Dusting off the Cobwebs! (And something about context)

Dodge, K. A. (2011). Context matters in child and family policy. Child Development, 82(1), 433-442.

This article is a commentary on the special issue of Child Development titled "Raising Healthy Children: Translating Child Development Research into Practice", in which Ken Dodge convincingly argues that the current model of translational science - that is, conducting basic research, testing hypotheses in efficacy trials, and then disseminating findings and scaling up interventions - needs to be completely turned on its head. His main thesis is that context changes everything, so that as soon as the context is changed (i.e., conducting an intervention in a lab, versus a classroom, versus a school district), the nature of the implementation changes. This may seem obvious to we who are school in the bidirectional arrow model, but the implications fo us are enormous. Fortunately, Dodge makes several recommendations for conducting evaluations at the population level, and not all of them start with, "raise a zillion dollars". We could implement some of these suggestions immediately, for example, by creatively designing our studies to assess population-level effects and account for missingness.

Rating: 9 out of 10 Jetts for being a great article to restart my blogging