The Center for Public Interest Communications offers a bridge between the front lines of change and the knowledge held in the best of scholarship and research. We’re committed to upholding the rigorous principles of the best of scholarship but move at a real-world pace. We want to help you unveil actionable, just-in-time insights that inform your strategic communication design and application.
Nearly everything the Center does has underpinnings in peer-reviewed research. Our team scours academic journals from a range of disciplines to unlock insights to inform strategic communication strategies. While primary research is an important part of the discovery process, our team’s expertise is also in the translation of other scholars’ work.
By engaging our team you’ll:
- Activate a network of researchers: Our team includes leading scholars in media effects, narrative and political science based at a major global research institution. Through our networks, we’ve collaborated with scientists and researchers across a vast range of disciplines and areas of expertise, including psychology, neuroscience, communication, sociology, history, behavioral economics and organization science.
- Unlock research access: Because we’re based in a major research university, we have access to networks of proprietary databases and nearly every published journal article.
Finding the Evidence for Your Strategy
We’re so much more than your nerdy sibling; we support your strategies with the research insights that can drive change. When the research is done, we’re not just going to push a thick report your way—we’ll offer practical, useful recommendations for how to apply the research to the problems you’re trying to solve right now. To do so, we set you on the right path by providing researched-backed recommendations for what methods are best for answering your burning question. To get at the heart of addressing the problem you are trying to solve we can provide:
- In-depth research reviews: We start by finding academic research that’s been written on a topic through a scholarship process called a systematic/ scoping review. Then, we carefully sort through it all and select only the most relevant information for your project.
- Living Literature ReviewsSM: When we need to get insights quickly or seek important nuance, we bring together the leading scholars on a given topic for a series of conversations facilitated by practitioners. This approach helps us quickly identify themes across research that we can translate into action.
- Surveys – national down to field or community-specific scope: Our quantitative and qualitative researchers design and conduct representative national, regional, or statewide surveys that can begin to track the pulse of the interests important to you. We can segment and compare our data in a range of demographic and psychographic dimensions. All our studies are Institutional Review Board-approved, so you know we’re applying the latest in ethical research design. We partner with a number of research panel firms, and select one best suited for each project.
- Narrative analytics: Through a partnership with the Atlas Lab, a sister program in our college at the University of Florida, we can engage in listening across a range of social platforms to discover online conversations and themes. Atlas’ approach is firmly entrenched in our public interest frameworks and gives real-world experience to a new generation of changemakers with professional guidance.
- User needs and testing: A hallmark of our approach is designing with our communities, not just for our communities. Our team can provide structured discovery on a range of user testing needs. We do so by employing principles from human-based design.
- Interviews and focus groups: Whether we are talking to academics, practitioners, or community members, we can gain a lot of knowledge from interviews and focus groups. We use technology and cutting-edge approaches in our analysis of interview transcripts while also taking care not to lose the human element for unlocking insights through good old-fashioned discussion.
- Message experiments: We have experienced researchers who can help develop strategic communication messages based on research to address your issues. Our approach is grounded in theories from psychology, sociology, economics, and communication studies on human behavior change to help you find effective and reliable message strategies.
- Quantitative analysis: Depending on the type of data collected from our methods we can apply high-level statistical analysis, including hierarchical regression, to discover what are the most important drivers of cause and effect.