Maple, Myfanwy

2013

As a researcher, my job is to provide the most robust and rigorous results of the finest quality research I can undertake with the skill and funds I have and present these to the academy. This is how knowledge is built, right? Yes. Challenging? Yes. Infallible? No. In Australia, as in other countries such as the United States, the push for translational research grows with each passing day. Research for research's sake is no longer enough for funding bodies. Rather, the requirement to demonstrate how the proposed research will inform practice is at the front and center of every research grant I write. How will my research translate into practice on the ground? How will service providers access this knowledge? More importantly, how will I access their knowledge to inform my research? As time has passed in my career I have made more and more connections into the practice field - primarily through commissioned evaluations and my social work teaching and scholarship activities. I have also been drawn toward the "evidence" from the practice community. The often untapped, practice-based evidence appeals more and more to me. In this short article, I want to explore some of the issues, challenges, and rewards of engaging with local services, with the hope of sparking interest in this neglected research arena. My published work is most often in the suicide bereavement/postvention field, yet my evaluation consultancies have more often than not been in the field of service provision to indigenous groups in the broader mental health sector, which is the field in which I worked prior to academia. I view this as "upstream" service provision. That is, the services offered to people who are at highest risk of suicide, and whose families and friends will be the ones subsequently informing my research in the future (e.g., the services provided to young indigenous people in a local regional town, the housing services offered to indigenous peoples throughout the regional in which I live and work). Such services are the ones that I evaluate. The family members of these people are those at most risk of becoming future participants in suicide postvention services.

American Association of Suicidology Newslink, 2013(Spring), p. 28-29

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/12413

en

American Association of Suicidology

Evidence-Based Practice/Practice-Based Evidence: Which Came First - The Chicken or the Egg?

Journal Article

Publication