Research Output and Knowledge Translation Among Faculty Members of University of Technology, Jamaica

Abstract

Universities are very important assets to produce research knowledge. The three major responsibilities of university faculty members are teaching, research, and community service. Balancing these three responsibilities is often very challenging, and the work that suffers most is research. The government of every nation looks up to its universities to produce research knowledge. The goal is to investigate the research output and knowledge translation among faculty members at Jamaica’s national university. A descriptive quantitative cross-sectional design was used for this study. This design was used to collect data from faculty members at one point in time. Most of the respondents (56.3%) perceived a lack of protected time for research as a barrier to research productivity. Seventy-five percent of the respondents reported having published one research article as the first author in the last two years. The majority (75%) of the respondents have concerns about the research policy of the university. The most common perceived barrier to knowledge translation (KT) was a lack of awareness of the concept of KT. The faculty members are experiencing challenges in conducting research and translating research findings. Keywords: Knowledge translation, Research output.