Normativität und Rekonstruktion

In social work research on professionalization, researchers are confronted with various normative issues. This concerns both the practice of social work, which is permeated by explicit norms and implicit value orientations, and the discourse on the profession and professionalism, which is itself normatively charged, as well as the principles of reconstructive social research, which include an amoral approach to analysis. The challenge is to recognize and reflect on normative aspects in research practice and to maintain an open research attitude. This article examines the interplay of different aspects of normativity and the resulting tensions with a focus on reconstructive research methods used to empirically explore the structural logic of professional action. Following reflections on the “socio-pedagogical view” of research, normativity and reconstructive research are related. The authors refer to their own empirical-reconstructive analyses and use an empirical example to show which normative questions arise in social work research on professionalization. They thus specify the “research view of social work”.