Reframing University and Practitioner Research Partnerships

This article reframes the potential for partnerships between university researchers and counseling practitioners that yield more applied counseling research. The gap in practitioner research and its resultant fracturing of the counseling field are well documented in the literature. Guiding principles of these partnerships are offered as a method of grounding the relationship based on a case study example between a university researcher and a local counseling training organization. The four primary values that can guide this reframing of practitioner research are the emphasis on practitioner expertise, development of research identity for practitioners and future practitioners, flexibility in data collection and analysis, and establishment of trust between researchers and clinicians. These values address the barriers to practitioner research that are currently explored in the literature. Application of these values led to a successful partnership yielding ample data collection with plans to produce academic articles and new training programs. Exploring the potential for effective practitioner research has the potential to produce more applied research that is currently lacking in the field of counseling.