Connecting research and evidence in child welfare practice

In the field of child welfare, research and practice are two disciplines with overlapping and shared goals that often fail to speak to each other in meaningful ways. In both research and practice the overarching goal is to... [ view full abstract ]

In the field of child welfare, research and practice are two disciplines with overlapping and shared goals that often fail to speak to each other in meaningful ways. In both research and practice the overarching goal is to improve the safety and well-being outcomes in the lives of vulnerable children and families.
To accomplish the shared goal of improving outcomes, researchers need to be continually pushed to translate their findings into practical clinical applications and recommendations for policy and practice. However, for reasons that are well documented and that we will hear about today, practitioners are often wary of the knowledge that research brings to the table. Innovations to advance the use of research evidence in to practice settings are needed. These will include strategies for communication that value both data and experiential knowledge, organizational and structural changes to improve the uptake and reach of research-based practices, and methods of evaluation that set up processes for continual quality improvement. It is through these types of process that child maltreatment research findings will be converted intoaction.
In case we become too self critical, we recognize that the gap between research and practice is not limited to the field of child abuse and neglect; in medicalresearch, on average it takes 17 years for research discovery to make it’s way through the pipeline in to real world practice. We have seen some progress in child welfare systems during the past decade with the growth of the field of implementation science. Increasingly, we have examples of how evidence-based intervention can be scaled up in real world child welfare systems. But significant challenges remain and we need strategies for creating a shared dialogue and culture between researchers and practitioners. Today we will hear about two examples of how this dialogue can happen.