Getting Research Evidence Used
WASHINGTON, DC (September 24, 2015) – Much has been written about the need to base policy and program decision-making on evidence. But what is the evidence that “evidence” is actually used by decision-makers? What are other factors that decision-makers take into account when deciding how to spend scarce resources? And what can be done to foster the use of research evidence in strengthening family planning policies, programs, and practices?
These and other questions are addressed in two new publications from the Evidence Project.
The first working paper, “Family Planning Policy, Program, and Practice Decision-making: The Role of Research Evidence and Other Factors” reviews the literature in examining the facilitating factors and challenges to evidence use.
“Given the family planning field’s rich history of research and the importance of research utilization to the Evidence Project, we wanted to know when, what types, and how evidence from research is used in family planning decision-making,” explains Karen Hardee, Director of the Evidence Project and a co-author of the paper.
The literature reveals that research evidence is used in family planning decision-making, but it is only one factor. Evidence is filtered through people’s values and beliefs, in addition to political, economic, and social considerations. These other factors can be particularly salient in decision-making on topics such as adolescent sexual and reproductive health. And the term “evidence” means different things to different people. To researchers it means research evidence whereas decision-makers define “evidence” more broadly. To them, “evidence” also includes program and local data from monitoring and evaluation, government reports, community views and complaints, and professional experience. Additionally, the authors found that rarely are policy and program decisions based on a single study, but rather a body of evidence.
So what can be done to encourage decision-making based on research evidence? The second working paper, “Expanding the Role of Research Evidence in Family Planning Policy, Program, and Practice Decision-making,”identifies a series of strategies to enhance the contribution of research to the decision-making process.
A key strategy is building cultures of evidence use by engaging decision-makers and researchers in generating and using research findings, strengthening decision-makers’ capacity to use research evidence, creating knowledge translation platforms, and packaging and communicating findings more effectively. Other important strategies are grounding evidence in an understanding of the health system and building the research utilization process into study protocols.
Together these papers provide a theoretical foundation and a road map in navigating the complex process of using research findings to inform family planning policies, programs, and practices.