practice

Excellence in practice-based research: beyond academia and into action

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Ulrica von Thiele Schwarz, Håkan Uvhagen, Åsa Hedberg Rundgren and Emma Hedberg Rundgren

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘When academic impact is not enough: a concept mapping study characterising excellence in practice-based research’.

What makes research truly excellent? In practice-based research, success is not just about advancing academic knowledge but also driving tangible societal change. It is research designed not just to discover but to act.

Traditional definitions of research excellence emphasise the innovation and rigour of scientific methods, while usefulness and practical applicability are less often emphasised. Currently, researchers are being asked to engage in practice-based research, working together with people outside academia to address societal challenges. However, their performance is still largely evaluated based on criteria reflecting a more traditional type of research. So, what happens if we combine the words excellence and practice-based research to ask: what is excellence in practice-based research? That is what we explored in our study where we engaged professionals working in Research & Development units in social services in Sweden, thus with one foot in academia and one in practice, in a brainstorming and sorting exercise to answer that question. The data was analyzed statistically to identify common patterns in the data, resulting in a visualisation of the key characteristics of excellent practice-based research and how they are interconnected.

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The ambiguous nature of today’s behavioural government

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Sarah Ball and Joram Feitsma

One of the major trends within the contemporary policy scene is ‘the use of behavioural insights (BI)’ to improve policymaking. All around the world, from Qatar to England and Japan, ‘Behavioural Insights Teams’ (or ‘BITs’), ‘Nudge advisers’ and ‘Chief Behavioural Officers’ now inhabit government, seeking to infuse it with state-of-the-art knowledge and methods from the behavioural sciences. The more specific signature traits of this BI agenda appear to be its focus on new behavioural economics, nudge techniques and Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). The COVID-19 crisis hasn’t hampered the behavioural momentum – quite the contrary: in the absence of a distributed vaccine, halting the spread of the coronavirus has very much been a behaviour change challenge, with BI being in great demand. The recent launch of dedicated ‘COVID-19 Teams’ and ‘Corona Behavioural Units’ within the UK’s and Dutch policy scene didn’t come as a surprise, and only confirmed that behavioural government is here to stay.

Intriguingly enough, though, one question about the new institutional praxis of ‘using BI’ remains not yet convincingly answered: What is it, really?

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