Game Change: How Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships Are Redefining How We Study Crime - Plenary Panel at the 2012 NIJ Conference

Jeff Rojek, assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, discusses the various types of researcher-practitioner partnerships in law enforcement agencies in the United States as determined from a nationwide survey, as well as the facilitators and barriers for such partnerships. Tami Sullivan - Assistant Professor, Yale University School of Medicine - was involved in a study of the infrastructure that facilitates researcher-practitioner partnerships. Issues in developing researcher-practitioner partnerships are funding, the availability of the researcher, and the high overhead costs at a lot of universities. The partnership was found to be more beneficial when the planning stages included conversations about the practical aspects of transitioning research findings into agency practices. Vivien Tseng - Vice-President, Program, William T. Grant Foundation - discusses the importance of having effective strategies for ensuring the products of research are integrated into practice. This is facilitated by structuring researcher-practitioner partnerships that give priority to determining the implications of research findings for how an agency performs its work.