Research-Community Bridges Posted on March 19, 2007 Ellen Goldstein (bio) supports community-research liaisons who can help link research and practice.

Something that I think is an underrated skill or an underdeveloped role would be that of the bridge, and that's somebody who would be conversant in both direct service and academic research and who could help translate one to the other or help translate the people from one to the other.

How are they thinking over there? Or why did they just say that to me? Or how do I reach them?

And so there are an increasing number of bridges, of people who are community liaisons, research liaisons, academic coordinators. There are a variety of titles of people who link research and practice.

Anywhere where that can be supported, where people who are junior researchers who can learn more about community agencies and turn into that bi-cultural, bi-lingual person or vice-versa, people who are at community agencies, but get advanced degrees and then have an understanding of how the research works and why does something have to be done in a particular way?

I'm a big advocate of creating the bi-cultural field of bridges.

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