Communicating quantitative research findings
Many quantitative social scientists look at important social questions, and want their research to make a difference.
·
Many students working with RDC data find employment with government agencies and need to be able to communicate research findings within the policy community.
·
SSHRC, CIHR and other agencies give increasing importance to dissemination when evaluating funding proposals.
To help our researchers communicate quantitative research findings, the RDC network now offers training workshops in knowledge translation (translating from scientific into everyday language). The pilot workshop was held at the beginning of April at the UWO RDC. It was a very positive experience for all involved, and completely fulfilled its “pilot” function; the event itself and valuable feedback from participants showed ways to improve workshop structure and content for next time. To read more about the workshop, click here.
The workshop was made possible by funding from the Population and Life Course Cluster. Our thanks to them, to UWO for hosting the workshop, to John Flanders for his excellent workshop and his feedback to participants since then, and to Zenaida Ravanera for all she did to make it happen.
This kind of training is becoming more and more essential. The communication gap between specialists and non-specialists is widening as data and methods used by quantitative researchers increase in complexity. Specialised “jargon” becomes ever-more sophisticated; data preparation and analysis consumes so much time and energy, it’s easy to lose sight of the original research question – a problem often reinforced by many top scientific journals, and therefore by the academic world in which many researchers are trying to establish their careers.