Integrating Public Impact Scholarship into Social Work Doctoral Student Education

Overview: Identifying ways to advance public impact scholarship is necessary for emerging scholars who aim to advance social justice and anti-racist social work research and practice. This workshop aims to co-create concrete multi-level recommendations for doctoral programs to build student capacity in conducting public impact scholarship.Proposal text: A defining feature of the social work profession is the centrality of affecting change to advance social justice. While social work research facilitates the development of solutions to complex social problems through scientific inquiry, scholars often fall short in sharing and translating findings that are applicable to non-academic audiences (Brekke, Ell, & Palinkas, 2007; Proctor & Rosen, 2008). Increasingly, researchers are engaging in public impact scholarship, which emphasizes intentional efforts to create social change by making findings accessible to practitioners, policy makers, community organizations, clients, and the general public (Silva et al., 2019). In social work, these efforts have included guidance for junior and senior faculty (McBride et al., 2019). However, a gap remains in doctoral education that advances students’ knowledge, skills, and involvement in public impact scholarship (Authors, In Progress). Identifying ways to advance public impact scholarship is necessary for emerging social work scholars who aim to facilitate systemic change to advance social justice and anti-racist social work research and practice.

Despite the lack of educational guidance generally, doctoral students are co-leading public impact efforts in partnership with faculty and community. We believe that public impact scholarship spans research processes, from the formation of research questions to the sharing of findings to inform social and systemic change. In addition, we believe that anti-racist and community-based research methods should guide these processes. The authors have been involved in various projects to advance public impact work and scholarship.

One example is with the SUSTAIN Center, a training and capacity building center that partners with communities disproportionately impacted by HIV. SUSTAIN is driven by values including meaningful involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS, transparency, collaboration, and racial justice. Given these values, public impact is integral to SUSTAIN’s daily work and larger vision. SUSTAIN’s public impact work includes developing interventions with communities most impacted by HIV, and sharing evaluation findings in accessible ways with intervention participants (e.g., conversations, visual reports, presentations). To advance public impact scholarship, SUSTAIN has created and implemented structures and processes to further share research findings that are often limited to peer-reviewed publications. These include webinars, strategizing with organizational leadership and staff, and infographics. Through SUSTAIN, doctoral student authors have gained training in partnering with community to design research studies and employ anti-racist strategies across research phases. SUSTAIN has also empowered doctoral student authors to envision structures and strategies for centering public impact scholarship in their independent lines of research.

While SUSTAIN is an exemplar of centering public impact work and training doctoral students in the process, there remains a need to integrate public impact training and capacity building into social work doctoral programs. As such, led by two doctoral students and a faculty mentor, this interactive workshop aims to: 1) share examples of ways in which doctoral students are co-leading public impact scholarship, and 2) co-create concrete multi-level recommendations for doctoral programs to build student capacity in conducting public impact scholarship and enhance student impact.