Research Support for Continuing Education

T may not be possible to state the relationship between research and continuing education better and more sharply than to quote B. F. Stanton [14]: "Continuing education should be based on scholarship and research." Stanton, in his paper, develops a logical basis for this statement. In addition, his statement is supported (at least indirectly) by empirical evidence [9, 16] which seems to indicate that continuing education and research go hand in hand in improving farm income and in increasing returns to human capital. Empirical evidence in Table 1 also is such that the hypothesis, "continuing education should be based on scholarship and research," cannot be rejected.' What this table shows is that extension education efforts are distributed over the various problem areas similar to that of research efforts, although the so-called "people problems" seem to receive more attention by extension than they do by research. Thus, in addition to supporting the contention that continuing education be based on research and scholarship, Table 1 also suggests that particularly in the "people-oriented" problem areas, continuing education may tend to lead research. Understanding that continuing education can direct research to significant problems should be of particular importance to the social scientist. On the other hand, it should be understood that a good researcher in any discipline will often anticipate important problems before they are recognized by the public. Thus, the challenge for research lies in appropriately assessing the signals received from continuing education and balancing them against research interests generated by research staff. It is necessary to point out that the total mission of research is considerably broader than the support of continuing education. While support of continuing education may be a very important -maybe even the most important-dimension, it is not the only research dimension. This is true regardless of whether we consider public or privately financed research, and it is true regardless of whether we consider public or private research organizations, both of which may work with either public or private funds. Other dimensions of the total research mission, particularly in publicly funded universities, include the support of classroom teaching. In addition, in more recent years we could observe a trend on the part of publicly funded research agencies toward accepting projects or contracts of an action-oriented, problem-solving nature. Such contracts may involve the establishment of educational research institutions (both here and abroad), the execution of feasibility studies (e.g., river basin development, plant location), the assistance with planning in ministries of commerce, agriculture, and education, etc. Still another dimension is the execution of contract research for either private or public organizations where the intended use of the research results is within the contract letting agency. This list of different dimensions of the total research mission is not intended to be exhaustive (the role of basic research has not even been mentioned!), but it is sufficient to make the point that continuing education is not the only client to research. To be sure, important relationships and varying degrees of complementarity exist between the various research dimensions and continuing education. However, not all research has as its goal the support of continuing education. The discussion below must be viewed in this light rather than as a comprehensive discussion of research needs.