Social Work Doctoral Education in Transition: The Islandwood Papers of the Roundtable on Social Work Doctoral Education

This introductory article to the symposium on doctoral education in social work aims to provide a framework for the symposium. Doctoral education in social work is continuously in flux. As society and the profession are constantly changing and as academia is also in a state of transition, doctoral education in social work needs to be reassessed. The five papers in this symposium start with understanding the changing environment and then they deal with issues such as policy research, the scientific inquiry, and transdisciplinary research. Finally, it discusses issues of racial and ethnic diversity in doctoral education. The hope is that this set of papers will help shape the discourse regarding social work doctoral education and will help doctoral directors and their peers better plan.