Estimating the Impact of Research Practitioner Partnerships on evidence-based Program Implementation*

Abstract

Evidence-based program implementation in criminal justice and community settings is complex and rarely encounters an ideal set of conditions. Implementation failure may be more common than success, and the field has only started to seriously consider how to improve dissemination and implementation. Research-practitioner partnerships are a potential mechanism for achieving implementation success. Using an implementation science framework, we examine the impact of researcher involvement and activity on implementation outcomes in a sample of 49 community-based multi-agency initiatives to improve public safety. Our findings suggest that projects focused more heavily on data and analysis from the outset achieved better implementation outcomes across multiple domains, including fidelity, penetration and dosage, complexity, execution, and sustainability. Similar improvements in outcomes were not associated with more robust data collection, access, or analytic capacity.

Keywords:

• Implementation science
• evaluation
• community crime reduction
• research partner

Acknowledgements

The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Two of the three programs were funded under a joint National Institute of Justice/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention solicitation.

2 See, for a longer discussion, Klofas, Hipple, and McGarrell (2010b).

3 https://bja.ojp.gov/program/innovationssuite/overview

4 The Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation program was renamed Innovations in Community-Based Crime Reduction (CBCR) program in 2017.

5 CBCR was formerly called the Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) Program.

6 Planning only grants were typically were small in comparison and did not have withholding conditions like the larger planning and implementation and implementation only grants.

7 For more information, see https://bja.ojp.gov/microsite-subpage/overview

8 https://vrat.psnmsu.com/

9 We could not get information on one site because the site liaison was no longer employed by the TTA provider at the time the survey was fielded.

10 We were able to obtain descriptive statistics for all 99 sites who have taken the VRAT from MSU as a part of the Innovations Suite program participation. These statistics have not been published elsewhere.

11 It should be noted that these are also the models that are adequately powered to detect medium effect sizes whereas the other only have sufficient power to identify large effect sizes.

12 The p-values for the analyses were calculated without adjustments for multiple tests. Using a post-hoc correction, results for the correlation between ‘reporting’ and ‘fidelity: relationship focus’ loses significance.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Award No. 2016-BJ-BX-K069, granted by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice.

Notes on contributors

Jessica Saunders

Jessica Saunders is the Research Director at The Council of State Governments Justice Center and an Adjunct Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her research focuses on evidence-based policy, racial disparities, and program evaluation.

Natalie Kroovand Hipple

Natalie Kroovand Hipple is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. Her research interests include gun violence, police partnerships and problem-solving, police line-of-duty deaths, and restorative justice. Her current work focuses on nonfatal shootings and crime-reduction strategy implementation.

Kayla Allison

Kayla Allison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at the University of Arkansas. Her research focuses on social networks, the intersection of gender, race, class, and crime, child maltreatment, and bias crime.

Jessica Peterson

Jessica Peterson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University and an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska Kearney. Her research focuses on policing, juvenile law and policy, and rural communities and crime.