Practice guides
Know the topic before you search it.
Plain-language guides to the practice frameworks, research methods, and citation rules social work students and practitioners look up most. Each one ends with a search you can run against the literature, so you can check the claims here the same way you would check anything else.
Research literacy
Evidence-based practice in social work: a working guide
Evidence-based practice is a decision process, not a list of approved programs. This guide walks through the five steps, how to build a searchable question, and what to check before you let a study change your practice.
9 min read
Practice framework
Trauma-informed practice: what it is and what the evidence supports
Trauma-informed care is an organizational stance, not a single intervention. This guide separates the framework from the specific trauma treatments it is often confused with, and flags the claims that outrun the evidence.
8 min read
Intervention
Motivational interviewing for social workers
MI is one of the most studied conversational methods in the helping professions, which also makes it one of the easiest to cite badly. Here is the method, the fidelity problem, and how to read the trials.
8 min read
Field education
Field education and supervision: a guide for interns and instructors
Field is where most social workers say they actually learned the job. This guide covers learning contracts, the three functions of supervision, feedback that lands, and the limits of the field education research base.
8 min read
Writing
APA 7 citations for social work assignments
Most citation errors in social work papers come from a handful of predictable places: missing DOIs, gray literature, and metadata copied from a database without checking it. Here is how to get them right.
7 min read
Elsewhere on Practora
- Search — find citable sources, or ask a practice question and get a SocialGPT overview with the sources it drew on.
- FAQ — coverage, verification labels, AI use, privacy, and exports.
- Methodology — the ranking weights and DOI verification steps behind every result.
- Assignment exports — APA reference lists and annotated bibliography starters from the sources you collect.