Most academic research finishes with the publication of findings, usually in refereed Journals and often in highly technical language unfamiliar to the people in the field who could benefit from the available evidence. Furthermore, findings are generalizations often produced in the form of statistics and their relevance to particular situations has to be inferred. Causality for instance has to be assumed from statistical tests based on concurrent and static data. The interpretation of the findings are made by the researcher(s) who are usually unfamiliar with the full range of the evidence and with the detailed experiences of the respondents who provided the data. Respondents are rarely asked to help with the interpretation of data.

Even if findings are produced in more accessible form and language, there still remains the problem of reaching the people who work in the field and motivating them to the point of taking action. Experience shows that the obstacles to utilization, based on the way research is conducted, interpreted and written up, are formidable. The present project has evolved against this background. We chose an Action Research method called Group Feed-back Analysis which will be described below.