Abstract
Academics and practitioners all too often have little or no contact with each other; the practitioner does not know what research exists that can inform their practices, and the academic does not know enough about the institutions they primarily study to make recommendations that are specific enough to inform a concrete practice or policy. I leverage my experiences both as an academic and as a data analyst and domestic violence coordinator at Family Court to outline lessons learned in the field. I detail how my academic training hindered my work as a practitioner, and how practitioners differ in terms of conducting internal research and presenting data and findings. I use my lessons learned and subsequently list several concrete practices that academics can begin to work into their work to increase communication with important stakeholders, and tailor their work to practical systemic improvement. Bridging the gap between academics and practitioners will lead to better research projects, and findings that will be able to actively enact changes within systems that academics focus on.
Sociology and specialized fields within it strive to conduct research to improve how individuals live and how societal systems operate; in a scholar’s world, published research will inform policy, practice, mobilize and empower marginalized groups, or meaningfully add to ongoing important debates and conversations. Unfortunately, some research findings suggest that it takes roughly 17 years for research to begin to affect policy and practice, if the research is published at all (Hung & Duffett, 2013; McKelvey et al., 2010; Morris et al., 2011). Many projects reviewed in the aforementioned cited literature were never officially published and remained internal to the facility where it was conducted. Projects bringing researchers, advocates, and policy-makers together are few and far between, and these projects are often singular occurrences and tend to disintegrate the moment the project ends. Working with practitioners can enhance research and ensure that more individuals actually have access to academic’s work, and this kind of focused research may also be more likely to actively change institutional practices. For the purposes of this essay, I will use the term “academic” to signify those individuals that work within universities and research institutions in traditional academic roles.
Practitioner research often is considered and conducted separately, for different purposes, and often is not a collaborative effort (Carr, 2006; Grant, 2008). Academics and theorists often are sequestered within academia, playing within their own “field” (Bourdieu, 1984), rarely exploring how their research findings actively contribute to practically improve the systems that they spend years studying and writing about. Moreover, much of academics’ recommendations within their findings are generalized to the extent that local systems they are analyzing cannot use their findings and recommendations in any useful way. This article aims to leverage the author’s experiences working both as an academic and as a practitioner within a Family Court to provide academics with ways that they can actively use their research to disseminate important findings to the institutions that would benefit from them, thereby ensuring that justice systems operate according to evidence-based practices.
This article begins with an outline of a disconnect between academic writing and practitioner perspectives, and follows with an overview of the author’s current role and the lessons learned when transitioning from an academic to a practitioner. The author then uses those lessons to list some practical guidelines that academics can follow to build relationships with stakeholders and produce research that is actively used to shape policy and practice. It is important to reiterate here that bridging this gap will lead to better research projects and findings that can inform changes within systems that directly affect the livelihood of individuals embedded within the justice system.
Highlighting the Disconnect: Academic Recommendations
One of the last articles I published as an academic (using the data collected from the court where I was employed) focused on Family Court mediators and hearing officers, and how they may influence domestic violence victims’ perceptions of fairness of the civil protection order (CPO) process (Carcirieri et al., 2019). Some of our findings were significant and suggested that negative behaviors committed by mediators and hearing officers influenced how women perceived the CPO process; therefore, the recommendations made were as follows:
The findings indicate that interpersonal training for court staff should emphasize the importance of court personnel listening to and validating petitioners’ experiences with abuse, and to be more encouraging of victims’ right to seek protection in whatever form they feel is best, whether that be through a consent order or an appearance before a hearing officer . . . Our study also encourages the policy recommendation that the opportunity for legal representation should be extended or expanded for individuals who use the civil court process . . . While having an attorney in and of itself did not significantly predict whether women thought the overall process was fair, women with attorneys were highly satisfied with them, suggesting that attorneys may still play an important role in the CPO process. (Carcirieri et al., 2019)
To begin, it is important to note that none of the above recommendations are bad or should not be in the paper at all. Rather, as a practitioner reading this, there is nothing useful to glean from the recommendations section that was not already known to the practitioner upon reading this. There is a recommendation that court personnel listen to and validate victims’ experiences of abuse, and that is extremely impractical and not specific to what is really meant there. As a practitioner, that statement has become extremely problematic to me and evidence of how little we knew not only about the mediation process but also about administrative limitations as well. Mediators cannot spend the time to listen and validate every litigant, but there are things that they can do to mitigate their negative behaviors.
Interestingly, it is not explained in the article what we meant by “listen” and “validate”; indeed, as the first author, I may well have written this line and not known what I meant by it. This is because academics are trained to write in generalized recommendations based on findings as an afterthought—a way to sell the importance of your research to other academics. If I had taken the time during this several-year project to learn processes, or meet court personnel to learn about what their constraints are, I may have been able to come up with concrete and specific training recommendations. This is not to say the way the article is published is unimportant, but it is not necessarily useful to practitioners, and it illustrates that academics publish research with other academics in mind. We are not trained to write or publish in ways that would be useful to practitioners, and we are also not trained to disseminate research we do write that might be useful. When this article was published, little to no effort was made to get it to the court. I sent this article to relevant court personnel only after I obtained my job there.
Given the critique of my own articles written before I was a practitioner, academics often have a theoretical/broad contribution for their findings, but can rarely offer concrete and relevant recommendations. This is a direct result of the sequestered nature of research, in which studies are conducted within a system in which the research has only surface knowledge of, and could have used the benefit of someone who actually understands the system of study at the operations-level. This is also a result of academics prioritizing generalizability; when making recommendations, we are taught to focus on broad implications for our work in an attempt to confirm the importance of the findings. During my tenure working within the court, I quickly learned that projects completed within the courts allowed for better recommendations that actively informed policy and practice changes. The next section will further outline my position as practitioner so that readers can place my perspectives into context.
My Current Role as a Court-Based Researcher
Having the benefits of being both an academic and a practitioner within a court system, it is important to outline the nature of my current position and its allowances for research and practice. I spent several years getting my master’s degree as a full-time academic within university and began to work on a large research project within the local Family Court. I spent 2 years going to Family Court to recruit our study’s participants and subsequently interviewed those participants about their court experiences. I learned little about the court processes during that time; my research team mainly concerned ourselves with the experiences and perceptions of our research subjects which is typical for on-site research as an outsider.
After receiving my master’s degree, I decided to take a break to work full-time and was able to secure a position with Family Court as a data analyst. After several years of working as an analyst, I learned how the courts function, how all types of Family Court cases are handled, and I formed lasting positive relationships with individuals within the courts and many of the community stakeholders. After involving myself in all types of court cases (child welfare, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, etc.), I took a domestic violence (DV) coordinator position within the courts because I wanted to re-focus on DV-related systemic issues. In addition, I had made the decision to return to university to complete my PhD; working as a contractor allowed me the flexibility to complete parts of the PhD program and organize a dissertation project that was in line with what I was already working on within the courts.
As a DV coordinator within the administrative unit of my Family Court, I am in a position with enough authority that my research (whether an internal project or full-scale study) and recommendations can be directly implemented, and my research agenda is focused and tailored to specific issues within my system of study. It is important that I acknowledge that my experiences may not be generalizable; in fact, it is safe to assume that my position is relatively rare, especially within the legal system. To clarify, while I do not work for the university where I am currently obtaining my PhD, I am endeavoring to continue publishing academically within my position at Family Court. This article aims to leverage these unique experiences to highlight areas where academics can begin building lasting relationships with practitioners to ensure their research can be actively used for systemic improvement. This should begin by acknowledging and examining some of the challenges that are faced with engaging with the practitioner community as an academic (and especially as a newer academic to their research field).
Challenges With Engaging the Practitioner Community
Having had the benefit of being able to spend time in both practitioner and academic spaces for many years, there are significant barriers to occupying both spaces at the same time as I currently am. These are worth mentioning because as academics, it is important to understand structural and systemic barriers that make it both harder for practitioners to access research and harder for academics to reach out and work with practitioners (especially academics who are new to their field of study).
The most difficult thing about being a practitioner who is involved in research is that the courts (and any other legal system for that matter) do not have access to academic libraries. It is not bold to say that most government and state systems nationally do not have funds to maintain all of the subscriptions to academic journals that are needed to conduct and stay current on relevant research. This is also likely one of the reasons why academic research rarely moves past other academics, and why it felt as a researcher that I was working so hard to publish work that would not have any effect on the systems I was studying. This is an area where academics could help greatly by offering literature reviews or open-access articles of relevance to practitioners, especially since academics often have extensive literature reviews written for their own research.
Another significant barrier exists within academia; many academic departments simply do not value or make space for academics to work with practitioners. When looking at tenure requirements and activities that most departments find valuable for their faculty to do, community engagement and practitioner collaboration are often ignored or seen as less valuable. Of most importance to a scholar to obtain tenure involve publishing academic research, attending conferences that other academics in your field attend, doing departmental service (serving on internal committees), and teaching experience (Lutter & Schröder, 2014). One study in Germany found that journal article publications specifically increase likelihood of obtaining tenure while other types of publications (book reviews, book chapters, reports, etc.) either have no affect or decrease chances of receiving tenure (Lutter & Schröder, 2014). Much of this work often takes so much time that it is not surprising that most academics do not place importance on getting to know practitioners that work within their study sites. That being said, working with practitioners, while it may take more time than pure outsider research, could lead to more impactful work and would reflect positively on tenure reports. Being able to cite practice/policy changes based on your publication would bolster the importance of that publication as opposed to the publication alone.
Given the challenges and lessons learned as I moved through academia and practitioner careers, there are ways in which academics can work to bridge this gap. It is important to note that the focus is on academics whose research primarily takes them out into the community when collecting data. As most published work, I anticipate the majority of my audience will be located within academia as opposed to within practitioner realms. Therefore, the next sections will outline some concrete practices that academics can begin to build into their research to ensure their research reaches a larger audience.
Bridging the Gap: Practical Guidelines for Outsiders
Although there are major differences in the approach of academics and of practitioners, there are ways to mitigate this. This section outlines several best practices from a practitioner’s point of view that academics can begin to adopt. Each section describes a specific practice using the lessons learned previously outlined in the paper that the current author has adopted to bridge the gap between research and practice.
Meet Practitioners Where They Are, Not Where You Want Them to Be
There are instances in which academics and practitioners do collaborate, often on larger projects with a specific focus. The Family Court Enhancement Project (n.d.) was one such project in Delaware that brought academics, researchers, courts, and other stakeholders together to improve how the legal system handled domestic violence within the courts (https://familycourtenhancementproject.org/). For these larger projects in which practitioners reach out to researchers for assistance, it is extremely important for academics to meet organizations where they are, not where academics believe they should be. Academics are not normally accustomed to thinking about enacting institutional changes and how these changes might occur practically; compromising and starting small are often the only ways that organizations can enact larger changes. Academics must keep this in mind, especially when an organization reaches out for assistance on a larger project.
There is a robust literature about the Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) framework that I just described (Minkler, 2004; Minkler & Wallerstein, 2003; Wallerstein & Duran, 2006, 2010). CBPR has several “core” tenants that set it apart from traditional academic research: it engages practitioners cooperatively, as a partner in research, and it is focused specifically on systemic improvement and is meant to be empowering on the part of the participants of the research project (Minkler, 2004). This framework attempts to integrate research with practice in ways that allow for greater diversity of thought and within the research team, which is especially important given the racial disparity between researcher and participant (Wallerstein & Duran, 2006, 2010).
One substantial challenge occurs when academics are ideologically at odds or undecided with what organizations are intending to implement using the collaboration. Most of the time when enacting broad changes within larger institutions, smaller goals may need to be set before system reform can be fully adopted. Academics tend to focus on larger issues and changes that need to occur for desired outcomes, but this simply is not how organizations actually change. Having the larger goal in mind is always helpful, but it becomes less helpful when academics use the larger goal to halt progress toward a smaller change that could be adopted faster and with less resistance. Minkler’s (2004) work outlines some of these very challenges with outsider research and academics who try to use the CBPR approach; issues around data ownership and dissemination, racism, and tensions between academics and practitioners are all issues that academics will inevitably have to navigate when engaging in this type of research. In fact, much of the remaining sections mirror the methodology in CBPR research and methodology overviews, which may be an important area of research to review if academics are looking into revising their methodology to be community-oriented (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2003).
Make an Effort to Learn Your Study Site’s Processes
Having the benefit of having both training as a PhD student and experience working within my system of scholastic interest and focus, I can understand the vast differences in the ways that academics and practitioners may think about and approach systemic issues. I previously illustrated that when publishing strictly as an academic, policy and practical recommendations are often too general for practitioners to use, and recommendations themselves are usually written with other academics in mind.
My recommendations and future research sections would have been a lot stronger, and much more useful if I had built relationships with someone who works in my study site, and made the effort to learn about the entire CPO process and not just the part that was the focus of our data collection. In addition, I could have had my previously outlined article influence a specific court practice, making my research that much more impactful. While I now ensure that my article (and others that I write) make their way to relevant court personnel, had I not been in my position, the article would be mostly read by other academics and may not have made its way into the courts at all.
Academics can begin to practice this almost immediately; this recommendation will be simple to incorporate as outsider researchers usually need to reach out to their research sites in some capacity when beginning a project involving data collection. Prior to beginning a study within a given space (courts, police agencies, therapy programs, etc.), take extra time to speak with your site contact. Try to understand what they would like to see from your project and if there are specific practices that may make their way into your research. For example, in my previous article, we could have learned more about mediators; we could have shadowed them before beginning the project to get a sense of what they told both parties, or gotten to know some of the challenges they face procedurally. We also could have learned about what the Court has told them that they can or cannot tell litigants to get a sense of their constraints, or we could have spoken with supervisors about training currently offered to them to make better recommendations in our paper.
Take Steps to Build Sustainable Relationships to Stakeholders to Share Findings
This may naturally follow from the previous section once academics begin to get to know their research sites. Practitioners do not have access to the current literature and research that may be relevant to them, nor do they have the time to sift through research on a regular basis. This is why relationships with academics are valuable, and one of the main ways academics and researchers contribute to stakeholder projects; they are able to devote the time and expertise toward a common goal of bettering practice or raising awareness.
Seek opportunities to share and present your work with individuals who are involved within the systems you are studying—it is important for academics to be able to make time to reach out of their siloes and actively push their research into spaces where it may be useful. It cannot be stated enough: where practitioners do reach out to local universities when they can, academics have more opportunity to share findings and research because they have more information about what is available and what may be helpful for practitioners who do not spend their time studying current research.
Given the lack of flow of information to practitioners, if there are articles and findings that are relevant to issues that your relevant practitioners or institutions are facing, send them relevant articles or send them a brief review of the literature. With regard to time spent working on sending an article or sending a literature review previously written for other projects, these are relatively efficient ways to continue to keep bridging the gap and to maintain relationships beyond larger research projects. Most academics have a particular area of focus and have many literature reviews, either from previous articles or from preparing articles, that can be sent informally to stakeholders with whom you have good relationships. In addition, academics could involve stakeholders in the writing/analysis process by sharing findings before publication and asking practitioners what they believe the findings could indicate in their fields.
Building relationships is a core facet of the CBPR approach earlier discussed in this section; building a relationship with your study site and the community it sits in not only leads to more impactful research, but research that empowers the community rather than objectifies it (Wallerstein & Duran, 2006, 2010). When sharing research or beginning a relationship, academics should keep in mind that the presentation of findings itself may not be the best option if you are presenting to stakeholders who do not have statistical training, which leads into the next section.
Presenting Data and Findings
It should come as no surprise that individuals outside of academia and research may not have the time nor training to read lengthy, jargon-filled academic articles. For those who do, they do not have the time to read the amount of research that academics are accustomed to, which may explain why much of the research literature goes unnoticed by anyone outside of academia. The first thing I noticed when I moved from being a full-time academic to a full-time analyst for the courts was the need to completely relearn how to write reports that outline data-driven project findings. Much of my reporting was condensed to three or four pages with graphs instead of analysis of variance (ANOVA) tables and significance tests. In addition, the communication of my findings became part of how I presented the data and subsequent recommendations.
There is a robust literature focusing on translating research findings to various types of audiences (Curtis et al., 2017; Davison, 2009; Grimshaw et al., 2012; Woo, 2008). Academics must consider their audience when translating findings; this can be useful not only in engaging stakeholders but also the broader community and media as well (Woo, 2008). As stated in Grimshaw et al.’s (2012) work focusing on medical research translation, “. . . need[s] to identify the key messages for different target audiences and to fashion these in language and knowledge translation products that are easily assimilated by different audiences.” Academics should consider carefully to whom they are communicating their data and what they may find most important (most stakeholders are less interested in global implications, for example, and are more attuned to what the findings may mean for their specific process).
Academics write and share their work in very different ways than practitioners. They adhere to scientific institutional practices, and often include complex statistical analysis and interpretations. These practices, while important, are not conducive for applicable change, as research findings are rarely explained in jargon-free terms. In most published work, academics do include a discussion section that sums up findings and provides recommendations; while previously noted that the recommendations are rarely useful for practitioners, discussion sections may fare better in terms of use. The next highlight will revisit my article and review how the data were presented within the article. Then, using the literature cited in this section and my experiences, I will rework one of the findings into a presentable format that could be shared with relevant stakeholders.
Highlighting the Disconnect: Academic Results Sections/Data Analysis
Turning back to the article I highlighted in the beginning of this essay, I want to outline one of the more important findings of our paper (and consequently the most important finding to myself as a court administrator). That being the finding that women in our sample were statistically significantly more likely to report higher levels of satisfaction with the overall court process when they also perceived the mediators and hearing officers as being fair to them (Carcirieri et al., 2019). Below, I show how we outlined our model when looking at our sample’s satisfaction with the CPO court process (sentences not involving the mentioned finding have been removed to consolidate the section):
Although this section of our paper is important for academics to be able to read through, there is little doubt that stakeholders would fail to glean important findings from these paragraphs. Although findings are briefly summarized in each paragraph, we cannot expect stakeholders to be able to parse through paragraphs of statistical language; this is why stakeholders typically skip over the results entirely, and why the discussion and recommendation sections of research paper are that much more important. If we had built relationships with court staff while engaging in our research and data collection, we may have been able to write up a smaller report that focused more on the findings and what they may mean for our site’s process. Below is a fairly common example of how I communicate complicated statistical findings to a broader audience:
We were able to run quantitative statistical analyses to determine whether court staff (namely our mediators and Commissioners) had an effect on women’s perceptions of our court process. We found that women were more likely to report higher levels of satisfaction with the court process when they also perceived mediators and Commissioners as treating them fairly. Interestingly, things like types of abuse, having an attorney, age, race, etc. did not affect women’s satisfaction with the court process.
The statistical language is always almost entirely removed—but still noted. For stakeholders, the findings themselves are a small portion of what would be considered when reading recommendations for procedural change. Thus, having stakeholders read the full article is, for the most part, not as useful as an academic sending a condensed report. In addition, sending full articles to stakeholders may not be feasible for academics depending on what the copyright restrictions are for the publishing journal. Communicating data and findings does not have to be as complicated as writing the journal article—it can be as simple as sending an email, if you have made the connections and have contacts from your study site or your study site’s stakeholders.
Academic Departments
It is important to note what might be the largest barrier for newer academics; some departments may need to address systemic values that academic departments prioritize for their faculty. Academics who are relatively secure in their positions can begin to advocate for internal changes within their departments’ value systems, but I am fully aware of the difficulties in doing so within a department that may be resistant to reorganizing priorities and timelines. Departments need to value work done within the community, and this value should be present administratively in faculty tenure requirements and other types of faculty reviews.
During my tenure at Family Court, I came to better understand the value of a strong administration. Having administration and leaders set expectations is of utmost importance for several reasons: administrative directives allow for faculty and employees to better understand what the values and priorities are for their units and departments, and it allows for the ability to structure employee and faculty evaluation forms to mirror those values and priorities in concrete measurable ways. One of these changes in priorities could involve a directive from departmental administrations that note that projects with stakeholders would be favorably rated on tenure reports even if said project is expected to take several years to fully complete.
This change needs to come from within the department (hence the difficulty of this recommendation); perhaps community engagement could be part of service requirements and counted as service just as serving on an internal/university committee would. Constructing a report for your system of focus should be treated similarly to publishing a book chapter or other smaller publication, and not as something useless for career advancement.
Should your department allow it, seek out relevant insider professional development opportunities; instead of spending department allowances on academic conferences, go to a conference that your local judges, advocates, or police officers attend to learn about practical challenges that your local system of academic focus is facing. If you have a relationship with stakeholders or advocate communities, getting on their email lists is the best way to learn about meetings and trainings. As a specific example to my field, I am on several DV advocate meeting lists where resources (webinars, information sessions, etc.) are distributed regularly. In addition, as you build relationships and continue to work with prominent community members, ask them what conferences they attend regularly; even if the conferences are not research/academic-focused, they provide excellent networking opportunities and insight into issues faced (which could impact your subsequent research questions). Judges have several annual national conferences that are tailored to challenges they encounter, as do community advocates and attorneys.
Conclusion
In summation, there are systematic and personal barriers to effective communication between practitioners and academics, but it is imperative that this divide be bridged, especially when trying to affect institutional change to improve our justice system. If academics work with institutions on any project, it should be expected that they share all findings/publications with that institution. Communicating findings to the institutions in which the research was conducted will ensure that research findings are immediately disseminated to the stakeholders that need it the most and can use that research to improve their policies and practices.
If academics have taken care to get to know their institutions well, they should be able to construct accessible reports that include both broad recommendations and recommendations that are specific to the institution’s policy and processes. The importance of making extra effort to communicate your findings in a way that is understandable to a broader audience cannot be understated—this is valuable to stakeholders who have not been academically trained and have not taken several statistics courses.
Communication with your institution and practitioners single-handedly provides the fundamental relationship needed for better research projects and better findings. With the turmoil of the pandemic, national leadership changes, and general uncertainty regarding how justice systems will operate in the coming years, it is that much more imperative that researchers and academics make the extra effort to participate in collaboration with their study sites. Doing so will not only improve the research being conducted but it will also lead to thoughtful articles, greater community impact, and the ability to reform and improve the justice system in evidence-based ways.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.