What Happens Next? Getting Research into Policy and Practice

Abstract

While academics seek to provide insights into the contemporary issues around families and relationships, we also need to think about the implications of these insights for those concerned with developing policies or working with families. This chapter explores how academic knowledge about families and relationships can influence the understandings and actions of policy makers and practitioners, and ultimately the support families receive by drawing on the growing national and international literature on these issues (e.g. Alexanderson et al 2009; Mullen 2005; Ouimet et al 2009; Widmer 2009). Much of this documents and debates national efforts to promote evidence-informed policies and practices within specific policy areas, such as education, healthcare and social work. Increasingly, there are also efforts to learn and draw broader lessons from these sector-specific national endeavours (Nutley et al 2007; Nutley et al 2010). As well as drawing out these general lessons, this discussion is grounded in an overview of the knowledge-to-action activities of one specific research centre, the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR), based at the University of Edinburgh with partners across other Scottish universities. Locating CRFR’s work within the context of the developing literature on research use, and showing how this literature has helped shape CRFR’s approaches to making research more relevant and influential enables less abstracted engagement with the issues. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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