The Bottom Line Posted on January 20, 2009 Hortensia Amaro (bio) provides practical advice for investigators who are hoping to influence policymakers.

I think in talking to legislators we really have to learn as researchers to be brief, so we always provide no more than one page briefing with bullets and not dense text, but really the bottom line of our recommendations and findings.

And we always bring along a number of consumers who can bring their lived experience to bear and to make it real for the legislators because they're very influenced by that.

So you need to address the intellectual aspect through information, but then the emotional aspect and the experience of real people and children — the mothers, the fathers, and the kids — to bear.

So you bring it alive to them. They see it's real; it's not just data. And so that requires I think researchers to build some skills that we aren't always trained in.

And you don't have to do this by yourself — in fact you shouldn't. Find out what are the groups that you can collaborate with that have the same or similar supportive agenda, and that's what we've done. We haven't done any of this work alone. We've done it in partnerships with other groups who are working towards similar ends.