Disseminating research findings to service providers and communities

Abstract

Investigators are funded with the expectation that advances made in research will be actively shared with others, communicated to them, and thereby become part of the collective body of knowledge in the field. Findings reported in high-quality scientific journals remain a major benchmark of success for work supported by a research grant. There is a growing recognition, however, that funded researchers also have an obligation to disseminate results of their work to other constituencies, including taxpayers, who are the true funders of publicly supported research grants; service providers, who are the intended users of many public health research findings; and communities that either can directly benefit from research results or whose members made the work possible by participating in research studies. Only when your intervention program is being delivered to clients as part of a sustained effort will it have a positive impact on improving public health. This chapter focuses on the dissemination of grant research findings to service providers and to communities that are stakeholders in a research area. Through the steps discussed in this chapter, you can ensure that results and methods used in your research reach those practitioners, providers, service agencies, and public health agencies who can use them. This chapter will draw on examples from an HIV prevention project, although the same principles also hold true for other areas of public health intervention research. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.