Isabel Walter

Using evidence: how research can inform public services.

There is widespread commitment across public service agencies in the UK and elsewhere to ensuring that the best available evidence is used to improve public services. The challenge is not only making research evidence accessible and available, but also getting it used. This book provides a timely and novel contribution to understanding and enhancing evidence use. It builds on and complements the popular and best-selling What Works?: Evidence-Based Policy and Practice in Public Services by drawing together current knowledge from the education, health care, social care, and criminal justice fields.

From Knowing to Doing: A Framework for Understanding the Evidence-into-Practice Agenda

The past decade has witnessed widespread interest in the development of policy and practice that is better informed by evidence. Enthusiasm has, however, been tempered by recognition of the difficulties of devising effective strategies to ensure that evidence is integrated into policy and utilized in practice. There is already a rich but diverse and widely dispersed literature that can be drawn upon to inform such strategies. This article offers a guide to this literature by focusing on six main interrelated concerns: (1) the types of knowledge relevant to understanding research utilization/evidence-based practice (RU/EBP) implementation; (2) the ways in which research knowledge is utilized; (3) models of the process of utilization; (4) the conceptual frameworks that enable us to understand the process of RU/EBP implementation; (5) the main ways of intervening to increase evidence uptake and the effectiveness of these; (6) different ways of conceptualizing what RU/EBP means in practice.

Why ‘knowledge transfer’ is misconceived for applied social research

‘Knowledge transfer’ has become established as shorthand for a wide variety of activities linking the production of academic knowledge to the potential use of such knowledge in non-academic environments. While welcoming the attention now being paid to non-academic applications of social research, we contend that terms such as knowledge transfer (and its subordinate sibling, knowledge translation) misrepresent the tasks that they seek to support. By articulating the complex and contested nature of applied social research, and then highlighting the social and contextual complexities of its use, we can see that other terms may serve us better. Following from this analysis, we suggest that ‘knowledge interaction’ might more appropriately describe the messy engagement of multiple players with diverse sources of knowledge, and that ‘knowledge intermediation’ might begin to articulate some of the managed processes by which knowledge interaction can be promoted. While it might be hard to shift the terminology of knowledge transfer in the short term, awareness of its shortcomings can enhance understanding about how social research can have wider impacts.

Increasing research impact through partnerships: evidence from outside health care

There is growing interest in using closer partnerships between researchers and research users to increase the appropriate application of research evidence in policy and practice. While this supplement reports and assesses a number of these initiatives in health care, this article reviews the evidence in support of partnerships from elsewhere. Drawing on a substantial cross-sector review of research impact initiatives, we extract lessons for health care from partnership evaluations in social care, education and criminal justice services. A reasonable and robust evidence base supports the use of partnerships as one means of increasing research uptake. Although requiring substantial investments of time, resources and commitment, and suffering from a number of possible pitfalls, we conclude that such partnerships offer great potential for increasing research use.

Promoting Evidence-based Practice: Models and Mechanisms From Cross-Sector Review

This article draws on both a cross-sector literature review of mechanisms to promote evidence-based practice and a specific review of ways of improving research use in social care. At the heart of the article is a discussion of three models of evidence-based practice: the research-based practitioner model, the embedded research model, and the organizational excellence model. The article concludes that the ideas contained within each of these models are likely to be appropriate at different times and for different service settings. There is a need to build on such models to develop a coherent framework for strategies to promote research use.

The many forms of research‐informed practice: a framework for mapping diversity

Much of the discussion of research‐informed practice in education has centred on two perspectives: the rational–linear and interactive perspectives on research use. This paper examines two initiatives aimed at delivering research‐informed practice in schools that appear to represent these two perspectives, Peer‐Assisted Learning Strategies and the School‐Based Research Consortia Initiative. This examination reveals that both initiatives contain rational–linear and interactive elements. It also highlights other features of the initiatives not captured by the rational–linear and interactive perspectives. The paper argues that in order to capture the cross‐cutting and multifaceted nature of initiatives on the ground, it is helpful to overlay the rational–linear and interactive perspectives with three models of research use developed in social care field: the research‐based practitioner model, the embedded research model and the organisational excellence model. The resulting matrix provides a framework for considering whether, when and how these different approaches to increasing research use might be combined.

The Institutional Arrangements for Connecting Evidence and Policy: the Case of Drug Misuse

The Modernising Government agenda stresses the need for policy to be evidence-based. Yet there is still a general perception that research rarely impacts on policy making. Strategies to increase the connection between evidence and policy have typically focused on improving the evidence base and on enhancing communication between researchers and policy makers. By contrast, this paper examines an area that has largely been ignored: the influence of micro-institutional arrangements on the integration of evidence and policy. It examines the development of new institutional arrangements for linking research evidence and policy on drug misuse in England and in Scotland, using data from interviews and documentary analysis. This provides the basis for a re-consideration of a set of propositions from the literature about those features that encourage evidence use. A fine-grained analysis of conducive arrangements in the drug misuse policy area results in a revised list of propositions, which provide some preliminary guidance on those institutional arrangements likely to support evidence-based policy making.