Guest Editorial Special Issue: Research on Social Work Practice in Israel Anat Zeira 1 and Gail K. Auslander 1 This year marks the 50th anniversary of the recognition of social work as an academic discipline in Israel. The country’s first academic school of social work was established at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1958 in cooperation with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Ministry of Welfare. As part of Israel’s first university, that prides itself on its research accomplishments, faculty members were among the first social work researchers in the country. Today, social work research is carried out in a variety of settings—in universities, research institutes, and government offices. This special issue is dedicated to state-of-the-art social work practice research in Israel. It provides examples of inno- vative studies carried out by both scholars and practitioners dedicated to producing timely and culturally and contextually relevant research. We wish to thank Dr. Bruce Thyer for initi- ating this effort and for his support and guidance through the various stages of producing this special issue. Practice Research in Israel Social work research in Israel is a very diverse field. A survey of 641 articles published in peer-reviewed journals by Israeli social work researchers, from 1990 to 1998 (T 1 ), related to a wide array of research paradigms (e.g., quantitative and quali- tative), and within those a wide range of designs (Auslander, 2000). In an effort to update this description of Israeli social work research, we carried out an abbreviated survey of social work research in Israel, published in scholarly journals during the years 2000–2007 (T 2 ). Rather than surveying all journals, the second survey was limited to journals indexed in the ISI Web of Knowledge database under Social Work and in the top 20% (categories A and B) of the social work section of the Jerusalem Index (a ranking of journals in various disci- plines based on impact factors as well as other parameters). In each of the resulting 14 journals, we identified articles that included at least one Israeli author. Table 1 presents the distribution by journal of the 160 Israeli-authored articles we found. Comparison of publications in T 1 and T 2 shows, for exam- ple, that the most prominent research designs remain associa- tional designs with over half of the articles in both periods (54% and 53%, respectively). We found a marked increase in the proportion of publications using qualitative methods (9.7% in T 1 and 21% in T 2 ), whereas the proportion of quantitative–descriptive designs decreased from 19.5% in T 1 to 11% in T 2 . Using the same categories in both surveys, we found that the most prominent topics of study in T 1 were work- place issues (9.2%), military service (8.4%), cultural difference and change (8%), family issues and specific health conditions (each 7.3%), and war and civilian populations (5.7%). In T 2 the most prominent topics were practice issues (22.5%), abuse (15.6%), adults’ mental health and illness (12.5%), and work- place issues (11.3%). These differences may reflect changes in social work research but they may also result from the more restricted selection of journals in T 2 . What Is in This Issue? As befits Research on Social Work Practice, this special issue focuses on research related to social work practice. We selected for inclusion studies that assess the outcomes of social work interventions and those that report on the development and eva- luation of measurement instruments that are relevant for social work practice. The latter topic is of particular importance in Israel. With its pro-immigration policies and expressed mission of ‘‘ingathering exiles’’ as well as its inclusion of a large Arab minority (about 20% of the population), Israel is multicul- tural in the extreme. Most well-known and well-validated mea- sures in social work and related disciplines originated in English-speaking countries and require cultural adaptation to the population characteristics (c.f., RSWP special issue on Latinos). Alternately, some argue that it is preferable to develop original measures that are culturally and linguistically appropriate. The first article in this issue by Khalaila, reports on the construction of a culturally sensitive scale to measure filial 1 The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Isreal Corresponding Author: Anat Zeira, School of Social Work and Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel Email: msanatz@mscc.huji.ac.il Research on Social Work Practice 20(4) 353-355 ª The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1049731509352338 http://rswp.sagepub.com 353