In their substantial review and analysis of the EBP implementation literature in social work, Osterling and Austin 5 identified four key factors related to the dissemination and utilization of research: individual, organizational, research and communication. More recently, the issue of access is almost exclusively discussed in EBP implementation studies, as EBP (or research-informed practice) is the framework that most explicitly requests social workers utilize research in practice. 3 This problem was identified much earlier as well by the federally funded Social Work Policy Institute’s Task Force on Social Work Research 4 in 1991, who determined that the dissemination of research to the practitioners is ‘fragmented and inefficient’. Lack of access to research is commonly cited in the social work literature as a problem for practitioners. However, there are a myriad of disconnects and complications that stifle the flow of information between researchers and practitioners throughout the knowledge production cycle. Social work research is most often produced and disseminated to inform practitioners working in the field. While we focused on the discipline of social work, similar barriers exist in other applied practice disciplines, especially those that employ the EBP framework, such as education.
We inquired about faculty attitudes and practices towards reaching non-academic audiences, gold and green open access (OA), research dissemination in the context of promotion and tenure, and impact in the practice field. 2 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. We found that practitioners rely heavily on research articles but are unable to access those to the extent needed.
Our previous research on social workers and barriers to evidence-based practice (EBP) informed this study.
Social work journal full#
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. 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 therefore institutional subscriptions to expensive journals) and also face an expectation of informing their practice decisions with recent research findings. Meanwhile, the lack of broad or substantial discussion on the access barrier supports the claim of the researchers’ ‘insufficient attention’. An often-mentioned barrier to practitioners making use of research is that they do not have access to research in the first place. 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’. But the barriers to research utilization in practice are complex, involving everything from lack of generalizability and relevance on the research side, and lack of training and workplace support on the practice side. 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.Īs in other professional practice fields, social work researchers produce research meant to be directly applied to work in the field. Faculty are conflicted regarding the dissemination of their research, especially in the context of promotion and tenure. Faculty are skeptical of open access journals, avoid article processing charges and are only minimally engaged with institutional repositories. Results demonstrate that faculty are primarily engaged with traditional publishing models and much less engaged with dissemination 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. 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. This research/practice divide is particularly problematic for practitioners required to work within evidence-based or research-informed frameworks. 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.
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