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​What’s the difference between respect and love?
 
Wait—back up. ​Before you go on a tangent of considering every relationship you have, and how they all differ in terms of respect and love, let’s look at just one relationship: your relationship with our field’s science. Our evidence. Do you respect it, or do you love it?
 
I think, for most people, the answer is actually “respect”, not “love”. And I see this as a problem. Here’s why:
 
Respecting our science, to me, means putting it on a pedestal. Knowing it’s highly valuable. Important. Something to be revered. Something to be referenced, whenever possible (Smith, 2017, #pretendcitation).
When a graduate student leaves his or her master’s program with a respect for our field’s science, that’s good. A good thing! But it’s also wholly inadequate. Because it can mean that they leave that science, sitting there on it’s pedestal, and wave a respectful little ‘goodbye,’ before proceeding on with clinical work. (Want a real citation for this blog post? Try this article on how quickly students lose touch with the evidence after grad school.)

So, to me, respect doesn’t cut it, because you can respect something but be completely uninvolved with it. Here's an example: I respect cardiovascular exercise. I am 100% confident it’s good for you, and smart people do it. But me? I don’t do it. I hate that crap, and have zero love for cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular exercise and I are entirely uninvolved with one another, but #respect.

So then, love. What does loving our science look like? ​

This is a super commonly-asked question among SLPs.

Let's dig in!

Note: This is about to kick you to a full-page answer instead of a blog post. It just felt like too much to squeeze into a blog column! Enjoy~

People reading this post likely fall into one of two categories: 1) You know exactly why I’m writing this, and you already have your “preach hands” up, or 2) You have no idea what I’m talking about, or why I would even open this discussion. If you fit in the latter category, I hope I can coherently explain the issue. I’ll give it a whirl...
 
Let’s start with the backstory:
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Once upon a time, the field of speech–language pathology realized that in order to act in our clients’ best interests, we need to be using evidence-based practice (of course this has been an interdisciplinary, international thing, but for now we’ll discuss it only as it applies within our field). Traditionally, SLPs have done well with the clinical expertise and clients’ needs portions of this. They’ve done less well with taking research evidence into consideration. Why would that be? Perhaps because the research is so far away from us. It’s hard to get, it’s hard to wade through, and it’s time-consuming to interpret. Simply put, there are high (and numerous) barriers between clinicians and the evidence, with two of the big ones being access and utility. And to-date, we haven’t been all that honest with each other about those barriers. Ultimately, this lack of communication, lack of frankness, and abysmal acknowledgment of clinical reality has impeded our ability to make the “research” corner of EBP realistic and achievable.