Confronting the Reality of Collaborative Practice Research: Issues of Practice, Design, Measurement, and Team Development

Abstract

The social work literature encourages practitioners and researchers to form partnerships to conduct practice research, but service providers and empirical researchers rarely join in such efforts (Dies, 1983; Fanshel, 1980; Kirk, Osmalov, & Fischer, 1976; Siegel, 1984). Well-intentioned efforts to engage in practice research may be undermined by a failure to confront issues that inevitably arise in collaboration between practitioners and researchers. Such collaboration is also ill-served by the paucity of realistic guidelines in the social work literature for conducting this form of research. In response to this gap, this article systematically looks at the different motives and perspectives of the researcher and practitioner in investigative efforts and examines issues that arise in collaborative research. An analysis of field notes that documented the authors' four-year practice-research partnership reveals issues related to practice, design, measurement, and team development that act as impediments to a productive practice-research partnership. Failure of the Practice Research Literature A strategy that unifies practitioners and researchers in research that is relevant to practice has not been identified to date. Rather, the extant literature encourages practitioners to participate in research projects and evaluate their practice (Briar, 1977; Kirk et al., 1976; Siegel, 1984; Wells, Feldman, & Kelman, 1988) and advises social work researchers to make their research more relevant to practice (Austin, 1977; Briar, 1980; Bushnell & St. L. O'Brien, 1977; Fanshel, 1980; Kirk, 1977; Schilling, Schinke, Kirkham, Meltzer, & Norelius, 1988; Thomas, 1978), without providing clear guidelines for the conduct of collaborative research. Moreover, scant attention is paid to differences between practitioners and researchers. The practice-research relationship is conveyed as unidirectional--from researcher to practitioner--favoring the priorities of research and implying that the perspective of the researcher is more important than that of the practitioner in developing, designing, and conducting the research. The impression imparted by the practice research literature is that the researcher does not view the practitioner as a full partner in the research process, but rather as a consumer of research or a data gatherer. Not having recognized and taken advantage of the knowledge the practitioner brings to practice research, researchers have largely failed to identify practitioner-relevant research strategies (Marsh, 1983), and practitioners dismiss the pragmatic application of research findings as irrelevant when not readily apparent. The literature may overemphasize the divergent theoretical orientations of practitioners and researchers in conducting practice research (Kirk, 1977; Minahan, 1977; Rothman, 1977; Turem, 1977), when, in fact, conflicting viewpoints and ideas on research design more often impede practice-research partnerships. For example, researchers routinely hold up rigorous research designs as gold standards, so that an unrealistic methodology for research in practice settings may deepen an aversion to research and alienate practitioners who might otherwise use social science knowledge to guide practice (Rothman, 1977). To illustrate, Kirk and Fischer's (1976) study of social workers' knowledge of research examined practitioners' ability to identify a sound research design, use of a control group being the operational definition of a sound research design. Use of such standards, however, may be constrained in practice settings because of ethical concerns and limited resources (Marsh, 1983; Wodarski, 1986). Despite these shortcomings, initial attempts to address the issues inherent in practice research have appeared in the practice research literature. Single-system research designs have shown promise for addressing the need for relevance and practitioner involvement (Bloom & Fischer, 1982). …