Review of Outreach Activities: Knowledge Diffusion and Technology Transfer - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 116

BOX 8-1
Research to Practice (r2p)

In the recent Evaluation of the Agricultural Safety Centers (2006), NIOSH staff worked
with the Agricultural Centers Evaluation team to define categories of “research to practice”
(r2p) to illustrate various methods of moving results of projects into use by others. Research
to practice was defined as research findings or products that are accepted and used by target
audiences. The eight categories that were represented were research to intervention and
education, research to research, research to field use, research to evaluation, research to aca-
deme, research to policy, research to surveillance, and research to technical assistance.
An interesting result of this study was the distribution of r2p activities. First, 71 percent,
or 94 of 133 projects, evaluated were in the r2p realm, and the 94 were classified in the
eight r2p categories:

% Research to Practice

57 R to intervention and education

13 R to research

10 R to field use

6 R to evaluation

4 R to teaching

4 R to policy

3 R to surveillance

2 R to technical assistance

99 Total

One might interpret the classification scheme broadly and combine all categories except
research to research; all the other categories involve research to some form of practice.
Uses in the field, for evaluation, for policy purposes, in the classroom, and for technical
assistance are all related to practice in different contexts. If we omit research to research,
86-87 percent of research went to practice in some form, and 13 percent was used as an
input for further research.
That approach, however, was not used in the evidence documents that were provided.
This may be a useful categorization; but no one seems to have asked the question of why
NIOSH came up with this set of categories and what NIOSH is doing with it. Is it meaningful
in some administrative way? Does it help understand the flow of knowledge from research
through other indirect routes to final use in education and intervention?

SOURCE: Buchan and Holmquist-Johnson, 2007.

beta testing was scheduled to be released in final form in 1995 (Jones et al., 1995).
This project is not mentioned in the materials provided by NIOSH. The database
described above may be the expanded phase of this dissemination activity.