Enhancing Social Work Research and Evaluation through Public Impact Scholarship: Lessons and Strategies from the Sustain Center at the Collective for Community Action

Abstract:

Social Work researchers and evaluators hold the key to advancing social justice and community health and wellness through a systematic inquiry to improve organizational practices, programs, and policies. While research and evaluation facilitate identification of solutions to complex social problems, operationalizing justice-centered values can enhance these data driven practices and transform organizations to benefit the greater public good, particularly communities most systematically impacted by oppressive structural conditions. However, gaps in principled dissemination strategies and approaches remain, with a 17-year gap between the translation of published findings to changes in practice (Edwards, 2015). These structural conditions in research and evaluation prevent social work scholars from sharing accessible, transparent, and relatable data-informed materials to wider audiences (Brekke, Ell, & Palinkas, 2007; Proctor & Rosen, 2008). Furthermore, these challenges suspend communities’ need to take data-informed action prompted by overnight anti-rights efforts in the US. These gaps in principled approaches, strategic delivery, and lag in information uptake suggest a need to re-envision research and evaluation infrastructure, processes, and practices that meet community-based organizations’ growing demands in a context of escalating social, political, and systemic violence.

Increasingly, researchers and evaluators are engaging in public impact scholarship, which emphasizes intentional efforts to create social change by making findings accessible to practitioners, policymakers, community organizations, community members, and the general public (Silva et al., 2019). Expanding on the practice of knowledge production and dissemination, public impact scholarship spans all phases – from the formation of questions, to the delivery and acceptance of findings. In addition, principled approaches, such as anti-racist and community-engagement are needed to support community-based organizations and programs to continue to carry out their mission to provide critical services to systematically impacted communities. This panel consists of Social Work research-activists affiliated with the Collective for Community Action (CCA) SUSTAIN Wellbeing COMPASS Coordinating Center. Panelists will discuss lessons learned and strategies for developing a public impact infrastructure. In addition, panelists will discuss the following topics: 1) operationalizing anti-racist and community-engaged methods, 2) developing a public impact infrastructure, 3) processes and practices, 4) working groups, 5) concrete strategies, and 5) examples of data-to-action materials.