How do you engage with the animal welfare advocacy groups who might act on your research?
We talk to them, try to understand what they do and why, ask what research they would find useful, and ask whether our research has influenced their decisions (we did it via a survey and informally).
Or alternatively, how do you counteract any negatives from not being an advocacy organization, and not getting feedback directly (e.g. advocacy that responds to research because they are done in conjunction)?
What do you think are the main relevant differences between the team being in-house versus a separate organization? The way I see it, all of us in the EAA movement are a part of the same team, working towards the same goals. A president of an animal charity can go to us and ask us to research a particular topic in a similar way they could go to their in-house research team. I guess one difference is that if they go to us, it’s up to us to decide whether to pursue the suggested topic but I don’t see why that would necessarily be worse.[1] Of course, I’m unsure about this as I’ve never worked for an in-house team.
So far, I haven’t pursued any of the research topics that were suggested by people from animal charities because they didn’t seem very tractable. However, I will probably try to make progress on some of these topics in the future.
I guess my inclination toward in-house teams would be that an organization would be more likely to respond / change direction on the basis of findings from in-house teams. But I’m unsure that there is much evidence that organizations have changed directions from research done by anyone, except perhaps in small ways. I also imagine being in-house would reduce barriers for data collection, etc., because there wouldn’t be NDAs or privacy concerns that might govern inter-org interactions. I think you and I had previously had this issue, where I had done research that might have been relevant to your work, and couldn’t share it due to an NDA.
We talk to them, try to understand what they do and why, ask what research they would find useful, and ask whether our research has influenced their decisions (we did it via a survey and informally).
What do you think are the main relevant differences between the team being in-house versus a separate organization? The way I see it, all of us in the EAA movement are a part of the same team, working towards the same goals. A president of an animal charity can go to us and ask us to research a particular topic in a similar way they could go to their in-house research team. I guess one difference is that if they go to us, it’s up to us to decide whether to pursue the suggested topic but I don’t see why that would necessarily be worse.[1] Of course, I’m unsure about this as I’ve never worked for an in-house team.
So far, I haven’t pursued any of the research topics that were suggested by people from animal charities because they didn’t seem very tractable. However, I will probably try to make progress on some of these topics in the future.
I guess my inclination toward in-house teams would be that an organization would be more likely to respond / change direction on the basis of findings from in-house teams. But I’m unsure that there is much evidence that organizations have changed directions from research done by anyone, except perhaps in small ways. I also imagine being in-house would reduce barriers for data collection, etc., because there wouldn’t be NDAs or privacy concerns that might govern inter-org interactions. I think you and I had previously had this issue, where I had done research that might have been relevant to your work, and couldn’t share it due to an NDA.