Linking research and end users
- 1. LINKING RESEARCH AND END USERS Can policy makers and decision makers use research to inform their decisions? WINNIE MBAU LIWA
- 2. Challenges End users may believe that academics do not understand or value practical problems or they may have had negative experiences working with. Researchers and end users must learn to speak a common language, as they often come from different backgrounds and use different terminology. It can be difficult for researchers to understand how to make complex technical information easily understandable if they are working with an end user who does not have a technical background. Once the researcher understands the end user’s needs and priorities, the next challenge is defining those needs as a research question. Often an end user’s problem will need to be reframed as a research question, while also ensuring that the emerging research plan remains directly applicable to the question the end user needs answered.
- 3. Challenges ….continued researchers often do not have a good understanding of how decisions are made in policy and practice. End users may not understand how the research process works – for example, they may not be aware that a student must produce a thesis over the course of the research, or that a professor needs funding or a publication. It is difficult to build relationships with partners and end users internationally Researchers often work exclusively in their specific discipline. This means that many researchers do not have colleagues they can consult outside their discipline, and very few projects that examine an issue from multiple perspectives because many researchers do not engage in interdisciplinary work. End users then experience difficulty because they have to integrate information from many different disciplines (engineering, ecology, economics, etc.
- 4. And more challenges. Uncertainty Around the Use of Research- giving research information to end users may result in the research being applied incorrectly. After dissemination, research may be or oversimplified to make it practical, scientific accuracy will be lost; research is reduced to “sound bites.” Securing research funding, especially funding that includes a knowledge translation component is difficult “Often, the people who really could and should benefit from the research find that it takes too long to get the research done.” – Graham Daborn
- 5. Solutions Many researchers stressed that full collaboration and honest communication with end users at the beginning of the project is essential to its overall success. A knowledge broker with the appropriate skills, as well as some content knowledge, would be suited to bridge the gap between researchers and end users. This could assist the researcher with communications and plain language writing, tool development, event and workshop planning, as well as provide website support. case studies that give examples of successful knowledge translation. Success stories would serve the dual purpose of educating researchers about past knowledge translation strategies that have been successful and providing examples of evaluation metrics that may help the researcher with evaluation of their own project.
- 6. Solutions A knowledge translation fund should be applied to help with better dissemination. Additionally, providing funding for students to do knowledge translation by assisting the primary researcher would also help with student training. Researchers also would like to be able to allocate more money to knowledge translation (specifically to preliminary relationship-building and dissemination activities) in their proposal, or to have a flexible “slush fund” within the budget that could be used for knowledge translation. LIWA to play a match-making role, connecting end users who need research done with researchers who may be able to assist with this need, perhaps even making international connections. An online forum or community of practice where multidisciplinary researchers can talk to each other and to end users. informal relationship-building opportunities eg sector boards A mentoring program or informal collaboration between junior and senior researchers might be an effective way of exposing junior researchers and students to end users and helping them to build relationships. a database or list of multidisciplinary researchers whose work touched on specific sector issues would help researcher to identify other researchers who they might be able to consult or collaborate with. A database with searchable key words would be especially helpful. Recommendation: LIWA Programme Trust has invested in a database to support research….connect info@liwaprogrammetrust.org
- 7. knowledge translation activities can be incorporated into every stage of the research process.
- 8. ASANTE SANA! COMPILED BY WINNIE MBAU LIWA PROGRAMME TRUST (KENYA)