What types of evidence do you work with most often (medical, business research, statistics, social science, etc.)?
“Social science and business research.” What is your involvement with evidence: applying it, advocating its use, researching/developing it, synthesizing/explaining/translating it, communicating it? “All of the above. In my teaching I try and instill an understanding for the value of evidence and some basic around how to collect it. I’ll admit it’s one of the toughest issues to convey in a general management class – but it’s also an opportunity to demonstrate how different business courses give you different approaches for collecting and evaluating evidence. “My colleagues and I do research based on social science techniques. The underlying effort and care is sometimes a surprise to our enterprise collaborators. I recall a pharma company being taken aback that we needed contact with hundreds of teams to effectively answer a particular question. Yes, it would have been a lot of work, but so was the resulting value and quality of the answer. Unfortunately the project wasn’t being driven a
“I am lucky to have the opportunity to work and learn from national leaders in practice-based research networks (PBRN). According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), PBRNs are based in primary care, and have been around for more than twenty years. PBRNs involve community-based clinicians and staff in specific activities designed to understand and improve primary care. ‘The best PBRN efforts link relevant clinical questions with rigorous research methods in community settings to produce scientific information that is externally valid, and, in theory, assimilated more easily into everyday practice.’ I love practice-based data – collected at the place where the ‘magic is happening’ – where it is difficult to control for all conditions and where you can really study, in a focused manner, the whole person.” What is your involvement with evidence: applying it, advocating its use, researching/developing it, synthesizing/explaining/translating it, communicating it? “I am
Business and social science research, quantitative, qualitative, meta-analyses, etc. Depends on what the issue or the problem requires. What is your involvement with evidence: applying it, advocating its use, researching/developing it, synthesizing/explaining/translating it, communicating it? I try to do all of the above. Applying in my own life as I teach from an evidence-based perspective, consult and advise based on evidence from science as well as facts of the organizational setting itself. Research is still my great love, but if it is seldom used, even the most wonderful research has less value than it would otherwise. I now do more work trying to integrate different literatures – to understand what the core findings are, and am writing more translation pieces. The latter is the absolute hardest, as writing for colleagues is more of an in-group language, and plain English is not my forte….but I am working on it! Where do you go looking for evidence, and what types of sources do
