Evidence-based

What is ‘evidence’? What is ‘policy’? Conceptualising the terms and their connections

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Sonja Blum and Valérie Pattyn

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How are evidence and policy conceptualised, and how do they connect? A qualitative systematic review of public policy literature’.

Are policies based on available evidence? Are academic experts willing to provide their expertise? What enables or constrains the effective use of evidence for policymaking?

Public policy scholarship has puzzled over such questions of the evidence and policy relationship for decades. Over time, ever more differentiated branches of public policy research have developed, which complement and enrich each other. However, they have also developed their own perspectives, languages, and understandings of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections.

Such differences in terminology and employed concepts are more than ‘just words’. Rather, attentiveness to careful conceptualisations helps to set clear boundaries for theory development and empirical research, to avoid misunderstandings, and enable dialogue across different literatures. Against that backdrop, in our article published in Evidence & Policy, we conducted a qualitative systematic review of recent public policy scholarship with the aim to trace different conceptualisations of ‘evidence’, ‘policy’ and their connections. To be included in our review, the research articles needed to address some sort of evidence, some sort of policy, and had to deal with some sort of connection between the two (a list of all included research articles is available online). The review followed all steps of the PRISMA methodology.

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Framing the evidence on sugar taxes in Germany: lessons for public health

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Katharina Selda Moerschel, Peter von Philipsborn, Elizabeth McGill and Benjamin Hawkins

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Evidence-related framing in the German debate on sugar taxation: a qualitative framing analysis and international comparison’.

Although sugar taxation is considered an important evidence-based intervention in the fight against obesity, some countries, such as Germany, have not yet implemented such a tax. While evidence does matter in policy processes, it does not speak for itself; it must be interpreted and used in specific contexts. What this context looks like, i.e. the framing of the underlying problem and the policy objectives, depends on the goals of the policy actor. To better understand how stakeholders in Germany argue for and against sugar taxation and how they utilised evidence, we examined how evidence was framed in 114 newspaper articles and compared our findings with similar studies from Mexico, the US and the UK.

German stakeholders demonstrated similar patterns of evidence use and evidence claims to those found in Mexico, the US and the UK. Tax supporters framed obesity as being (at least partly) attributable to sugar consumption and identified a reduction in sugar consumption as a key policy objective. They cited Mexico and the UK as main examples of successful reduction in sugar intake and framed sugar taxation as an effective means to tackle obesity in combination with other interventions.

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Evidence-based practice in social care: straitjacket – or fluid support?

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Isabella Pistone, Allan Lidström, Ingemar Bohlin, Thomas Schneider, Teun Zuiderent-Jerak and Morten Sager

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Evidence-based practice and management-by-knowledge of disability care: Rigid constraint or fluid support?’.

Evidence-based practice in social work is often critiqued for constraining practices by emphasising rigid methods and standardised interventions that exclude professional and clients’ experiences. Our research within disability care found rather it catalysed a dynamic interplay between local and external knowledge, as explained in our recently published Evidence & Policy article.

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Breaking the fourth wall: evidence communication inside policy organisations

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Christiane Gerblinger

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Peep show: a framework for watching how evidence is communicated inside policy organisations’.

Seeing how governments formulate decisions is a crucial component of their ability to claim democratic legitimacy. This includes being seen to draw on the knowledge and evidence produced by their civil service policy advisers. Yet much of the advice provided to governments is being increasingly withdrawn from public accessibility.

With governments likely to benefit from a status quo that normalises withdrawal of policy processes and rationales from public view, it is important to find alternative ways to illuminate how policy officials communicate their evidence and how that evidence is used in political contexts by governments to make decisions on our behalf.

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In the age of evidence-based decision-making, where can education decision makers really turn for evidence?

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Fiona Hollands and Venita Holmes

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Comparing evidence on the effectiveness of reading resources from expert ratings, practitioner judgements, and research repositories’.

In 2017–2018, a large school district in the U.S. was threatened by the state education agency with closure of 23 struggling elementary schools unless it could improve students’ performance on state-mandated assessments. The district’s Office of Elementary Curriculum and Development immediately tried to determine which reading resources (reading programmes, assessments, online tools, book collections, and professional development supports) were available at each school and to assess their effectiveness at improving student reading proficiency. To help with this evaluation task, our research-practice team explored various options for quickly providing suitable evidence on the effectiveness of each of 23 reading resources used at one or more of these schools. We expected to find reasonable consistency across multiple sources of information that we could use to help guide the district’s actions. The results were not quite as expected.

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Applications of the Use of Research Evidence (URE) Methods Repository

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Drew Gitomer, Kevin Crouse, Nikki Dreste and Meged Eisenberg

We recently announced in the William T. Grant Foundation Digest the launch of the Use of Research Evidence (URE) Methods Repository, a new, open resource in development that focuses on the use of research evidence. The Repository is housed in a Collection on the Open Science Framework (OSF), and we welcome contributions in which detailed research methods are catalogued in an open-access format. One of our principal goals in designing this resource is to serve and connect the broad community of stakeholders that engage with and around topics focusing on the Use of Research Evidence (URE). Accordingly, we have designed the Repository so that it can be used in multiple ways that are tailored to the different interests and goals that different potential users have.  

As we were designing the Repository, we envisioned an open-access resource for the broad community of URE participants. This includes providing a space for the URE research community to share and display a fuller description of their methodological approaches than typically appear in final publications and making those approaches accessible to those who are interested in discovering or reviewing research methods that are used in URE studies. We saw value in ensuring that practitioners, funders, and others outside of academic research could access all of the resources without needing a paid subscription or institutional account. We also want to engage researchers and graduate students in the social sciences who have not done research in URE but are interested in learning more about the questions and spaces they address.

In this blog post, we describe the most common intended use applications of the URE Methods Repository.

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Empathy is key to addressing obstacles to policy progress

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Serena Bartys

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Empathy is key: addressing obstacles to policy progress of ‘work-focused healthcare’’.

Pre-pandemic, the UK government estimated that work loss due to ill-health costed around £100bn per year. This problem places an unsustainable burden on health, employment and welfare systems, and is a major cause of socioeconomic disadvantage and inequality. The potential for healthcare to reduce this burden has been reflected in numerous UK policy initiatives and clinical guidance ever since 2008, when Dame Carol Black published her seminal report Working for a Healthier Tomorrow.

However, over a decade later, avoidable work disability remains a leading public health concern. One key concept – healthcare professionals discussing work with their patients during routine consultations – has remained elusive in practice. There are clearly significant obstacles to translating ‘work-focused healthcare’ policy into practice. Our Evidence & Policy article sheds light on what those obstacles are and how they may be addressed. It raises wider concerns about how scientific evidence is used and understood by policymakers, making a novel contribution to the expanding literature which suggests that researcher-policy-practice relationships are key factors in mobilising the evidence.  

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How can we support evidence-informed policymaking on the African continent?

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Joseph Adu, Sebastian Gyamfi, Ebenezer Martin-Yeboah and Mark Fordjour Owusu

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Knowledge translation platforms to support African evidence-informed policies: challenges and progress’.

Evidence-based policy is key to reducing public health problems worldwide. The late 2000s witnessed a breakthrough in maternal healthcare delivery in Southern Africa by way of a policy initiative that allowed the use of magnesium sulphate to prevent pregnancy induced hypertension-related deaths among pregnant women. Pregnancy induced hypertension was identified as the single most important cause of death among pregnant women in the Africa sub-region. This feat was attained through the concerted efforts of a team of international researchers, local researchers, health practitioners (academic obstetricians) and policymakers from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa who harnessed their individual knowledge into a policy to address this long existing health scare.

In our review, we found that the intervention by EVIPNet (in making giant strides in the fight against malaria in Africa) improved the capacities of knowledge among institutions on the continent through publication of policy briefs and peer-reviewed articles – resulting in an increment in Africa’s share in global research. This effort, apart from creating awareness about the health challenges on the continent, also served as a springboard to attract researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders as a community of actors championing knowledge translation in Africa.

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New Editors in Chief of Evidence & Policy

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We are pleased to introduce the new Editors in Chief of Evidence & Policy: Professor Zachary Neal, Michigan State University, USA and Professor Caroline Oliver, University College London, UK, who took over from the journal’s previous Co-Editors Professor Katherine Smith, University of Strathclyde, UK and Dr Mark Pearson, Hull York Medical School, UK as of January 2022.

Evidence & Policy is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to a comprehensive and critical assessment of the relationship between researchers and the evidence they produce and the concerns of policymakers and practitioners.

International in scope and interdisciplinary in focus, it addresses the needs of those who develop public policies, provide public services, or provide the research base for evaluation and development across a wide range of social and public policy issues (e.g. criminal justice, employment and welfare, education, environmental protection, finance, health, housing, international development, social care, and transport), and those who are working to connect the two (such as knowledge brokers).

Zachary Neal, Incoming Co-Editor in Chief of Evidence & Policy, said:

“Mark Pearson and Katherine Smith have done amazing work to establish Evidence & Policy as a leading outlet for research on knowledge translation. I am excited to build on their hard work and look forward to incorporating open science practices that help make this research transparent and available to everyone.”

Caroline Oliver, Incoming Co-Editor in Chief of Evidence & Policy, said:

“It feels an honour to take on the role as Co Editor in Chief with Zak, and we look forward to continuing the great work that Katherine and Mark have done with Evidence & Policy over recent years. In this position, I am looking forward to maintaining the high quality of publications in the journal, as well as encouraging a diversification of articles published in terms of geographic focus, topics, disciplines and theoretical underpinnings, to further that aim.”

We join Professor Neal and Professor Oliver in thanking Co-Editors Professor Katherine Smith, University of Strathclyde, UK and Dr Mark Pearson, Hull York Medical School, UK for their dedication, their excellent stewardship of the journal and the many achievements that have marked their term as Editors in Chief.

Bridging the research‐policy gap: the importance of effective identity leadership and shared commitment

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Frank Mols

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Bridging the research‐policy gap: the importance of effective identity leadership and shared commitment’

There is widespread agreement, among public policy scholars, that research evidence does not translate readily into policy practice, and that more needs to be done to ‘bridge the gap’ between policy research and policy practice. But why is it so difficult to achieve evidence-based policy in practice?

An important reason for this mismatch is that there are typically different sources of knowledge and evidence, and because stakeholders will often disagree which of these sources of evidence should inform policy. Such disagreements are common when dealing with complex ‘wicked’ policy problems.

As researchers have shown, policy researchers and policy workers often feel as though they live and work in different worlds. Policy researchers are often disappointed their research finding are being ignored, while policy workers tend to complain that policy research lacks practical relevance.

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