Communities and researchers often site a research to practice gap. While publicly and privately funded research occurs in universities, research institutions, federal agencies and foundations across the country, the fruits of these labors do not always make it into communities. Particularly, scientist-developed and tested interventions that have met the standard of being “evidence-based” often have not been successfully disseminated or adopted by the targeted end-users–the community. Why is this the case? A recent article suggests four reasons why dissemination has been unsuccessful.

Capacity to Implement Programs – There is often disconnect between what communities can implement and what is originally intended by scientists. Local capacity is a factor of multiple issues, including finances, the complexity of community systems, and the context in which communities function (e.g., political and administrative issues). Research has not sufficiently examined how community capacity matches the requirements of a given intervention.

Value Congruence–If there is a disconnect between the values of the intervention and values of the community, the intervention is not likely to be implemented. For example, if an evidence-based intervention includes needle exchanges to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS among heroin users but this is opposite the values and beliefs of a community, then the intervention is not likely to be used by a community, regardless of how much evidence exists to show the success of the intervention.

Pro-Innovation Bias–Most intervention developers (or innovators) naturally assume that their innovation should be disseminated and adopted. However, this view assumes that communities are merely waiting for interventions to come down the pipeline and are passive adopters of these

interventions. However, the most effective coalitions are active problem solvers of local substance abuse concerns. While one should not assume that all homegrown programs are effective or better than those developed by researchers, the fact remains that communities are often the developers of their own interventions in the absence of programs that fit their community's contextual needs.

Simplistic Models of Decision-Making–Dissemination models assume that simply providing evidence that an intervention is successful is sufficient information to help consumers decide to adopt them. However, the decision-making that communities undergo in choosing interventions is based on a variety of factors and a variety of stakeholders. Additionally, since social interventions vary in form, function and meaning, choosing one over another is not as cut and dry as it may be choosing to eat at McDonalds over Burger King. Furthermore, research suggests that most consumers do not adopt the entire intervention; typically it is the essence of the intervention that gets diffused. If this is the case, then it is important for research to isolate the “active ingredients” of a given effective policy, practice or intervention.

Given these dissemination failures, researchers realize that additional works needs to be done to understand what works from the perspective of communities. Learning is a two-way street and in order for research to be more beneficial to communities, scientists can learn from the day-to-day work of community members. The authors of this article suggest that instead of creating interventions in vacuums and marketing them to communities, community-based researchers should work find interventions already in use in communities and work with communities to study their effectiveness, key ingredients and then disseminate these interventions to other communities.