University-Community Collaborations for Secondary Data Analysis: Moving Beyond Program Evaluation to Build the Profession’s Knowledge Base

Social service agencies routinely collect a variety of data on the clientele they serve, the services they provide, and the outcomes that result. These data are often salient to the issues that social work researchers study. This roundtable will discuss university-community partnerships for the purpose of analyzing routinely collected agency data. Such partnerships are potentially beneficial for both agencies (which can gain insight into client needs, outcomes, and the success of different service interventions) and researchers (who are able to conduct applied research with “real world” implications, and typically requiring fewer resources than original data collection). While many researchers engage in program evaluation, university-community collaborations for secondary analysis of agency data appear to be under-utilized as a path to peer-reviewed publication and building the knowledge base of the social work profession.

This roundtable will draw on the experiences of a diverse panel of presenters, as well as session attendees, to explore the mutual benefits of these partnerships and best practices for maximizing benefits to both partners. The panelists include three researchers who have used such collaborative secondary data analyses in their academic publications. The researchers will discuss their experiences and describe the actions they took to maximize the utility of the data for answering their own research questions and ensuring rigor in the analyses, while also making sure that the needs of community partners were met. Researchers will discuss university-community partnerships for secondary data analysis as a useful strategy specifically for early career scholars (e.g. doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, junior faculty), who face the challenge of building a research portfolio with limited resources in order to amass a publication record to be competitive for grant funding.

One panelist representing a community agency in the field of health and human services will discuss her view of university-community partnerships, describing the agency’s vested interest in pursuing such partnerships as a way to enhance services through more robust analysis of program-level data. This panelist will also address the community perspective in navigating university-community partnerships. In addition to elaborating on the benefits, the panel will also address the limitations and challenges of research partnerships from multiple perspectives, as well as outline caveats that should be considered by both parties.

The format of this roundtable presentation will be: (1) welcome, overview, and purpose of the session; (2) brief remarks from each panelist regarding their experiences with university-community partnerships for secondary data analysis and the benefits and limitations of this approach (as described above); (3) guided discussion, in which attendees will have the opportunity to ask the panel questions and the panel will also ask attendees to share their own experiences with these partnerships; (4) conclusion and summary of lessons learned on best partnership practices, based on both panelists’ and attendees’ experiences. The overall objective of this session is to encourage more researchers to consider drawing on university-community partnerships for secondary data analysis as a way of building the profession’s knowledge base and to conduct such partnerships in a way that maximizes benefits to both partners.