Abstract
In applied research disciplines like social work, there is a clear disconnect between the production and dissemination of research and the access and use of research in practice. This research/practice divide is particularly problematic for practitioners required to work within evidence-based or research-informed frameworks. To explore this issue, we conducted a nationwide survey and qualitative interviews with social work faculty regarding their research dissemination attitudes and practices, especially to non-academic audiences. The survey and interviews provide data on faculty dissemination methods, attitudes toward gold and green open access and promotion and tenure considerations. Results demonstrate that faculty are primarily engaged with traditional publishing models and much less engaged with dissemination to non-academic audiences. Faculty are skeptical of open access journals, avoid article processing charges and are only minimally engaged with institutional repositories. Faculty are conflicted regarding the dissemination of their research, especially in the context of promotion and tenure. Shifting dissemination outside of non-academic audiences would require increased confidence in open access, support for the creation of practitioner-focused materials and prioritizing the impact of research on practice.
Highlights
As in other professional practice fields, social work researchers produce research meant to be directly applied to work in the field
To examine the flip side of this problem, in this study we explored the research dissemination practices of social work researchers based on data from a nationwide survey and follow-up qualitative interviews
While we focused on the discipline of social work, similar barriers exist in other applied practice disciplines, especially those that employ the evidence-based practice (EBP) framework, such as education
Summary
As in other professional practice fields, social work researchers produce research meant to be directly applied to work in the field. Gray et al.[1] provide a quick distillation of the situation, ‘Repeated claims are well recognised, on the one hand that practitioners make too little use of research and on the other that researchers pay insufficient attention to making their findings known, useful and usable’. The lack of broad or substantial discussion on the access barrier supports the claim of the researchers’ ‘insufficient attention’. This disconnect within social work exemplifies that of other practice-oriented fields where the majority of graduates will enter the workplace, lose their affiliation with higher education institutions (and institutional subscriptions to expensive journals) and face an expectation of informing their practice decisions with recent research findings. Access to research articles in the field is bare-boned – even the core professional association, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), only provides its members full text access to one of its four scholarly journals
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