21.2 Sharing with an academic audience

The most immediate audience for your research project is your professor and your research methods class. We are not going to focus on this domain, as it is best handled by the professor at your individual institution. Check the syllabus and the prompt for this assignment, as well as any class notes the professor provided about the project. At my institution, Radford University, we require students to present their research project as part of a poster session to be rated by faculty as well as at a community event. Students are guided through the process of poster creation as part of their integrative seminar, and they are required to contextualize their findings within relevant social work theory, practice models, and social welfare policies. If you haven’t gotten clear instructions on what to do with your project once it’s done, now is the time to check in with your professor and double-check the course syllabus.

This section will cover presenting your findings to academic audiences outside of your immediate classroom. As previously stated, you must ensure that your IRB and social work department support public dissemination of your research products. Assuming this requirement has been met, let’s introduce you to the academic social work research ecosystem. Addressing an academic audience means you will be talking with people who may (a) research the same topic as you (b) teach that topic (c) plan or administer programs that teach that topic. If these aren’t important audiences for your project, you should read the following section with the purpose of understanding academic conferences as a consumer of information.

Social work education conferences

One of the many pieces of advice I received in my social work PhD program was to start attending social work research conferences. When you are in a graduate or doctoral program, the social work world can seem quite small—one department, one faculty, one academic building. Academic conferences provide you with the opportunity to see the immense scale of social work research and the innovations that are happening across the country and the world. Your first academic conference will likely be an eye-opening experience as you see the depth of research undertaken by academic researchers and researcher-practitioners in the field of social work. You will likely find a community of scholars who are doing incredible work and are supportive of your work as a researcher.

If you feel like academic conferences are only for senior faculty members with much more experience and expertise than you, I encourage you to reconsider that idea. Impostor syndrome never goes away, even for experienced researchers, so you may as well start dealing with it now by ignoring the voice in your head that tells you that you don’t belong in room full of big-wigs. Student posters make faculty members happy, as they demonstrate the hard work of our students and our program. Don’t be afraid to share what you accomplished! You may develop connections with researchers and practitioners to collaborate with in the future.

Table 23.2 provides a short overview of each academic social work research conference relevant to the United States context, as that is the authors’ context. Information in this chart was correct as of Summer 2020 (pre-pandemic). Due dates often shift from year to year, so be sure to consult the website for each conference for the most current information or join the organization’s mailing list. Websites for the international conferences listed below sometimes change from year to year and may be out of date past 2020. Social work faculty have collaboratively created a list of conferences from 2019-2021 that may also be of assistance.

Types of conference presentations

Academic conferences use a few different presentation types to direct the interaction of participants and speakers. Some are more formal, like oral presentations. Others are more interactive, like workshops and roundtable presentations. Generally, most MSW students will choose to present a poster, though I have seen engaging and impactful student presentations of all types.

An oral presentation is probably what you think of when you think of a conference presentation. A person at the front of a room with some slides, talking about the results of a study. It is very similar to the presentations you would give inside of a classroom. Your university or social work department likely has a PowerPoint template they would like you to use when presenting at a conference. Doing so allows others to see where your work is from and allows your department and university to brand the research presented at conferences.

When preparing an oral presentation, it is very important to get details well in advance about the expected length of your presentation, and whether any visual aids such as video or slideshows are expected by your audience. At conferences, the typical oral presentation is usually expected to last between 20 to 40 minutes, though it will vary by conference. While this may sound like a tortuously lengthy amount of time, you’ll be amazed by how easily time can fly the first time you present formally.

Researchers, myself included, can get so caught up explaining minute details that we don’t have enough time to thoroughly address the key conclusions of the study. One stumbling block in oral presentations of research work is spending too much time on the literature review. Keep in mind that with limited time, audience members will be more interested in hearing about your original work than a long list of previous studies to introduce your own research. While in scholarly written reports you must discuss the studies that have come before yours, in a presentation of your work, the key is to use what precious time you have to highlight your findings. Whatever you do in your oral presentation, do not read your paper verbatim. Nothing will bore an audience more quickly. Highlight only the key points of your study. These generally include your research question, your methodological approach, your major findings, and a few final takeaway messages. To avoid this all-too-common occurrence, it is crucial that you repeatedly practice your presentation in advance—and time yourself.

This advice is also true for workshops. Workshops are interactive, hands-on presentations which teach the audience members new skills, so spending too much time in the literature and not on practical tools would be inappropriate. Often, workshops are structured to allow audience members to role-play with a new resource or to conduct group discussions or projects, modeling what would happen in a practice situation. Workshops are a good idea for student projects whose implications can be put into practice by educators or students. They also require careful planning insofar as selecting activities with which to engage your audience.

In less formal roundtable presentations of your work, the aim is usually to help stimulate a conversation about a topic. You’ll be expected to structure the conversation by providing discussion questions, background information, or practice examples. Roundtables are unlikely to use slideshows, but handouts are often used by presenters. Roundtables can be especially useful when your research is in an early stage of development. Perhaps you’ve conducted a pilot study and you’d like to talk through some of your findings and get some ideas about where to take the study next. A roundtable is an excellent place to get suggestions and to also get a preview of the objections reviewers may raise with respect to your conclusions or your approach. Roundtables are also suitable places to network and meet other scholars who share a common interest with you.

Panel presentations are also discussion-based but are more formal than roundtables. Panels are usually composed of experts on an issue. Each will give a brief statement of their expertise and opinion about a topic and participate in a conversation based on statements or prepared discussion questions. Panels often leave more time for audience engagement. Panelists often create an outline of key talking points to use and engage with the work of their fellow panelists, who often come from different perspectives or participate in projects related to the same topic.

Finally, in a poster presentation, you visually present your work. Just as you wouldn’t read a paper verbatim in a formal presentation, avoid at all costs printing and pasting your paper onto a poster board. Instead, think about how to tell the “story” of your work in graphs, charts, tables, and other images. Bulleted points are also fine, as long as the poster isn’t so wordy that it would be difficult for someone walking by very slowly to grasp your major argument and findings. Your university of social work department likely has a template they wish for you to use for poster presentations, so consult with your professor. Most poster presentations are e-posters, and you will stand in front of a television screen with up to three very large powerpoint slides you can cycle back and forth between. Poster presentations are generally scheduled simultaneously, and people will spend time moving from poster to poster during each session. Some conferences still use paper posters. If this is the case at the conference you plan to attend, consult with your university’s printing office or a local printing shop for assistance with printing large-format color posters. Posters are generally between three and five feet in width and height.

Posters, like roundtables, can be quite helpful at the early stages of a research project because they are designed to encourage the audience to engage you in conversation about your research. Don’t feel that you must share every detail of your work in a poster; the point is to share highlights and then converse with your audience to get their feedback, hear their questions, and provide additional details about your research.

Submitting a proposal

Depending on the conference, there may be a specific call for proposals (CFP) for students or only one CFP for both students and non-student researchers . If your research project was completed in collaboration with other researchers, be sure to reach out to them before you submit. It is best to have as many research team members present for a presentation as possible, but it may not be practical for all team members to join. Conference proposals and presentations should be included in the planned workflow of any project, and submissions should be approved by all relevant team members.

Conferences also vary in their requirements for submission, with some requiring only a few hundred words while others require a few pages of text. Usually, a research proposal can be easily adapted into a conference proposal with some minor tweaks. Be sure to follow the guidelines set out in the call for proposals, as reviewers will penalize you for straying outside of them. Proposal submissions are usually handled through an online submission system, and it is a good idea to write your proposal drafts in an external document and copy and paste them into the submission system. This way, you can use the spelling and grammar checking in your Word processor and the commenting and track changes feature in collaboration with any other research team members.

Submitting to a conference usually requires the author to indicate that they are planning to attend the conference. Presenters will have to pay a registration fee and often a membership fee to the association sponsoring the conference in order to present their work. Conferences often offer discounted student rates, and many further discount registration and membership fees for students who volunteer at the conference. Registration fees are cost barriers for students and faculty, though the money from conferences provides funding for important professional organizations.

To cover these expenses, ask your professor about grant opportunities within the university, community, or with professional organizations that support graduate student research dissemination. Unfortunately, with grant funds comes the complicated process of travel and reimbursement policies from universities. Many universities have contracts with travel agencies or restrictions on lodging, transportation, and other costs commonly incurred during conference travel. These requirements can be a pain and may require you to pay up front for various costs and get reimbursed by the institution, which is not possible for many students who are already economically strained from tuition and fees. These further perpetuate a cycle in which conferences privilege the knowledge of the well-off and well-positioned. I encourage you to pursue these supports for your research regardless, as there are ways to minimize the impact of these inequitable barriers. But it is important to be up front about them.

Writing a journal article

Presentations at academic conferences are a good outlet for student projects. Not only are you exposed to a wide range of other research from students, faculty, and researchers in the field, but presentations are relatively easy to get accepted in comparison to journal articles. Journals are more restrictive about what they will publish, as they have limited space for articles in the issues they publish each year. However, that should not stop you from submitting! One of the best experiences I had in my MSW program was submitting my thesis work as a journal article, which was a requirement to graduate. Even though my submission was ultimately given a “revise and resubmit” response from the reviewers, preparing a journal article felt different than preparing a paper for class. Everything felt more “real,” like the paper would be read by more than just my professors.

If writing a journal article sounds like a lot of work, you would be correct. I do have some good news, though. As part of your research methods course, you have completed about 40% of your article already! Empirical journal articles, as we discussed in Chapter 3, have five sections—Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. Your research proposal covers the first two sections, the introduction and methods. While you will need to change the tense of your methods section from what you will do in your study to what you did do in your study, the majority of the content in your proposal can stay the same. Using the advice in Chapter 16 and Chapter 21, you should be able to write a coherent results section, though you may need to consult additional sources to cover more advanced data analysis techniques. All that is left is to contextualize your findings in the literature for your discussion section and discuss the key conclusions and implications of your study.

It is beyond the scope of this textbook to provide you a detailed guide to writing an academic journal article. There are number of books and guides available for help, though I haven’t found any that I would recommend over others. Wendy Belcher, author of Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, offers her worksheets for writing a journal article for free on her website.

Instead of reviewing the steps of writing a journal article, let’s focus on identifying the right journal to submit to. The first decision you will need to make is whether to submit to a journal that is specifically dedicated to students, such as the Columbia Social Work Review, or for special calls in journals for student research. Submitting an article to one of these venues means you will be competing against other students, and unfortunately, some researchers may be reluctant to cite work found in a student-authored journal.

If, on the other hand, you want to submit your article as any other researcher would, look at journals that often publish on your topic. Perhaps you want to publish in a journal that is cited often in your references. Your article will be in competition with articles from seasoned researchers. We suggest working with a faculty mentor who can help you fine-tune your article for publication. You may also want to reach out to other scholars who publish in your topic area and ask for assistance. They may suggest additional literature you did not find or offer edits to your content to better meet the expectations of journal reviewers. Once you submit a journal article, you will either receive a rejection or a “revise and resubmit”. With the latter, the journal may accept your article if you make the suggested revisions.

As with conference presentations, if you have research collaborators, writing a journal article should be a collaborative endeavor. While you will need to find a journal that publishes in your area, note as well that journals are reluctant to publish highly similar articles. Your study should add something new to the journal’s output as well as the literature more broadly. Each journal will have specific instructions on format, citation style, length, and other considerations. Be sure to attend to each and every detail. Incorrectly constructed and submitted articles are easy to reject.

While writing a journal article may seem impractical or unnecessary, I would encourage you to reconsider that. A publication in an academic journal is an excellent highlight on your resume, particularly if you are planning to continue into doctoral study or work as a social work researcher or policy/program analyst after graduation. If you made your project something important to you, your community, and the literature on your topic, it should be worthy of publication.

Do not let impostor syndrome stand in the way of your growth as a scholar.