Academics and practitioners work often alongside instead with each other. Lately, the relation between academic knowledge production and the need for innovative solutions to pressing problems in society at large, and in service delivery in the public sector has been questioned. Concerning the field of social services, including child welfare services, the need for a close partnership between frontline services, higher education and research is particularly pressing, because social work in Norway only recently has been recognized as an academic discipline. Consequently, a very limited number of PhD-courses with relevance to social work and child welfare services is offered at Norwegian universities, and practitioners and administrators in the various welfare services with a PhD in social work or child welfare are few.
The aim of NORWEL is to establish a research school for PhD-students in the subject area of social work and child welfare that systematically trains the next generations researchers in developing high quality research, based on the needs of the practice field.
NORWEL
- provides the first systematic training in Norway for PhD-students with an exclusive focus on social and child welfare services
- brings together PhD-students with senior researchers, frontline workers, administrators and service end-users throughout and beyond the PhD-journey
- significantly enhances the awareness of PhD-students for making their research relevant to the practice field
- challenges stakeholders from academia, frontline services, administration and end-users to define research questions for further research, based on the needs of the practice field.
NORWEL provides a sorely needed platform for researcher education in these fields, based on a tight link between knowledge production according to high academic standards, and an awareness for the needs for researchbased knowledge in frontline welfare services. Students enrolled in the school are offered a variety of PhD-courses that are integrated in the formal PhD-education. PhD-courses offered as part of the school’s activities will address central topics, relevant to social work, child welfare and welfare service delivery.
NORWEL further provides different communicative meeting arenas, designed to support the development of individual research competency among the school’s participants, to establish tight communicative structures between PhD-students, practitioners and end-user interest organizations, and to provide the students participating in NORWEL with opportunities to create a professional national and international network. Thus, the school will make a major contribution to boost the development of research capacity in the field.