21.4 Sharing with professional and lay audiences

Researchers should not limit themselves to sharing with academic audiences alone. Social work research exists to inform practice, and so sharing the results of your project with practitioners, clients, and other stakeholders is a necessary part of the research workflow. At minimum, engaging non-academic audiences means eliminating barriers to accessing your research products. Sharing conference presentations and papers in open access repositories democratizes access to knowledge. Your average clients and agency workers do not have money to pay for a journal article or registration fee for a conference. More than likely, to reach a practitioner or client group, you will need to share your work in multiple ways.

Practice-focused conferences

If your project is relevant to direct social work practice, consider sharing it at the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) conference in your state or at their annual national conference. Additionally, societies for clinical social work within states may provide opportunities to share your research, if it has clinical applications. If your work is more relevant to social workers leading human service agencies, consider sharing it at the annual Social Work Management conference. Even emerging areas within social work will have conferences, such as the Alliance for Social Workers in Sports.

You may also want to identify conferences that are in other disciplines or are transdisciplinary in orientation. For example, Matt DeCarlo (2021)^[1] presented the results of my research project on Medicaid waiver programs for people with disabilities at the Association of University Centers on Disabilities conference, which is attended by a diverse audience including interdisciplinary disabilities scholars, people with disabilities, advocates, and public administrators. Seek out information on national, state-wide, or regional conferences on your topic area.

In addition to presentations, you may consider sharing your results in a trade publications such as the New Social Worker magazine or the NASW News newsletter. As less formal outlets, they are more approachable for your lay practitioner and can link to more thorough documentation of your project. Other outlets for reaching a professional audience include creating continuing education classes around your topic and submitting them for approval with local and national licensing boards, or creating in-service trainings to be administered at local agencies or government offices.

Presentations to stakeholders

While it is important to let professionals know about the results of your research, it is important to identify stakeholders who would also benefit from knowing the study results. Stakeholders, as you’ll remember from previous chapters, are individuals or groups who have an interest in the outcome of the study you conduct. Instead of the formal presentations or journal articles you may use to engage academics or fellow researchers, stakeholders will expect a presentation that is engaging, understandable, and immediately relevant to their lives and practice. Informal presentations are no less rigorous than formal presentations, but they do not follow a strict format.

For example, in my project on policy for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, our team partnered with the National Resource Center on Participant-Directed Services (NRCPDS) to deliver a webinar summarizing our project findings. NRCPDS gathered a diverse audience of administrators, advocates, and service providers, and our results reached those who needed to hear about our study. Because these individuals were practitioners, their foremost concern was how to apply the results of our study in practice. They were also immensely knowledgeable about our topic, so representing conclusions with the humility required of a social scientist is prudent.

Hypothetically, I could have also addressed people with disabilities through the National Disability Rights Network. In this research project, people with IDD are my target population—the people for whom I want my study to have an impact. Providing these individuals with access to information about the programs designed to support them will support their self-advocacy for better and more responsive programs. Individuals in a state with relatively few benefits can point to programs from other states that have more robust programs as models for policymakers.

I stated earlier that scientists and academics may be the most interested in your study’s methods. That is only partially true. Advocates from your target population experience the issues you study every day. Because of that, they are immensely knowledgeable and will closely scrutinize your methods and results to make sure they accurately represent what happens in the real world. Indeed, this local and lived knowledge is why community-engaged research incorporates client and community perspectives in the creation of research projects. This stage of dissemination will look quite different for community-engaged projects, as stakeholders can better guide your dissemination to community members.

In addition to practitioners and clients, grant funders are an important stakeholder in research dissemination. Specifically, your grant funder will want you to discuss how your results fit with the goals of the grant program. They may also emphasize cost-benefit or cost-efficacy models, in which you demonstrate how money was spent and how the program creates a net positive effect from the funder’s investment. It is important to use your program evaluation skills to properly meet the expectations for methodological rigor of a grant funder, though these should be distilled into a succinct executive summary or elevator pitch describing your project’s impact.

In addition to funders, policymakers are often a key audience for social work research. Almost all social work research projects have policy implications, and outreach to policymakers should be integrated into the dissemination plan for research. Common policy practice skills apply, including targeting your efforts at different levels of government, key bureaus, or committee members and chairs to maximize impact. Messages to policymakers should be relevant and particularized to their jurisdiction and should make a concise and trustworthy case for policy change.

Presentations to the general public

While there are a seemingly infinite number of informal audiences, there is one more that is worth mentioning—the general public. I often say to my students that social work involves working in the areas of the social world that others do not want to see. Part of our job as social workers is to shine a light towards areas of social injustice and raise the consciousness of the public as a whole.

Researchers commonly share their results with popular media outlets to reach a broader audience with their study’s conclusions. University relations offices can sometimes make these connections for researchers, while on smaller campuses, professors may reach out to local journalists directly to talk about their work. Researchers may also consider publishing their results in a blog post or via social media. These require a public presence for authors, and it is a good idea for student and faculty researchers to build a personal website through which people can engage with your work.

Engaging with the public differs from engaging with academic or professional audiences. As noted elsewhere, knowing your audience is crucial when preparing a research report. What are they likely to want to hear about? What portions of the research do you feel are crucial to share, regardless of the audience? What level of knowledge do they have about your topic? Answering these questions will help you determine how to shape any written reports you plan to produce. In fact, some outlets answer these questions for you, as in the case of newspaper editorials where rules of style, presentation, and length will dictate the shape of your written report.

Whoever your audience, don’t forget what it is that you are reporting: social scientific evidence. Take seriously your role as a social scientist and your place among peers in your discipline. Present your findings as clearly and as honestly as you possibly can; cite appropriately the scholars whose work your project builds on, even while you raise questions about their work; and aim to engage your readers in a discussion about your work and about avenues for further inquiry. Even if you won’t ever meet your readers face-to-face, imagine what they might ask you upon reading your report, sketch out your response, and provide some of those details in your written report.

Public social work scholarship

In this chapter so far, we reviewed how you might share the results of your project outside of the classroom. A 2019 section in the Journal of the Society for Social Work Research was dedicated to “public interest scholarship,” and reading through it might give you some innovative ideas for how to disseminate your work to the public. You’ll also encounter the ethical arguments for why public engagement is a necessary part of being a social work scholar. We encourage students to pursue public scholarship, outside of the grades in a classroom, because social work is a necessarily public and applied research discipline. Social work research exists to inform action to address social issues, and disseminating findings is a key component of ensuring competent practice and fostering social change. As you think about dissemination for your project, consider the following questions:

• What academic and research conferences are relevant to your topic?
• Which journals publish in your topic area? Which journals appeared often in your literature review?
• What interdisciplinary conferences and meetings are relevant to your topic?
• What stakeholders would find your research conclusions relevant?
• Who is your target population? What media do they consume?
• What popular media would find your research relevant or interesting? Can you trust them to report your results responsibly?
• How can I make my scholarship openly accessible to all audiences, regardless of ability to pay or professional status?