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What Makes Research Useful for Public School Educators?

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Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this study, we explored the extent to which educators discuss and prioritize Rogers’ (Diffusion of innovations, The Free Press: New York, 1995) five attributes of innovations—relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, observability, and trialability—in the context of research use. Using a directed content analysis of 54 semi-structured interviews and exemplar quotes, we describe how educators mentioned compatibility most frequently, but also commonly invoked observability and complexity in their discussions of research use. Our results also revealed key differences between educators in executive and non-executive roles. We discuss the implications of our findings for closing the research-practice gap in school-based mental health services and psychosocial interventions.

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Notes

  1. County names are pseudonyms to protect the confidentiality of study participants.

  2. Because this method of calculating reliability could potentially result in high scores even if coders identified different segments for each code in an interview, we also calculated coder reliability by segment-code pairs. Over all of the segment-code pairs in our study, our coders demonstrated high inter-rater reliability (κ= 0.87). This suggests that coders were consistently coding attributes in the same segments.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by Officer’s Research Award (#182241) and a Use of Research Evidence Award (#183010) from the William T. Grant Foundation. Additional support for this research also came from an R21 research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (#1R21MH100238-01A1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 316 Physics Rd. Rm. 127A, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Jennifer Watling Neal, Zachary P. Neal, Jennifer A. Lawlor, Kristen J. Mills & Kathryn McAlindon

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  1. Jennifer Watling Neal
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  2. Zachary P. Neal
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  3. Jennifer A. Lawlor
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Correspondence to Jennifer Watling Neal.

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Conflict of interest

All authors of this manuscript (i.e., Jennifer Watling Neal, Zachary P. Neal, Jennifer A. Lawlor, Kristen J. Mills, and Kathryn McAlindon) declare that they have no conflicts of interest. This research was approved by Michigan State University’s IRB (#x12-1011e, #x14-706e, #x14-1173e).

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Interview Protocol

The full interview began with a series of questions asking the educator to describe a recent social skills program or practice that had been adopted or considered for adoption. These questions focused on how they (or their district) learned about the program, how they evaluated it for adoption, and who participated in the process. The questions in this section did not directly ask about “research” or “evidence” and the interviewer was instructed to not raise these issues.

The second part of the interview, which is the focus of this study, included the following questions about research:

figure a

The interview concluded with basic demographic questions about work history, education, and racial, ethnic, and gender identity.

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Neal, J.W., Neal, Z.P., Lawlor, J.A. et al. What Makes Research Useful for Public School Educators?. Adm Policy Ment Health 45, 432–446 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-017-0834-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10488-017-0834-x

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