What is the Scope and Contribution of Lived Experience in Social Work? A Scoping Review

Lived experience, or people's expertise and perspective derived from their involvement with events and interventions, represents an important resource for social work. Despite the appeal, lived experience is an ambiguous concept and the way social work knowledge is informed by lived experience is difficult to grasp. This article reports on a scoping review that maps the social work academic literature to examine how lived experience is used to inform social work. Over a thirty-three year period (between 1990 and 2022), we identified 1,877 studies. Of these, 110 met the inclusion criteria and were analysed for this study. Most studies (52 per cent) were published between 2019 and 2022, and a majority (43 per cent) were published from research conducted in the UK. The studies contribute knowledge to social work practice, education, research, and about the practical management of lived experience. The results show that lived experience contributions benefit both social work and the people contributing. An important implication is the opportunity for social work to lead the changes required to enable lived experience contributions to continuously inform the profession and contribute to social work realising its aspirational version of itself. Social work as a profession has a long interest in lived experience. Although the term is often not clearly defined, lived experience refers to the knowledge-and expertise-that people have through their experience of an intervention or circumstance. Despite its importance, we lack systematic knowledge about how social work is informed by lived experience. We know little about how lived experience contributes to the professional knowledge base. We conducted a scoping review of the social work literature, published between 1990 and 2022. We found that there is a rich body of research that explains how social work benefits from lived experience. Most of this research is very recent; it has been published since 2019. We also found that nearly half of the world's research in this area comes from the UK. Ultimately our review finds that lived experience knowledge can and does help social work realise its social justice and inclusion values, but this requires social work to actively work to create the conditions to enable people to contribute.