The RUSH Project's Summer 2007 Survey of NIDRR Grantees

During the summer of 2007, the Research Utilization Support and Help (RUSH) project administered an online survey to 151 NIDRR grantees. The sample design targeted researchers who were Principal Investigators (PIs) of Employment Outcome, Health and Function, and Participation and Community Living projects, and/or of Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers (RRTCs), Rehabilitation Engineering and Research Centers (RERCs) and the RUSH Research Utilization Awards (RUAs). The response rate was 75% (N=113).

RUSH asked respondents to report on the research utilization activities of one of their projects, and estimates of budgetary commitments related to those efforts. The survey also collected data regarding projects' targeted audiences and outcomes, and methods of measuring those outcomes. Respondents estimated their own capability to disseminate, readiness levels for research utilization, and the degree to which they believed that their project's work was appropriate for target audience use.

This "Update" presents an overview of survey results regarding what audiences NIDRR grantees target, what outcomes they hope to produce among these groups, and what strategies they are using to accomplish those goals. Future updates will present other excerpts from these data, including results specific to the particular NIDRR priority areas included in the sample.

What Audiences do NIDRR Grantees Target?

RUSH asked NIDRR grantees to identify the top three audiences they target for research dissemination and utilization. The list was drawn from NIDRR's Annual Performance Report (APR). As seen in the table below, the most commonly targeted audiences are other researchers, practitioners/clinicians, and people with disabilities and their family members. Another audience many NIDRR grantees (41.6%, n=47/113) consider a main audience are service providers. Fewer than 15% of grantees included the following audiences in their list of the top three targeted audiences: consumer advocates, educators, policy experts, federal and non-federal agencies, industry representatives/product developers, state or local governments, employers or the media.

Table 1: NIDRR Grantees' Target Audiences

Most grantees who work in the areas of Technology for Access and Function were not included in this sample, and neither were any of the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Centers (DBTACs) or Utilization Projects; had they been surveyed, this ranking would likely look quite different. The survey data pertain primarily to the research projects NIDRR funds, not to the universe of NIDRR projects.

What Outcomes do NIDRR Grantees Target?

To identify which outcomes NIDRR grantees' dissemination and research utilization activities were designed to target, the survey presented grantees with a list of possible immediate and intermediate outcomes. The former, such as changes in knowledge, awareness and attitude, pertain primarily to changes in cognition, while the rest of the list related more to changes in policies, programs and practice, whether individual or collective.

Table 2: Outcomes NIDRR Grantees Target for Change

Most grantees targeted the more feasible shorter-term goals of changing levels of knowledge and awareness, though interestingly, more grantees cited changing practice than attitudes as their goal. As Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald (2002) argue regarding race and gender, and Burdein, Lodge, & Taber (2006) for political beliefs, attitudes can be rooted in unconscious beliefs that do not change despite new knowledge and awareness of contradicting facts. NIDRR grantees working in the employment outcomes area of disability and rehabilitation research have also found that attitudes can be quite intransigent (Gilbride et al., 2000 and Hernandez, Keys, & Balcazar, 2000).

What Strategies do NIDRR Grantees Use for
Dissemination and Research Utilization?

The survey listed 22 dissemination and research utilization strategies, including 9 ways to disseminate written products of various formats, 6 kinds of face-to-face interactions, and 7 methods of outreach that relied more heavily on technology, such as webcasts or distance learning modules.

Table 3: "Top 10" Reported Strategies for Dissemination and Research Utilization

Commonly, activities rely heavily on text, though those italicized less so. Most of the activity reported seems designed to meet the need of researchers, who comprise the primary audience NIDRR grantees identified on the survey. It is debatable, however, whether these types of strategies meet the communicative needs and preferences of the other audiences grantees cited as important targets: clinicians/practitioners and people with disabilities and their families.

In the comments fields, when grantees brought up barriers to doing more outreach, they most often described strong technological expertise as a desired skill that either they themselves or their staff lacked. One survey question addressed barriers to dissemination and research utilization directly; the top reasons given for not doing more of it were lack of funding and time. The chart below depicts across most of the funding mechanisms included in the survey what NIDRR grantees estimated were their budgetary commitments for the given project on which they were reporting, for the entire funding cycle. It breaks out these data by funding mechanism, since budget amounts and the mission associated with each vary in ways pertinent to the likely emphasis on dissemination and research utilization. For example, since all RRTCs must do training, unsurprisingly, they devote more budget to activities related to the survey.

Table 4: Estimates of Budgetary Commitments to
Dissemination and Research Utilization Activities

For purposes of confidentiality, not all projects in the respondent pool are represented in the chart since some of the projects held by those who were awarded RUAs would be the only one in a given funding mechanism's cell.

Future Updates

The purpose of this Update is to make NIDRR grantees familiar with the nature of this survey's content, sample design, and general findings. Future "Updates" will offer more detail about findings for specific priority areas of NIDRR's research. It is hoped this information can be helpful in establishing some benchmarks against which future change can be assessed.

References

Burdein, I., Lodge, M., & Taber, C. (2006). Experiments on the automaticity of political beliefs and attitudes. Political Psychology, 27:3, pp. 359-371.

Gilbride, D., Stensrud, R., Ehlers, C., Evans, E., & Peterson, C. (2000). Employers' attitudes toward hiring person with disabilities and vocational rehabilitation services. Journal of Rehabilitation, 66:4, pp. 17-23.

Hernandez, B., Keys, C., & Balcazar, F. (2000). Employer attitudes toward workers with disabilities and their ADA employment rights: A literature review. Journal of Rehabilitation, 66:4, pp. 4-16.

Nosek, B.A., Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2002). Harvesting implicit group attitudes and beliefs from a demonstration web site. Group Dynamics Theory, Research and Practice 6:1, pp. 101-115.

Contact us

We encourage you to contact RUSH at 1-800-761-7874 or 512-476-6861 or by email rush@sedl.org with any question about the content of this update or research utilization in general.