Social Service Applied Project (SWK689)

SWK689 Social Service Applied Project provides Master of Social Work students with the opportunity to undertake an applied project rooted in real-world practice, addressing current challenges or service gaps identified within the social service sector. Students will identify and develop a project topic drawn from practice settings and aligned with their selected specialisation track: Advanced Clinical Practice, or Social Impact Leadership. Projects may focus on service innovation, programme design or evaluation, policy implementation, organisational change, client or caregiver engagement, or system-level issues. Students will be embedded in social service agencies and work under the joint supervision of an academic faculty and a designated agency supervisor. Through this collaborative process, they will apply critical inquiry, clinical reasoning, participatory research, or strategic thinking to generate practice-relevant outputs. At the conclusion of the course, students will submit a formal report and are expected to present their findings through suitable platforms such as agency briefings, professional symposia, academic conferences, or practitioner publications.

• Introduction to practice research in social work
• Identifying practice-based research questions
• Research ethics in applied project context
• Designing research project
• Writing the proposal
• Understanding of data collection and analysis in practice research
• Project management
• Partnership with community partner– roles, expectations and communication
• Translating research into practice
• Writing for practice and policy
• Presenting and disseminating findings
• Critical reflection and evaluation

• Formulate a researchable practice-based question in collaboration with a social service agency.
• Apply relevant research and practice inquiry methods to investigate issues or test solutions.
• Critically analyse research finding and translate them into actionable practice insights.
• Build capacity in ethical and culturally responsive research practice
• Critically reflect on the role of social work research
• Produce and disseminate evidence-informed insights or solutions