|
Abstract
|
Recent strategies of the Campbell Collaboration have stressed not just increasing the production of high-quality reviews, but also increasing the use of those reviews by decisionmakers. However, the things that researchers usually do--publishing in journals and speaking at academic conferences--will not reach decisionmakers. A short plain language summary is embedded in every Campbell review, but this is still of little or no use if those summaries remain on our website, undiscovered, rather than in the hands of decisionmakers.
Campbell has been working to increase the policy uptake of evidence from Campbell reviews by building on two recent trends. First, there is increasing recognition of the need to involve stakeholders, especially decisionmakers, at the early stages of any research. The second trend is the rise of knowledge brokering or knowledge translation--that is, the need to take the research one step further in 'translating' the research findings into forms which are discoverable, understandable and usable by decisionmakers.
The main way in which Campbell is helping to build policy uptake is to work with what we call user commissioners. These are commissioners of research who are not traditional research funders, funding research for research's sake, but organisations who have a demand for knowledge to inform their own work. These user commissioners include the What Works movement, whose members are responsible for developing evidence-based decisionmaking products. They work with their stakeholders in diverse sectors, such as youth employment, youth offending, homelessness and education. They also work with other user commissioners in the World Health Organization, development banks and governmental departments who inform national implementation strategies.
Campbell's approach includes the strategic use of evidence and gap maps, to build the evidence architecture (White, 2021). In this approach, we first undertake an evidence and gap map of the sector of interest with the user commissioner and with the engagement of other stakeholders such as citizens, practitioners and decisionmakers. For example, we developed the maps of effectiveness and implementation evidence for people who are homeless or vulnerably housed in collaboration with the Centre for Homelessness Impact in the UK, as well as other key stakeholders (White et al., 2020). Another example is the evidence and gap map on home-based health and social care, developed in collaboration with the World Health Organization, practitioners and citizens (Welch et al., 2021)...
Language: en |