Researcher-practitioner Partnerships Research Articles

Creating Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships in Counseling: Lessons Learned

Action research has long been heralded as the solution to narrowing the gap between counseling research and practice. Collaborative research partnerships are a cornerstone of action research, but these partnerships remain rare in the counseling profession due to the barriers researchers and practitioners must navigate. This article offers an overview of action research and the associated barriers. We, the coauthors, reflect on the lessons learned from our collaborative research partnership in order to provide concrete and pragmatic advice that informs future researcher-practitioner partnerships.

‘I really felt wanted’: Police recruitment strategies within a competitive labour market

Abstract As law enforcement organizations report challenges surrounding recruitment, evidence-based practices are critical and cost-effective measures which fundamentally support and advance the policing profession. To combat a hiring crisis and remain competitive among endless options of agency vacancies, employers must recognize internal data resources at hand along with the advantages of researcher-practitioner partnerships. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the effectiveness of a single mid-size southeastern municipal law enforcement agency’s recruitment program to identify unique indicators present within career decisions from the incoming officer workforce. Primary findings identified the recruitment process to play an integral role in the ultimate application and agency selection decision for participants, regardless of participant background. Further, participant interviews identified elements such as Responsiveness, Communication, Personal, and Timeliness critical to perceived success of the recruitment program. Regarding police staffing, this study introduces a self-sustaining model for agency-specific key motivating factors in recruit agency selection, to include application of strong recruitment practices and benchmark identification for sustained program effectiveness. Implications include the impact of customer-service approaches to police staffing and evidence-based strategies for agency-specific strengths during a nation-wide staffing crisis.

HEALTH SYSTEM PARTNERSHIPS IN INTERVENTION AND OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES: REFLECTIONS FROM AN EARLY-CAREER SCHOLAR

Abstract The early knowledge base and interventions in the field of elder mistreatment were built by clinician researchers, leading to a natural research-to-practice pipeline. But with more non-clinical researchers steadily entering the field, care must be taken to forge strong research-practitioner partnerships, to three ends: 1) developing clinically informed research and intervention approaches, 2) recruiting clinically relevant samples, and 3) implementing findings into clinical practice. This process can be particularly challenging for early-career non-clinical researchers, who may lack strong partnerships on which to build their research. This presentation extracts lessons for early career scholars by providing overviews of the development of and findings from two studies. The Comprehensive Older Adult Caregiving Supports (COACH) EM prevention program was delivered in partnership with a managed care health system, with referrals received from health system providers. The Better Together study of dementia care groups (i.e., persons living with dementia and their care partners) received referrals from clinicians in mixed managed care/fee-for-service settings, county health facilities, and community partners. Drawing from the principles of community-engaged research, the presentation highlights the relevance of various engagement approaches to elder mistreatment research, including: 1) partnering with senior researchers with existing networks; 2) taking the time to learn the health system’s and clinicians’ operational systems, pressures, and constraints; 3) honoring practitioner expertise in building research projects and developing research questions; 4) prioritizing meaningful reciprocal engagement, through offering topical or research presentations, funding, co-authorship, etc.; and 5) educating health system administrators about the nuances of conducting elder mistreatment research.

Reimagining Public Safety: Defining “Community” in Participatory Research

In the context of a national movement to defund police departments, many American cities are starting to reimagine public safety, as activists demand new practices that maintain safety while minimizing harm, as well as ensuring accountability when harms occur. Drawing on Everyday Peace Indicators methodologies, we argue that “community-centered” measurement, combined with researcher-practitioner partnerships, can help move both researchers and policymakers toward a more meaningful approach to policy design and evaluation. However, the application of community-centered measurement to the context of American policing raises important theoretical and practical concerns—in particular, the question of how community is defined, and who gets to define it. In this article, we ask: how do we define “community” in participatory research contexts where the concept of community is overlapping and contested? Using the example of a recent study carried out in the City of Oakland, we illustrate the complexities of applying a community-centered measurement process to the case of public safety and, more broadly, to police reform in American cities. We conclude with a discussion of both the benefits and limitations of our own approach, as well as a set of considerations for those engaging in participatory research.

Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships to Implement and Evaluate Sexual and Relationship Violence Prevention Programs for Boys and Men.

Although male-focused sexual and relationship violence (SRV) prevention programs are widely promulgated, limited guidance concerning how programs should be implemented for rigorous evaluation exists. To help develop evidence for such guidance, this paper reports on 20 interviews with leaders at youth-serving community-based organizations (CBOs) and educational institutions, which are sites for male-focused SRV prevention programs. This study examined: (1) how programs can be designed to engage male participants; and (2) how youth-serving CBOs and educational institutions can partner with researchers for evaluations. Findings underscore the importance of attending to the unique needs of program participants, their parents/guardians, and host organizations.

Measuring social and emotional learning implementation in a research-practice partnership.

The measurement of social and emotional learning (SEL) implementation is a critical part of enhancing and understanding the effects of SEL programming. Research has shown that high-quality SEL implementation is associated with social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Schools achieve these outcomes in part through organizational practices that emphasize ongoing communication, collaboration, coordination, shared decision making, and strategic planning, processes that are ideally informed by evidence. The application of implementation science to SEL has advanced our understanding of the role of implementation in achieving student outcomes. However, the development of practical approaches for measuring and supporting SEL implementation have lagged behind work on measuring student SEL outcomes. Research-practitioner partnerships (RPP), long-term, mutually-beneficial collaborations geared toward identifying problems of practice and testing solutions for improvement, are a promising means for addressing this important gap. Though implementation science and RPPs have complementary aims, there has been limited attention to the integration of these approaches in the context of SEL programming. The goal of this paper is to offer practical strategies for measuring and using SEL implementation data in schools, using the example of an RPP that used implementation science practices to guide SEL implementation. We give special attention to structures that can support the collection and use of implementation data to improve practice, as well as considerations around developing measures, considering trade-offs of data collection decisions, and conducting data analysis.

And you know, we’re on each other’s team: Lessons from an in-depth analysis of researcher–practitioner partnerships in criminal justice research

ABSTRACT Researcher–practitioner partnerships (RPPs) bring together multiple perspectives to create more holistic, contextually grounded, and arguably better criminal justice solutions. However, a better understanding of how these partnerships operate and what contributes to success is needed, particularly for new and emerging scholars who may be inexperienced in creating and sustaining RPPs. Previous research has explored the process of creating RPPs, but much of this research is limited by singular partnerships or anecdotal experiences. Further, this research does not account for the myriad of RPP types within the criminal justice field. Our study involves an analysis of 20 years of National Institute of Justice-funded RPPs in the United States. Our findings identify clear themes from this extensive review of the literature and provide empirically based lessons learned for RPPs. As such, this study is designed to support new and established researchers with guidance on how to better create and maintain RPPs.

911 Usage by Boston Public Schools: A Researcher–Practitioner Partnership

Abstract To reduce police presence in schools, School Resource Officer programmes are being eliminated across the USA. However, police also become involved in schools through other routes—namely, in response to school calls to 911. This type of police involvement has generally been overlooked in prior studies of school use of police services. In addition, prior research has primarily relied on interview and survey data of school administrators. We describe a researcher–practitioner partnership created to address the limitations of this prior research and to answer foundational questions from one urban school district—Boston Public Schools (BPS)—about police involvement in schools through calls to 911. First, we discuss ongoing collaborative work conducted among the Boston Police Department (BPD), BPS, and academic partners. Next, we provide an example of how this partnership can address pressing questions identified by BPS by providing the results of an analysis of 911 calls. In particular, we examine the ways in which elementary versus secondary schools in the BPS system differ in their patterns of 911 usage across schools when requesting assistance from the BPD. This work provides an example of how researcher–practitioner partnerships can inform policy and practice in schools, and guide decision-making about school-based police services.

Caring for the community: An academically based community service course in LIS

The field of Library and Information Science (LIS) has historically struggled to connect theory and practice in its graduate education, specifically when it comes to building partnerships with diverse stakeholders in public library communities. One possible technique for bridging the gap of stakeholder experiences is academically based community service (ABCS) courses. ABCS courses attempt to directly focus on research-practitioner partnerships to solve real-world problems by involving the community to democratically co-design the curriculum. In this paper, we present a reflective case study of an ABCS course on integrating participatory design methods to co-design new digital learning activities for youth in an urban public library. By conducting 10 co-design sessions and 26 semi-structured interviews, we examined a partnership between a university and a library, and how this ABCS course impacted different stakeholder participation. Our findings highlight how ABCS courses require systematic structural endeavors from higher education and care between all stakeholders within a library setting. This work contributes to a growing body of work that calls for more courses in LIS education with greater civic and democratic engagement between graduate students, university partners, and library stakeholders.

The Effect of COVID-19 on Community-Engaged Homicide Research

COVID-19 transformed society, affecting how every sector conducted work. Researchers, law enforcement, and social service agencies had to adapt procedures to a virtual space—moving participant recruitment, warrant requests, and protection orders online. Researcher-practitioner partnerships also altered, halting in-person data collection and agencies having limited time to support guests, regardless of interest. While some COVID-19-related challenges will likely subside, the future of these partnerships seems to have permanently shifted. In this research note, we reflect on these shifts using an example of an intimate partner homicide study to discuss research adaptions to COVID-19 and the future of community-engaged homicide research.

Special Issue on Collaborative Science: Police Researcher–Practitioner Partnerships

Special Issue on Collaborative Science: Police Researcher–Practitioner Partnerships

Researcher-practitioner partnerships and in-school laboratories facilitate translational research in reading.

Educational neuroscience approaches have helped to elucidate the brain basis of Reading Disability (RD) and of reading intervention response; however, there is often limited translation of this knowledge to the broader scientific and educational communities. Moreover, this work is traditionally lab-based, and thus the underlying theories and research questions are siloed from classroom practices. With growing awareness of the neurobiological origins of RD and increasing popularity of putative "brain-based" approaches in clinics and classrooms, it is imperative that we create more direct and bidirectional communication between scientists and practitioners. Such direct collaborations can help dispel neuromyths, and lead to increased understanding of the promises and pitfalls of neuroscience approaches. Moreover, direct partnerships between researchers and practitioners can lead to greater ecological validity in study designs to improve upon the translational potential of findings. To this end, we have forged collaborative partnerships, and built cognitive neuroscience laboratories within independent reading disabilities schools. This approach affords frequent and ecologically valid neurobiological assessment as children's reading improves in response to intervention. It also permits the creation of dynamic models of leading and lagging relationships of students' learning, and identification of individual-level predictors of intervention response. The partnerships also provide in-depth knowledge of student characteristics and classroom practices, which, when combined with the data we acquire, may facilitate optimization of instructional approaches. In this commentary, we discuss the creation of our partnerships, the scientific problem we are addressing (variable response to reading intervention), and the epistemological significance of researcher-practitioner bi-directional learning.

Assessing States' Intimate Partner Violence Offender Treatment Standards using a Principles of Effective Intervention Framework.

Court-ordered treatment programs are a widely used response to intimate partner violence (IPV) and many states have developed standards to guide programs. The current study provides an update to Maiuro and Eberle's. (2008) review of states' standards and extends the literature by using the principles of effective intervention (PEIs; i.e., risk, need, responsivity, treatment, and fidelity) as an organizational framework to examine standards. Findings showed that 84% of states had standards in 2020, compared to 88% in 2007, and extensive changes both within and across states' standards had occurred. Regarding the PEIs, in line with the risk principle most states mandated the use of risk assessments; inconsistent with the needs principle, few states used these assessments to classify clients into risk levels or inform individualized treatment. The majority of standards addressed the treatment principle by outlining a required structure and duration, but few attended to responsivity factors (e.g., identifying treatment modalities, attending to specific client factors). Regarding the fidelity principle, most standards outlined education or training requirements for staff and required periodic program reviews or audits, but few standards were evidenced-based and only about half required that programs collect data to measure effectiveness. Taken together, findings suggest that standards have continued to evolve and that the integration of PEIs into IPV treatment is only just beginning. Standards provide a rich opportunity for future researcher-practitioner partnerships in the field of IPV intervention.

Comparing 911 and Emergency Hotline Calls for Domestic Violence in Seven Cities: What Happened When People Started Staying Home Due to COVID-19?

Research Summary: We examine changes in help-seeking for domestic violence (DV) in seven U.S. cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Bayesian structural time-series modeling with daily data to construct a synthetic counterfactual, we test whether calls to police and/or emergency hotlines varied in 2020 as people stayed home due to COVID-19. Across this sample, we estimate there were approximately 1,030 more calls to police and 1,671 more calls to emergency hotlines than would have occurred absent the pandemic. Policy Implications: Inter-agency data sharing and analysis holds great promise for better understanding localized trends in DV in real time. Research-practitioner partnerships can help DV coordinated community response teams (CCRTs) develop accessible and sustainable dashboards to visualize data and advance community transparency. As calls for drastic changes in policing are realized, prioritization of finite resources will become critical. Data-driven decision-making by CCRTs provides an opportunity to work within resource constraints without compromising the safety of DV victims.

Comparing 911 and emergency hotline calls for domestic violence in seven cities: What happened when people started staying home due to COVID-19?

Research Summary: We examine changes in help‐seeking for domestic violence (DV) in seven U.S. cities during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using Bayesian structural time‐series modeling with daily data to construct a synthetic counterfactual, we test whether calls to police and/or emergency hotlines varied in 2020 as people stayed home due to COVID‐19. Across this sample, we estimate there were approximately 1030 more calls to police and 1671 more calls to emergency hotlines than would have occurred absent the pandemic. Policy Implications: Interagency data sharing and analysis holds great promise for better understanding localized trends in DV in real time. Research‐practitioner partnerships can help DV coordinated community response teams (CCRTs) develop accessible and sustainable dashboards to visualize data and advance community transparency. As calls for drastic changes in policing are realized, prioritization of finite resources will become critical. Data‐driven decision‐making by CCRTs provides an opportunity to work within resource constraints without compromising the safety of DV victims.

Partnerships between community corrections and researchers: the view from the probation/parole chiefs

ABSTRACT Calls to improve the interaction between academics and practitioners have been repeatedly pronounced by scholars and government leaders alike. A number of publications have focused on examining the experience and views of police leaders on partnerships with researchers. However, there is a general lack of knowledge about community corrections leaders’ receptivity to research and the experience and view of research partnerships. Our study addressed this limitation with a statewide survey of probation/parole chiefs in Pennsylvania. Guided by prior research on research partnerships in policing, the survey in the current project included questions about potential correlates of researcher-practitioner partnerships in addition to the questions measuring the experience and opinions of probation/parole chiefs in Pennsylvania on such partnerships. The current research results provide greater insight to inform practitioners and researchers on how to encourage the research utilization and tailor researcher-practitioner partnerships to the context and conditions within community corrections.

Building entrepreneurial researcher capacity to increase positive changes in practice

Background: Over the past decade, research-based and evidence-informed decision-making have played increasingly important roles in influencing educational policy and impacting practices in education. The dissemination, implementation and sustainability of research-to-practice are thus fruitful topics for discussion. Even though, as Oliver and Cairney (2019) report, there is no shortage of literature on the topic, many academics struggle with where to start. This entrepreneurial concept is based on the current literature and the author’s experiences working with an Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada initiative designed to promote a systems approach to building research-practitioner partnerships so as to mobilise findings into practice. Aims and objectives: This practice paper is meant to offer such a starting place. It introduces the concept of the `entrepreneurial researcher’ and provides concrete strategies by which contemporary researchers can develop entrepreneurial skills to plan, promote and mobilise their research and findings. In doing so, the researchers may arrive at a better understanding of self-actualization opportunities and move beyond the institutional barriers (i.e. academic institutions), that underlie and incentivise much of scholarly publication, to broaden their research focus and dissemination (Best and Holmes 2010). Key conclusions: We suggest a revised research process that includes the importance and application of collaborative planning, networking, partnerships and knowledge mobilisation processes. Also, recognizing the goals of many research agendas to improve and impact practice, we provide a list of recommendations for researchers to support greater transfer of research into practice.

Successful Research-Practitioner Partnerships: Empirical Research in Honor of Joan Petersilia

Special Issue EditorThe goal of this special issue is to honor the legacy of Dr. Joan Petersilia, a policy and practitioner-oriented corrections and sentencing researcher of world renown, whom the ...

Estimating the Impact of Research Practitioner Partnerships on evidence-based Program Implementation*

Evidence-based program implementation in criminal justice and community settings is complex and rarely encounters an ideal set of conditions. Implementation failure may be more common than success, and the field has only started to seriously consider how to improve dissemination and implementation. Research-practitioner partnerships are a potential mechanism for achieving implementation success. Using an implementation science framework, we examine the impact of researcher involvement and activity on implementation outcomes in a sample of 49 community-based multi-agency initiatives to improve public safety. Our findings suggest that projects focused more heavily on data and analysis from the outset achieved better implementation outcomes across multiple domains, including fidelity, penetration and dosage, complexity, execution, and sustainability. Similar improvements in outcomes were not associated with more robust data collection, access, or analytic capacity.

We have the program, what now? Development of an implementation plan to bridge the research-practice gap prevalent in exercise oncology

BackgroundExercise has emerged as a promising therapy for people with cancer. Novel programs have been developed to translate research into practice; however, implementation barriers have limited their success in part because successful translation of exercise oncology research into practice requires context-specific implementation plans. The aim of this study was to employ the implementation mapping protocol to develop an implementation plan to support programming of a co-located exercise clinic and cancer treatment center.MethodsThe Implementation Mapping protocol, which consists of five specific iterative tasks, was used. A stakeholder advisory group advised throughout the process.ResultsA comprehensive needs assessment was used to identify the organization’s general manager as the program adopter; oncologists, center leaders, and various administrative staff as program implementers; and the operations manager as the program maintainer. Twenty performance objectives were identified. The theoretical domains framework was used to identify likely determinants of change, which informed the selection of eight individual implementation strategies across the individual and organizational levels. Finally, an evaluation plan was developed which will be used to measure the success of the implementation plan in the project’s next phase.ConclusionThe Implementation Mapping protocol provided a roadmap to guide development of a comprehensive implementation plan that considered all ecological domains, was informed by theory, and demonstrated an extensive understanding of the implementation context. Strong research-practitioner partnerships and effective stakeholder engagement were critical to development of the plan.