Evidence use

When do public-academic partnerships lead to evidence use in policymaking?

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Amy Preston Page and Christina Kang-Yi

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Public-academic partnerships to foster use of research evidence in improving youth outcomes: findings from document analysis’

Child welfare and youth mental health services in the United States are complex and often disjointed. Government policies and funders increasingly require evidence-based care from these agencies. To meet this demand, partnerships between public care agencies and academic researchers have become popular in recent years. While these public-academic partnerships or ‘PAPs’ have demonstrated a positive impact on improving use of research evidence by public care agency leaders, we still have limited knowledge about how these partnerships work and which partnership characteristics may contribute to evidence use.

In our Evidence and Policy article, ‘Public-academic partnerships to foster use of research evidence in improving youth outcomes: findings from document analysis’, we analysed documents from 23 US PAPs aiming to improve mental health and promote well-being of youth aged 12–25 years. We found that the PAPs had diverse partnership goals including implementation and dissemination of research/evaluation evidence, information sharing, and prioritising and streamlining research processes. PAPs sustained longer than 10 years had more focused goals while PAPs 10 years or newer were engaged in more diverse goals. The majority of PAPs used journal articles, presentations and multimedia as dissemination strategies. Several PAPs had a large volume of material available online while others had very little.

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Embedding researchers in service organisations: what do initiatives look like and how can they be cultivated?

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Dr Vicky Ward

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy articles ‘Embedding researchers into organisations: a study of the features of embedded research initiatives‘ and ‘A framework to support the design and cultivation of embedded research initiatives‘.

Embedding researchers in service organisations is the latest in a long line of approaches to better link the worlds of research and practice. Embedded researchers have become particularly popular in the field of healthcare, but can also be found in education and local government. As with any new initiative, one of the big questions on people’s minds is ‘does it work’? The problem, though, is that until now we haven’t had a clear picture of what ‘it’ (i.e. embedded research) is and how those interested in the approach might design an initiative.

To address this, our research team (a diverse group including researchers and healthcare managers) set out to better understand what embedded research initiatives look like in practice and produce a practical framework for anyone involved in designing or cultivating an initiative.

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Four things we have learned about national evaluation policies in Africa

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Caitlin Blaser-Mapitsa, Takunda Chirau and Matodzi Amisi

National evaluation policies are one way of demonstrating a willingness in government to promote the use of evidence in a systemic way. Our recently published Evidence & Policy article, ‘Policies for evidence: a comparative analysis of Africa’s national evaluation policy landscape‘, explores the relationship between evaluation policies and evaluation systems. We have found that policies are one piece of the puzzle acting to strengthen undertaking of evaluations, evidence use, and build evaluation practice in Africa.

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