ABSTRACT
Do you remember why you first decided to make an academic career in your discipline? Was doing research that “makes a difference” one of your reasons? One way to make that happen is to form or join a collaboration with practitioners – community leaders, direct service providers and their agencies. And, we must admit that publishing is important to an academic career. To publish, you may need to have access to pertinent data, and that means working with the caretakers of those data – practitioners who maintain large archived datasets and direct service providers who collect and maintain client data. But just obtaining access to a dataset may not help you do research that is relevant to a community’s needs, although you may get a publication out of it. To design and carry out relevant, high-quality research, you must thoroughly understand the meaning of the data. Collaboration with the practitioners who care for that data is a way to make that happen. By collaborative research, we mean research conducted jointly by academic
researchers and practitioners at every stage, from developing the initial idea, through designing and carrying out the research project, to analyzing and disseminating the results. Research partnerships and action research projects are not necessarily collaborations, although they may be. Research partnerships can range from a simple agreement for the agency to provide data to the researcher to a truly collaborative project. Action research projects are likely to be collaborations, or evolve to be collaborations, because they aim to help the community respond to a problem, but they also can be a simple partnership, not a true collaboration. A true collaboration fosters an environment where the researcher and practitioner work to develop shared goals, shared research and practice standards, a research agenda, and plans for data collection and dissemination (Block et al. 1999a, b). A “collaborative culture” (Block et al. 1999b) evolves, which encourages each collaborator, regardless of background, to contribute to both the research and practice aspects of the project. Each member of the group learns from and teaches others. All four of us have worked for many years, in our individual careers, to
develop and sustain research collaborations between academic researchers and practitioners. We have also been part of the growing Collaboration Working Group, a network of people who share their experiences and try to help each
other develop and sustain truly collaborative research projects. In their network discussions and in the Collaboration Workshop that they have organized for four years at the American Society of Criminology meetings, the eighty Working Group members have accumulated a wealth of information.1 As a group, the Collaboration Working Group has learned a lot about paths to successful collaborations, challenges, and barriers that can threaten collaboration, and roads to meeting those challenges and sustaining the collaboration. In this chapter, we hope to sum up that experience for you, to help you enter and negotiate the world of collaborative research.
