Abstract
Recent decades have seen widespread efforts to improve the generation and use of evidence across a number of sectors. Such efforts can be seen to raise important questions about how we understand not only the quality of evidence, but also the quality of its use. To date, though, there has been wide-ranging debate about the former, but very little dialogue about the latter. This paper focuses in on this question of how to conceptualise the quality of research evidence use. Drawing on a systematic review and narrative synthesis of 112 papers from health, social care, education and policy, it presents six initial principles for conceptualising quality use of research evidence. These concern taking account of: the role of practice-based expertise and evidence in context; the sector-specific conditions that support evidence use; how quality use develops and can be evaluated over time; the salient stages of the research use process; whether to focus on processes and/or outcomes of evidence use; and the scale or level of the use within a system. It is hoped that this paper will act as a stimulus for future conceptual and empirical work on this important, but under-researched, topic of quality of use.
Highlights
Over the past 2 decades, there have been widespread efforts to improve the generation and use of evidence across a number of sectors
As we see it, improved evidence use will require clarity about what counts as quality evidence, and what counts as quality use
This paper focuses on the question of how to conceptualise the quality of research evidence use
Summary
Over the past 2 decades, there have been widespread efforts to improve the generation and use of evidence across a number of sectors. The authors describe how there is ‘a diverse landscape of initiatives to promote evidence use’ ranging from efforts to improve research generation and dissemination through to activities to build practitioners’ capacity to use research, foster collaborations between researchers and research users, and to develop system-wide approaches to evidence use There is a well-developed literature around understanding and appraising the quality of different kinds of evidence (e.g., Cook and Gorard, 2007; Nutley et al, 2013; Puttick, 2018), but little in the way of an equivalent for understanding and appraising the quality of different kinds of use
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