Practice-Based Research in Speech-Language Pathology
Abstract
Practice-based research is an active and collaborative approach to clinical research that minimizes the research-practice gap. Practice-based research involves collecting data in practice to answer questions that arise from clinical practice. The findings from this research then inform future practices. Though over the past two decades there has been a significant increase in knowledge translation activities, especially the use of collaborative partnerships, the integration of these practices in speech-language pathology is in its infancy. In this thesis, I investigate the role of practice-based research in speech-language pathology. In Chapter 2, I first examine the current role of practice-based research in speech-language pathology through a scoping review. I present a practice-based research Co-Creation Model that characterizes the outcomes of partnerships, and I present the results of the scoping review. The Co-Creation Model outlines capturing practice, changing practice, and creating practice as three potential outcomes of these partnerships. In Chapter 3, I employ two aspects of the model, first capturing practice and then changing practice. In this chapter, I report on a practice-based research partnership between researchers and speech-language pathologists at a school board in Ontario. The clinicians at this school board designed a language and literacy tool and they were interested in determining the effectiveness of the tool. In study 1, we capture the current use of the tool and the results of this study led to a collaborative update of the tool. In study 2, additional data was collected to determine the effectiveness of the updated tool and determine the tool’s validity against standardized measures of language. The results of this study demonstrated that the update of the tool was successful. Chapter 4 aims to understand the experiences of researchers and clinicians engaged in a partnership and draws on qualitative data collected during the practice-based study reported in Chapter 3. Insight from their experiences provided knowledge of barriers and facilitators to partnership, and factors important for partnership initiation and maintenance. Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of these 3 chapters, discusses broader implications of this work, acknowledges limitations of the current work, and outlines considerations for future work in practice-based research.