10 Sharing Research Knowledge
Paula Roberts
Colin Macduff
Tim Smale
Helena Priest
Introduction
This chapter focuses on research implementation and dissemination strategies. Firstly, it discusses the need to consider the limitations of your work as well as its strengths, and ways to summarize and conclude written reports. It then considers ways to implement evidence based practice and empirical research results in practical contexts, from a book review to a journal article. Finally, it provides suggestions for writing abstracts, presenting research at conferences, and liaising with publishers and the academic press, in order to disseminate the results of good quality empirical studies.
Preparing to disseminate your work: Considering limitations
Even with thorough planning and attention to detail, no research study is perfect, and whether you have undertaken a large multi-site or small-scale study, it is important to acknowledge the study’s limitations before you plan to disseminate it. Valid and reliable small-scale studies have a very important part to play in the contribution of knowledge and understanding in your field. However, not all studies are generalizable to other settings and this should be made explicit. Small-scale studies are limited by relatively small sample sizes and sometimes by elite bias (where participants are selected by purposive sampling or by using key informants). Although the selection of well informed and articulate respondents can generate rich data, samples may be unrepresentative due to potential subjectivity during the process of selection (Black, 1999). Similarly, with snowball sampling, often used in qualitative interviews, the representativeness of respondents cannot be established within the wider population. Consequently, the findings cannot be generalized per se.
Additionally, whilst you may have had a good sample size from your population, a study will have limited generalizability if you have only used one study site or organization. This must be acknowledged by stating, for example, that ‘whilst useful insights have been gained, findings from this study cannot be generalized to other organizations’.
If you have conducted your own empirical study, you should make the limitations of the study explicit in your research report, presentations or any publications arising from the study.
The limitations will depend upon several factors relating to the design of the study, its resources, scope, depth and timeframe. It is important to be honest in detailing a study’s limitations. You do this through your own assessment and critique of your study. Areas you may need to consider include:
- Literature search and review: Was your literature review sufficiently comprehensive to conclude that your research was necessary? How was your literature review delineated? Did you limit your review to UK/American literature? If so, why? What was the scope of your enquiry? What search engines did you use? Are you confident that your search strategy generated sufficient literature?
- Theoretical orientation of the study: Has your appraisal of the literature given you a sufficiently robust theoretical foundation upon which to structure your exploratory study, or from which to develop valid theoretical constructs?
- Did you ensure that you had the appropriate ethical/R & D approval for your study?
- Have you ensured anonymity for participants and organizations involved in your study?
- Was your study designed to generate sufficient data to obtain reliable results? For example, if you undertook focus group interviews, did you continue conducting focus groups until saturation occurred in the data; that is until the same ideas were being generated and there was repetition in the type of data being proffered? If you were developing measurement scales, were your theoretical item constructs based on a sufficiently large sample of respondents? Did you pilot your instruments? Were your measurement scales tested on sufficiently large samples to claim reliability? What measures have you taken to minimize bias in the sample? (For example, did you exclude pilot participants from your main study?) If you conducted a survey, what measures did you take to improve response rates and reduce non-response bias? (For example, did you use methods whereby results from later respondents (after reminders) are compared to those of early respondents?) Was your sampling strategy and frame sufficiently robust for the subsequent methodology and to generate valid and reliable results?
- Were your methods of data analysis rigorous? Did you undertake respondent validation and inter-coder reliability checks?
- Have you considered your own impact upon the data collection and analysis? Were you an integral part of the research team? Might your own interpretation of findings have had a bearing on the validity of results? Being a researcher within your own professional field has advantages and disadvantages, in that whilst you will have professional insight in your chosen field, and thereby will be able to authenticate responses and findings intuitively, your familiarity within your working context may obscure issues and ambiguities that others from outside the field may be prompted to question;
- Are your findings valid and reliable? Can you have confidence in presenting your data? Can you defend your research design and results? Can your results be generalized beyond your study? If so, what is the scope of generalizabilty?
While it is important to discuss the study’s limitations, you should also discuss what can be gained from your study (however small, and whatever its limitations). In other words, you should try not to be too negative, otherwise readers may not appreciate the value of your work. Include a summary of the useful insights that have been gained whilst undertaking the study, which may be helpful for others in similar settings.
For example, you could report ‘whilst this was a small-scale study undertaken in one healthcare setting and, therefore, results cannot be generalized to other settings, nonetheless some useful insights can be gained from the study, which may be helpful in other contexts’ (and then discuss them). You should then summarize your study, detailing what the study can, and cannot, claim to offer.
In the same way, if you are reading and reporting on a research paper, you must consider the strengths and limitations of the study as you go through it. A good paper will have a section on limitations towards the end of the paper.
Summarizing your work and making recommendations
It is very important to summarize the findings of your study and to make explicit its main recommendations. Your readers will want this information in a succinct form, so that they can readily see where they could use the findings in the development of their own practice or organization. They will want to know not only that they can rely on the findings of the study, but also that your recommendations are based on sound interpretation of the results. In some forms of report, an executive summary is presented first; this summarizes the key aims, objectives, questions, methods, findings, implications and recommendations. In other forms of paper, an abstract precedes the paper itself; it is normally a paragraph of 200–300 words summarizing these same areas. Some journals require that the abstract is presented in a structured format using key subheadings, such as ‘method’, ‘conclusion’, ‘recommendations’, or ‘application to practice’; journal author guidelines available from the journal’s web site will indicate the required format for the abstract. Some journals also require a list of key words that will be indexed by the publication and will then facilitate literature searching (Chapter 4).
In summarizing your research, you need to bear in mind the audience; are you summarizing the findings for a research report, a poster, a seminar or conference paper, a published paper or your research thesis? It is useful at this point to refer back to the aims of your study, in order to frame the recommendations.
Disseminating evidence in your workplace
If you have undertaken a literature review as part of your studies, or are in the process of conducting an empirical study, you could offer to disseminate your ideas and findings to your local colleagues. You are now in an ideal position to influence good practice, and see the results of changes in practice. There are several ways in which you could do this: offer to host a lunchtime seminar for your clinical colleagues; incorporate your findings into clinical teaching; offer to give a presentation at the local research seminar series at your local university; or produce a summary paper for your clinical area’s resource file.
Seminars
A good place to start sharing your work and ideas with others is by presenting at a local seminar or journal club relevant to your professional speciality. This does not need to be about research you’ve undertaken; it can be presenting developments in your clinical field, evidence based practice, or a topic you have investigated for a project. Many healthcare and educational providers host regular seminar programmes or journal clubs. To find out where these are being held, check web sites or contact the seminar organizer at your local NHS Trust or the relevant faculty/school at your local university. Write to the organizer with a 500 word abstract detailing your work, and offer to do a 15 minute presentation with 15 minutes for questions. Many seminar or journal club organizers will welcome such an offer.
Once you have booked a slot on the seminar series or journal club, then prepare your presentation. A good presentation should be clear, succinct and visually attractive, with accompanying handouts of the presentation.
Use a proprietary presentation package, such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint, and prepare the slides. It’s important to familiarize yourself with the presentation package at this stage. It will guide you in how to create a new presentation, apply a range of attractive templates, graphics and annotations to your slides, and help you time your presentation. By using the ‘notes’ function, you can prepare more detailed notes on each slide to guide your talk, or to distribute as handouts. Once you are happy with your presentation, save it on a data stick to take with you to the seminar venue, and arrange with the organizer to e-mail your slides and notes files in advance of the presentation for pre-loading onto their equipment.
Action Point
Write a 500 word abstract on a topic of interest, such as an update in evidence based practice in your field or a topic you have investigated for a project.
Forward it to your local seminar organizer for consideration for the next seminar series.
Conference presentations
Having gained some experience in giving papers at local seminar programmes, it is time to start disseminating more widely. There are many regional, national and international conferences to target. The professional journals and their web sites list forthcoming conferences. Each discipline/speciality usually has a special interest section with its own conference area. Additionally, there are many generic and interprofessional practice, education and research conferences to target. Conferences usually call for abstracts well in advance of the conference dates, so look out for calls for abstracts on web sites and in professional journals and flyers. Note the special requirements of the particular conference in relation to the sort of paper are you aiming to submit.
Action Point
Go to one of the web sites below, as relevant to your field, and browse its forthcoming conferences section. Have a look at the section ‘Call for Abstracts’, and the requirements. Conferences usually have a range of ways to contribute; for example, you can choose to submit a poster presentation or a paper for a concurrent session or symposium:
Healthcare Conferences: http://www.healthcare-events.co.uk/
Royal College of Nursing: www.rcn.org.uk
Nurse Education: http://www.netnep-conference.elsevier.com/
Royal College of Midwives: http://www.rcm.org.uk/college/resources/events/
Medical and health-related conferences: http://www.gmc-uk.org/links.asp#doctors
Medical Education conferences: Association for the Study of Medical Education: www.asme.org.uk
British Psychological Society: http://www.bps.org.uk/
Chartered Society of Physiotherapy: www.csp.org.uk
Association of Operating Department Practitioners: http://www.aodp.org/
National Prescribing Centre: www.npc.co.uk/events
Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain: http://www.rpsgb.org/worldofpharmacy/events/
British Dental Association: http://www.bda.org/education/
Doctoral colloquiums
If you are a doctoral student (undertaking Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD) or Professional Doctorate), an extremely useful way of gaining academic and professional feedback on your work is to submit an abstract to present a paper at a doctoral colloquium. These are often attached to conferences and offer doctoral students the opportunity to present their work in a safe and supportive environment in which feedback is encouraged from the audience of peers and academic/professional colleagues. Doctoral colloquiums can often help with viva voce examination preparation and in developing the skills of defending your work with wider audiences.
Working papers
Presentations on working papers focus on work in progress; for example, presentations on pilot studies or the first section of a longer research study that you might present more fully once subsequent stages of the research have been conducted.
Concurrent papers
This means that several similar but individual papers are clustered for presentation within a theme, and several theme tracks are being hosted concurrently. Delegates at large conferences then select the presentations they wish to attend. You can usually expect up to 30 delegates at your presentation (occasionally many more if it’s a popular topic).
Symposia
These are several individual themed papers, developed together around a particular topic. The sessions are usually pre-linked by group members coordinating their development and scheduling the various papers within the topic area. The abstracts and group of papers are then submitted together as a symposium presentation of three to five related papers.
Poster presentations
You may choose to submit your work as a poster presentation, or sometimes when you submit an abstract to present a paper, you are offered a poster presentation instead. This is often because the review committee feels your work would be best disseminated visually at the conference. Poster presentations offer the opportunity to develop your artistic and writing skills, and are a very useful way to disseminate your work, as you can discuss your work with delegates in a relaxed and informal way. Some conferences offer the opportunity to have a short presentation of posters, for example three minutes and one conference slide prior to the hosting of posters. You will be expected to register at the conference and to be available with your poster to discuss your work and answer questions.
Producing a poster
If you are offered a poster presentation, before you start to produce it check the required size, that is, will the board it is to be displayed on be portrait (vertical appearance) or landscape (horizontal appearance), so you can produce the poster accordingly. It is also a good idea to check if you are required to include information such as your institution’s logo. When you have obtained the information about the size of your poster, you will need to check with your reprographics unit or local printer that they will be able to produce this size, and what margins you need to set around the border of your poster (these must then be set in the page properties of the program you are using).
Although there are many programs you can use to create a poster, the two most commonly used are Microsoft Office Publisher and Microsoft Office PowerPoint. These two applications allow you to create free floating text boxes and insert pictures with ease. Posters can also be created effectively using Microsoft Word. We will focus on producing posters with MS Publisher, available to use in many university libraries or purchase from Microsoft http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/publisher/default.aspx. Packages are sometimes available for free download from Microsoft for a limited period.
When you are ready to start putting your poster together, you need to create a new document (File, New …). It is good practice to set the page properties (via the File, Page Setup menu) equal to the size required in the final poster. This is so that when you come to print the final poster you will reduce the risk of having pixelated images and diagrams. Pixelation is where an image is increased in size to the point where the individual pixels are visible and the image is therefore distorted.
Putting a poster together might sound like a difficult task and that it requires skill in graphical design, but it really does not. With MS Publisher, creating a poster is simple and fast. To produce a simple, but effective poster, you might only need to use two tools:
‘Insert, Text Box’ and ‘Insert, Picture, From File …’
A Text Box is a free floating area where you can produce the textual content of your poster. This box can be resized/shaped and moved around on the page (by clicking on it with your computer mouse and dragging the box) until you are happy with its location. All text boxes are independent of each other and can be formatted differently, although the use of too many different formats is not recommended, as it will not give a uniform look to your poster. You can add as many text boxes as you need. Similar features are available on MS Word.
Inserted pictures (images) can be treated in a similar way to Text Boxes in that they can be resized and moved around the page. A point of caution is that when you resize a photo you should ensure sure that you do not stretch the image in only one direction. This will distort the image and could affect the resolution (clarity). This can be prevented by right clicking on the image with your mouse, then selecting ‘Format Picture …’ In the new menu, you need to select the Size heading and select the ‘Lock aspect ratio’ option. This will prevent the image becoming distorted. Microsoft Publisher has some useful inbuilt functions to help you edit your images, but if you have an image editing program (such as Adobe Photoshop) you may produce better results.
If you do not have an image editing program, all the tools required to edit your image can be found in MS Publisher on the ‘Picture’ toolbar. A similar toolbar is available in MS Word by selecting ‘view/toolbars/picture’.
