Positioning Social Work Researchers for Engaged Scholarship to Promote Public Impact

The concept of engaged scholarship has garnered significant attention across numerous scientific disciplines. Engaged scholarship can be conceptualized as both a method centered on cocreating and applying new knowledge and a movement focused on prioritizing community identification of needs and social problem-solving strategies. In an effort to position social work researchers for engaged scholarship to promote public impact, we provide an overview of the following engaged-scholarship mechanisms: (a) community-based participatory research, (b) participatory action research, (c) practice-based research networks, (d) translational research, (e) transdisciplinary scientific collaborations, (f) systemic evaluation, and (g) developmental evaluation. We address the contextual factors that may influence the extent to which social work researchers can successfully pursue engaged scholarship and conclude by explicating a plausible relationship between engaged scholarship and public impact scholarship. Specifically, we apply the diffusion of innovations model and community dissonance theory to conceptually position engaged scholarship as a vehicle for promoting and optimizing public impact scholarship.