AUDIENCES FOR RESEARCH

There are several audiences for research: foundations and government agencies, executives and administrators who decide whether a CRI takes place in their organization, CR practitioners, and researchers who do one or more of the types of research described earlier.

Funding Agencies

Our sense is that most private foundations are less interested in supporting research than they are in supporting pilot programs, particularly if such pro­grams focus on preventing violence. Their interest in research is mainly oriented to evaluation, to answering the question does it work? Many government agen­cies have interests that are similar to those of private foundations. However, some domestic agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health, are willing to support basic and develop­mental research if the research is clearly relevant to their mission.

Internationally, as humanitarian organizations integrate CRIs into their work, the need to evaluate CRIs for the purposes of reporting the results to funders of humanitarian organizations has become a significant and challenging aspect of CR work (Church and Shouldice, 2002). For example, while funders may be accustomed to evaluations of humanitarian programs that use immediate, con­crete measures such as the number of people who participated in an initiative, a more accurate indicator of success for CRIs may be the long-term impact on the larger community. Working with funding agencies to reconcile the methods used to evaluate the short-term outcomes and long-term impacts of humanitarian- related CRIs can prove a challenging, but worthy task.

With respect to the type of evaluation research needed, we suggest that there is enough credible evidence to indicate that CRIs can have positive effects. The appropriate question now is under what conditions such effects are most likely to occur—for example, who benefits, how, as a result of par­ticipating in what type of initiative, with what type of practitioner, under what kind of circumstance? That is, the field of conflict resolution has advanced beyond the need to answer the oversimplified question of does it work? It must address the more complicated questions discussed in the section on types of research—particularly the questions related to developmental research.

Executives and Administrators

The executive and administrative audience is also concerned with the question of does it work? But depending on their organizational setting, they may have different criteria in mind in assessing the value of CRIs. A school administrator may be interested in such criteria as the incidence of violence, disciplinary prob­lems, academic achievement, social and psychological functioning of students, teacher burnout, and cooperative relations between teachers and administrators. A corporate executive may be concerned with manager effectiveness, ease and effectiveness of introducing technological change, employee turnover and absen­teeism, organizational climate, productivity, and the like.

It is fair to say that, with rare exceptions, CRI researchers and practitioners have not developed the detailed causal models that would enable them to specify and measure the mediating organizational and psychological processes linking CRIs to specific organizational or individual changes. Most executives and administrators are not much interested in causal models. However, it is impor­tant for practitioners and researchers to be aware that the criteria of CRI effec­tiveness often used by administrators—incidence of violence, academic achievement, employee productivity—are affected by many factors other than CRIs. They may, for example, be successful in increasing the social skills of stu­dents, but a sharp increase in unemployment, significant decrease in the stan­dard of living, or greater use of drugs in the students’ neighborhood may lead to deterioration of the students’ social environment rather than the improve­ment one can expect from increased social skills. The negative impact of such deterioration may counteract the positive impact of CRIs.

One would expect executives and administrators to be interested in knowing not only whether CRIs produce the outcomes they seek but also whether it is more cost-effective in doing so than alternative interventions.

Practitioners

Conflict resolution practitioners often have questions about the degree to which their work successfully affects both individual and institutional change. With regard to each focus, practitioners have articulated a need to have measuring instruments that they can use to assess the effectiveness of their work. Such instru­ments could be of particular value to them in relation to funding agencies and policy makers. Practitioners often feel that the methods they use during their training and consulting, to check on the effects their work has, are more detailed and sensitive than the typical questionnaires used in evaluation. Their own methods may be more useful to them even if less persuasive to funding agen­cies. Our sense is that a lot of general value could be gained from a study of the implicit theoretical models underlying the work of practitioners, as well as a study of how practitioners go about assessing the impact of what they are doing.

Practitioners’ focus on individual change tends to be concerned with such issues as these:

• How much transfer of knowledge and skill is there from the conflict resolution training, workshop, or encounter to the participants’ other social contexts? How long do the effects of CRIs endure? What factors affect transfer and long-term outcomes?

• How can CRIs be responsive to individual differences among partici­pants in personality, intelligence, age level, social class, ethnic group, gender, and religion?

• How important is similarity in social cultural background between prac­titioner and participant in promoting effective CRIs? Are well-trained junior or student practitioners particularly effective in training other participants or students?

• What models of training are being employed among trainers?

• Can levels of expertise be characterized? How long and pervasive does training have to be for these levels?

• What selection and training procedures should be employed with regard to participants? With regard to trainers of trainers?

• At what age are the effects of CRIs most likely to take hold?

The focus on institutional change is concerned with other questions:

• In schools and communities, what set of adults and other community members—for example, administrators, teachers, parents, staff, and guards—should participate in CRIs if students’ learning is to effec­tively take hold? Must other community institutions be involved, such as the church, the police, health providers, and other community agencies?

• What are the most effective models for institutionalizing CRIs in schools, universities, communities, and at the political level?

• What changes in a CRI’s structure, pedagogical approach, and culture are typically associated with a significant institutional change?

• What critical mass of community and/or political involvement is neces­sary for systemic change?

It is evident that the issues raised by the practitioners are important but com­plex and not readily answerable by a traditional research approach.

Researchers

Psychologically, other researchers are usually the most important audience for one’s research. If your research does not meet the standards established for your field of research, you can expect it to be rejected as unfit for publication in a respected research journal. This may harm your reputation as a researcher— and may make tenure less likely if you are a young professor seeking it. This may be true even if funding agencies, administrators, and practitioners find the research to be very useful to them.

The research standard for psychology and many other social sciences is derived from the model of the experiment. If one designs and conducts an experiment ideally, one has created the best conditions for obtaining valid and reliable results. In research as in life, the ideal is rarely attainable. Researchers have developed various procedures to compensate for deviation from the ideal in their attempt to approximate it. However, there is a bias in the field toward assuming that research that looks like an experiment (for example, it has con­trol groups, and before-and-after measures) but is not because it lacks ran­domization and has too few cases (more on this later) is inherently superior to other modes of approximation. We disagree. In our view, each mode has its merits and limitations and may be useful in investigating a certain type of research question but less so in another.

We suggest three key standards for research: (1) the mode of research should be appropriate to the problem being investigated, (2) it should be conducted as well as humanly possible given the available resources and circumstances, and (3) it should be knowledgeable and explicit about its limitations.