Suchergebnisse

Research in such fields as population planning, agriculture, and education has demonstrated the importance of intermediaries to ensure the dissemination of innovative practices However, little attention has been given to how organizations serve this function This article reports four case studies of regional educational service agencies in their role as disseminators of new knowledge Three characteristic approaches to dissemination were identified laissez-faire, entrepreneurial, and authoritarian These approaches wereshapedbyfivefactors in the agency's context state policy initiatives, client concerns, staff interests, history, and leadership External constraints, staff interests, and history created crosspressures that executive leaders responded to by developing missions for their organizations Missions that maximized dissemination services were often associated with some tension with external constituencies

Formalization of qualitative research (that is, case study or ethnographic research) is a major adaptation to the policy world that includes codification of research questions before fieldwork starts, standardization of data collection procedures through semistruc tured interviews, and reduction of verbal data to categories. The histories offive multisite, qualitative policy studies were examined to see how much variation in formalization reflected the technical requirements of the research problem, the demands of the federal client, and the preferences of the project team and its professional network. The research team has the greatest influence although the client sets broad limits on what is possible.