A new approach to building social work knowledge.

A vehicle such as an information reporting and summarization system (IRSS) is needed to assist social workers in building social work knowledge. The IRSS moves toward this goal in two important ways: (a) by requiring that social workers strive to formulate unambiguously detailed categories and classifications for use in making descriptive generalizations of their individual cases; and (b) by enabling social workers to generate descriptive generalizations extending over a multiplicity of cases. In this way it provides social workers with the kinds of empirical data necessary to verify and build thier knowledge.