Research Highlights for Families

One of the goals of this blog is to summarize and disseminate useful information from early childhood research to families.  It seems to me that there are two ways in which we could approach this task.

First, we could summarize the findings of individual research studies.  The Beach Center has been doing this sort of summarizing of its own research for some time in the form of PDF "research highlights."  For example, we created a research highlight of a published article on Participatory Action Research by Turnbull, A.P., Friesen, B.J., & Ramirez, C. (1998).

Of course, we have only consistantly used the research highlight approach with our own work and doing so with the work of others as well might be very time consuming. This is what makes the second approach so important.

Second, we could synthesize the literature reporting studies in a topic area and summarize what the research says and does not say about the topic.  While the Beach Center has never previously focused on a synthesis approach (instead conducting its own independent studies), we have conducted some syntheses and created research highlights when we publish those studies.  For example, we created a research highlight for a study on the Impact of Deafness on Quality of Life by Jackson, C. W., & Turnbull, A. (2004).

Synthesis of research not only provides a very important service to the research community by consolidating research into a form that clarifies what future studies are needed, it also makes it easier to give families the bottom line of what we know and don't know.

This blog will be central to our future dissemination efforts and will take both approaches (at least for now).  We will begin by posting links in the blog to some of the research highlights related to early childhood that already exist in the Beach Center resource library, such as the ones above.  Afterall, we don't want to leave our past successes behind in our pursuit of the future.   We will also begin discussions in our CoP about the form of these summaries and how they should interrelate with our other goal for knowledge translation and this blog--the insight and widom of families and professionals.  But that's another blog post.