How do you translate research into practice?

Many highly skilled researchers – able to develop, implement, and evaluate cutting-edge interventions – often fall short on the last, and most important, stage of the process: translating their research into practice.

Much of the problem is that the people who develop and evaluate interventions are usually academics, and academia is primarily concerned with generating new knowledge. Translating interventions into the messy world of government bureaucracies, public health departments, and social service agencies, as well as dealing with political and funding challenges, has never been the focus of academic work.

With medication and medical devices there exists a machinery – drug companies and medical device suppliers – to translate research findings into practice, including convincing doctors to prescribe them, patients to take them, and insurance companies to pay for them. No comparable machinery exists for behavioral or structural interventions (e.g., changes to the physical environment, changes to the law). Political leaders, public health and social service practitioners and advocates do not typically read research journals, and when they do they are often unsure how to translate projects that were conducted in a research setting into practice.

This gap between knowledge generation and program adoption must be bridged if we are to take full advantage of newly developed interventions. There are a number of steps that researchers can take to make translation of their work easier:

• Design interventions that are translatable.

• Articulate the benefits of the intervention in terms people will understand and be motivated by.

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