“That intervention just isn’t going to work for my students.”
“My school doesn’t have the time.”
“This program isn’t working like you said it would.”

In school-based research, these phrases are commonplace. Despite the careful planning put into intervention research, schools end up adopting relatively few evidence-based interventions into long-term practice. Even those interventions that are implemented frequently fail to produce promised outcomes. This phenomenon is referred to as the “research-to-practice gap”, or “implementation gap.”

This gap is the result of many factors. Often, research is conducted under idealized conditions, using a standardized, researcher-directed approach. These conditions, while ideal for research publications, do not often match actual school conditions. Thus, researchers may inadvertently fail to account for schools’ specific needs, including training support, contextual fit, and staff buy-in, creating barriers to long-term implementation.

As researchers, the solution to this problem may seem to be more research; however, it may instead be that different research is needed. Qualitative research offers one promising approach to bridging the gap between applied researchers and school-based stakeholders. Qualitative research can produce a more holistic understanding of the school context, collect meaningful data using flexible approaches, and capture rich narratives of students’ and staffs’ everyday experiences, allowing researchers to better tailor interventions to schools’ unique needs.

At the CSDE, we’ve increasingly used qualitative approaches to support the adoption of Unified Champion Schools. For example, we conducted a series of focus groups asking students with and without disabilities about their understanding of inclusive behavior. We’ve conducted interviews with students, teachers, and coaches to develop a series of extracurricular social-emotional learning (SEL) resources and conducted joint interviews with student stakeholder on inclusive youth leadership. Using these qualitative approaches, our goal is to continuously improve UCS implementation by incorporating the perspectives and needs of our stakeholders, improving both student outcomes and intervention sustainability.

By Staci Ballard, Graduate Assistant at the Center for Social Development and Education.