While clinical social work has a strong conceptual understanding of uncertainty, there is a lack of empirical data on how practitioners navigate uncertainty in practice. This paper reports findings of the data generated from a simulation-based pilot study designed to explore clinical social workers’ encounters with uncertainty and the strategies they use to navigate it. Experienced clinicians (n = 4), recent graduates (n = 4) and graduate students (n = 3) participated in a 30-min video recorded case-based simulated session with a live standardized client (SC). Using standardized clients, simulation-based research methodology allowed us to capture moment-to-moment practice behaviours and decisions among social workers. Following each simulation, participants reviewed the video-recorded sessions and engaged in an audio-recorded reflective dialogue with a researcher. Two themes emerged from the data sets: (1) there is a variation between less experienced participants who navigated uncertainty in pragmatic, task focused ways and more experienced practitioners who focused on the wider relationship with the client; and (2) less experienced practitioners tended towards struggling against uncertainty while more experienced practitioners demonstrated an ability to sit and wade within it. These findings offer several implications for clinical social work research and practice, including the important role that simulation methodologies have in exploring clinical practice and the need to understand specific aspects of uncertainty in clinical practice.

尽管临床社会工作对不确定性有很强的概念性理解，但缺乏有关从业人员如何在实践中克服不确定性的经验数据。本文报告了从基于模拟的试点研究生成的数据发现，该试点研究旨在探索临床社会工作者的不确定性遭遇，以及他们用于导航的策略。经验丰富的临床医生（n  = 4），应届毕业生（n  = 4）和研究生（n = 3）与现场标准化客户（SC）一起参加了一个基于案例的30分钟视频模拟会话。通过使用标准化的客户，基于仿真的研究方法使我们能够捕捉到社会工作者从一瞬间到另一半的实践行为和决策。每次模拟之后，参与者回顾了视频录制的会话，并与研究人员进行了音频录制的反思性对话。数据集中出现了两个主题：（1）经验不足的参与者以务实，专注于任务的方式应对不确定性，而经验丰富的从业者则致力于与客户建立更广泛的关系，两者之间存在差异。（2）经验不足的从业者倾向于与不确定性作斗争，而经验丰富的从业者表现出能够在不确定性中坐着和嬉戏的能力。