicity (with Larry E. Davis). He is a member of the editorial board of Race and Social Problems. As an active member of the research community, he has authored journal articles on such topics as poverty in later life, welfare benefits, and depressive symptomatology, and has written a variety of monographs reporting agency-based evaluations. His funded research includes studies on gambling, faith-based organizations, and employment in later life as well as funded evaluation research studies on welfare-to-work programs and drug and alcohol prevention programs. His most recent research involves older adults and gambling prevention.

Russell K. Schutt, PhD, is professor and chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he received the 2007 Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Service. Since 1990, he has also been lecturer on sociology in the Department of Psychiatry (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) at the Harvard Medical School. He completed his BA, MA, and PhD degrees at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University. In addition to eight editions of the text on which this brief edition is based, Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research, and four other coauthored versions—for the fields of social work, criminal justice, psychology, and education—his other books include Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness (2011), Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (coedited, 2015), and Organization in a Changing Environment (1986). He has authored and coauthored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and research reports on homelessness, mental health, organizations, law, and teaching research methods. His research has included a mixed-methods investigation of a public health coordinated care program, a study of community health workers and recruitment for cancer clinical trials, a mixed-methods study of a youth violence reduction program, a randomized trial of a peer support program for homeless dually diagnosed veterans, and a randomized evaluation of housing alternatives for homeless persons diagnosed with severe mental illness, with funding from the National Cancer Institute, the Veterans Health Administration, the National Institute of Mental Health, the John E. Fetzer Institute, and state agencies. His current scholarly foci are the impact of the social environment on cognitive and community functioning, the meaning of housing and service preferences, and the value of alternative organizational and occupational structures for service delivery. His prior research has also included investigation of social factors in legal decisions and admission practices and of influences on job and service satisfaction. Details are available at http://rschutt.wikispaces.umb.edu.

Designed to help students develop skills in evaluating research and conducting studies, this brief version of Rafael J. Engel and Russell K. Schutt’s popular, The Practice of Research in Social Work, makes principles of evidence-based practice come alive through illustrations of actual social work research. With integration of the CSWE Competencies, the text addresses issues and concerns common to the discipline and encourages students to address diversity and ethics when planning and evaluating research studies. The Second Edition includes a focus on qualitative research, a new chapter on research ethics, new sections on mixed methods research and community-based participatory research, and more.