Zachary Neal, Editor-in-Chief
Evidence & Policy is piloting a new portable peer review policy aimed at reducing inefficiencies in the publication process, and lessening some of the burdens placed on reviewers and authors by the cycle of repeated submissions to different journals. The official policy is available in the journal’s Author Instructions, but this blog post provides some additional background details and rationale for adopting this policy.
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Renee Parks and Fanice Thomas
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Municipal officials’ perspectives on policymaking for addressing obesity and health equity’.
More than 30% of adults in the US have obesity, with higher rates among those who have lower incomes or are racially or ethnically minoritised. Local-level policymakers within municipal governments can play a unique role in addressing obesity and related health disparities through policy strategies, including zoning and other land use laws, city or park master plans, and local, healthy food procurement policies that create healthy environments and promote community members’ engagement in health promoting behaviours.
In our Evidence and Policy article, we discuss municipal officials’ decision-making regarding policies impacting community health, their views on the prevalence of obesity and health disparities in their communities, and their role in addressing them. By understanding policymakers’ views on obesity and health disparities, we can identify best practices for sharing evidence with policymakers and promoting its integration into policies that address health disparities in communities.
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Joanne Gleeson, Lucas Walsh, Mark Rickinson, Blake Cutler and Genevieve Hall
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Quality use of research evidence: practitioner perspectives’.
The use of research to inform practice can play a vital role in improving decision-making and social outcomes. As such, research use has gained widespread attention, with a range of initiatives now in place across sectors, countries and jurisdictions that promote it. Yet, what it takes for research to be used on the ground, let alone what quality research use looks like, is not well understood (Sheldrick et al., 2022). Without these understandings, there are real risks that research into research use will stay, as Tseng (2022) suggests, on ‘the proverbial shelf (or website) — far from the action of policy deliberations and decision-making’. This presents a challenge to the research community; to not only gain robust evidence on how research is used by practitioners, but also what it means to use research well and what it takes for it to improve.
In our new article in Evidence and Policy, we address this challenge by presenting findings from an investigation into Australian educators’ views on using research well in practice. Utilising thematic analysis, we draw on survey and interview data from almost 500 Australian educators (i.e., school leaders, teachers and support staff) to examine their perspectives in relation to a previously developed conceptual Quality Use of Research Evidence (QURE) Framework (Rickinson et al., 2020, 2022).
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Paul Atkinson
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘How did UK policymaking in the COVID-19 response use science? Evidence from scientific advisers’.
Should scientists who want to influence government ‘speak truth to power’, or follow the ‘rules of the game’? Do you make more difference as an outsider or an insider? This matters to any scientist who wants their research findings to have impact. As a former Department of Health civil servant employed in a University public health department, I often work with my Liverpool and Oxford colleagues on achieving ‘policy impact’, and this question arises each time, but it has never mattered more than in the Covid-19 pandemic. So what is the best way to influence government?
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Carla Alvial Palavicino and Cristian Matti
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Co-creation for Transformative Innovation Policy: an implementation case for projects structured as portfolio of knowledge services’.
For addressing grand societal challenges such as climate change or biodiversity loss, the power of research and innovation is an important consideration. In this context, a new framework has emerged that invites us to re-think how we can maximise the impact of research and innovation for societal challenges: ‘Transformative Innovation Policy’ or TIP. This framework emphasises the role of co-creation, learning and reflexivity as part of research, technology development and innovation processes.
Our Evidence & Policy article, ‘Co-creation for Transformative Innovation Policy: an implementation case for projects structured as portfolio of knowledge services’, explores what co-creation means in practice for TIP, using the case of two innovation projects developed by the TIP consortium and EIT Climate-KIC, two international organisations seeking to promote innovation for global challenges. These projects were co-developed between experts on transformative innovation policy from the organisations previously mentioned, and scientific researchers and consultants grouped in two consortiums: one focused on sustainable mobility solutions (SuSMo) and the other focused on sustainable landscape management (SATURN). These projects have aimed at creating new knowledge that can be used by societal stakeholders in addressing specific sustainability problems and developing a ‘portfolio’ of knowledge services.
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Kelsey Wuerstl, Miranda A. Cary, Katrina Plamondon, Davina Banner-Lukaris, Nelly Oelke, Kathryn M. Sibley, Kristy Baxter, Mathew Vis-Dunbar, Alison M. Hoens, Ursula Wick, Stefan Bigsby and Heather Gainforth
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Building consensus in research partnerships: a scoping review of consensus methods’.
When reading articles describing a collaborative research decision, such as a research partnership creating a list of research priorities, we often read the statement, ‘The research partnership came to consensus’. But what does this statement actually mean – what is consensus, what does it mean to come to consensus, and how did the research partnership come to consensus?
Research partnerships are characterised by researchers and research users engaged in a collaborative research project to enhance the relevance and usefulness of research findings. Consensus methods require group members to develop and agree to support a solution that is in the group’s best interest. However, simply doing partnered research and using consensus methods does not guarantee the research addresses the priorities of those most affected, nor that inclusion and power dynamics have been considered. Consensus methods are often poorly reported and missing crucial information about how the research partnership made decisions about the project, as well as how issues of inclusion, equity and power dynamics were navigated.
We conducted a scoping review to better understand how research partnerships use consensus methods in health research and how these research partnerships navigate inclusion and power dynamics. Our findings, published in Evidence & Policy, identified six recommendations to enhance the quality of research teams’ consensus methods.
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Marissa J. Smith, Srinivasa Vittal Katikireddi, Kathryn Skivington and Shona Hilton
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Contextual influences on the role of evidence in e-cigarette recommendations: a multi-method analysis of international and national jurisdictions’.
The use of evidence in public health decision-making is not as straightforward as it may seem – people have different ideas of what constitutes ‘evidence’, and how it should be interpreted and used in different contexts. Even when there is agreement on what constitutes evidence, research has shown that the same evidence, used in different contexts can lead to different policy decisions. A current example of this is e-cigarette policies and their recommendations. Our Evidence and Policy article explores how context, broadly defined as the factors that influence decision-making, influences the role of evidence in developing recommendations and how it may contribute to different policy approaches.
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Alexis Dewaele
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘A grounded theory on collaborative interactions in a community-university partnership: the case of youth in the public space’.
In a society that is steered by complex processes such as globalisation and institutional complexity, we are increasingly confronted with what is sometimes called ‘wicked problems’ (i.e., a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise). At Ghent University in Belgium, we were interested in trying to solve such problems by setting up a collaboration with diverse community stakeholders. We sent out a call to diverse stakeholders asking them to submit proposals on societal challenges that could be addressed by bringing together various actors and making use of scientific knowledge. An employee of the municipal department of well-being and equal opportunities submitted a case related to antisocial behavior by youth at a municipal park. The researchers involved selected the case as a pilot project to further investigate collaborative processes. For our study published in Evidence & Policy, we analysed a set of four video recorded co-creation sessions of this particular case to learn to better understand the process of how knowledge exchange can actually contribute to problem solving.
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Mathieu Ouimet
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Use of research evidence in legislatures: a systematic review’.
Our Evidence and Policy article reports the findings from a systematic review of how and for what purpose legislators use research evidence. It also examines legislators’ perspectives on enablers and barriers to using research evidence.
We searched for all published studies, either in English or French, in which the type of use and the barriers and facilitators to using research evidence by legislators were empirically examined. We included relevant studies regardless of the year of publication, the country where the study was conducted or the kind of legislatures. We found twenty-one studies, most of which were conducted in the United States. There has been a noticeable growth in studies since the 2010s.
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Sarah Morton and Ailsa Cook
We gain fascinating insights working alongside organisations across sectors in public services, that want to use data and evidence well to understand and track their impact. We specialise in working with organisations where it is hard to simply measure the difference they make, and where the main focus for change is relationships: work that educates, empowers, inspires, supports, encourages or influences people. What we have observed over the last 5 years, is that every organisation is influenced by their data culture, but it is rarely talked about. It is something we highlight in our new book: How do you know you are making a difference, from Policy Press.
Through our company Matter of Focus, we support organisations to understand the context for their work, set out their theories of change, and use this as a lens to collect and analyse data that can help them understand their change processes and evidence the difference they make. This means we host workshops and meetings where people really get to grips with different elements of their work, and we see what is inside the pandora’s box when organisations start to review the data they hold about their own work.
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