Creating Partnerships

Talking Points from the SRCD Briefs

• This is an exciting time to make child and family policies (laws, programs, and practices) more evidence-based.
  • Researchers are becoming increasingly interested in sharing and maximizing the use of their findings.
  • Practitioners and policymakers are becoming increasingly interested in evidence-based decision making. 
• There are multiple types of research-practice partnerships with three principles to set them apart:
  • Mutualism: researchers and practitioners work together to define a research agenda that addresses issues important to practitioners’ work and simultaneously fits researchers’ interests and expertise.
  • Commitment to long-term collaboration: knowledge is built over time and partners can examine complex problems and improve implementation of policies, program, or practices. 
  • Trusting relationships: partners communicate reciprocally and can continue working together even when evaluations and data analyses provide unexpected or disappointing results. 
• Efforts to improve the quality of research have boosted scientific rigor in testing what works and synthesizing that evidence. 
• The use of research is hindered by researchers’, practitioners’, and policymakers’ differing definitions of research and criteria for evaluating its trustworthiness and utility. 
• Fulfilling the promise of research-practice partnerships will require taking a long view on research and practice improvement with learning and innovation required on all sides.