Research to policy change: ALR wrap-up

Nothing compares to the enthusiasm, sincerity and energy of Dr. James Sallis for Active Living Research. I first heard him speak at a NYC Fit-City conference and have been a fan ever since. He and his team have really built this small-ish area of research into a body of work on which policymakers have come to rely.

It's always good to be immersed in a context in which you're unfamiliar. The conference was fairly multi-disciplinary, as professional conferences go, with researchers, advocacy, urban planners, and designers, but it was focused on the needs of researchers. Safe Routes for Seniors and Harlem River Park ped improvement projects went over surprising well given our lack of co-efficients and model names (e.g., Likert scale a very popular one, even T.A. was in on it without knowing it).

I don't think I've seen more shorthand for concepts since...maybe college calculus. In the world of shorthand, transportation is filled with an alphabet soup of acronyms that only insiders intuitively understand (at least you can always try to figure out the words to the letters). Public health studies are full of proper nouns that researchers recognize as the author who did the past study that came up with the concept. (Hence JD got the question for the poster, "You didn't put an author for this study?" since it only had our logo on it.)

I only bring this up because I think it incredibly important that we (all of us, advocates and researchers and policymakers) make research accessible to people from all backgrounds. What is the point of research if it can't be communicated? There are so many fabulous studies that are going to come out later this year (looking forward especially to one on Bixi from the University of Montreal that might have the right data to draw some conclusions about mode shift; walkability and depression from Andrew Rundle and the Built Environment and Health group at Columbia University; and the health impact assessment of congestion pricing from the San Francisco Department of Health). Let's make it open and accessible!

Maybe next year's conference should have a working session on how to communicate the results of your study. So many smart and fabulous researchers had to talk through their posters - which presumably are a digestible version of their very long and important study - for anyone to understand what they did and found. What if the posters did the work and the people could do the discussing? I went to a lot of sessions excited by the topics listed and sometimes left wondering what the study found although I agreed with the policy recommendations in the conclusion (almost all studies had policy recommendations.)

To get us to that policy change, make it accessible. I remain excited by the potential of ALR and I'm looking forward to learning more (and getting a handle on public health proper nouns).