Background: The literature on evidence-based policy in education offers insight into the need to form partnerships between researchers and practitioners with particular attention to the role of "intermediaries." However, the operationalisation of the partnership, especially in school violence prevention, the focal policy of this…

Background: As calls for evidence-based policymaking become increasingly common, qualitative research has much to offer the policy community. However, policymakers frequently evidence a preference for quantitative research. By discounting the importance of qualitative research in the policymaking process, resulting policies and their target…

The opposing views in the scholarly debate on evidence-based policy (EBP) have recently been labeled 'rationalist' and 'constructivist', where the former are positive to EBP and the latter are not. This framing of the debate is suboptimal, as it conflates critical positions that should be kept separate. This article suggests that the debate should…

Background: Despite the growing attention given to the political process of evidence-based policymaking (EBPM), we still know little about how evidence is processed at the early stages of the policymaking process, especially at the agenda-setting stage. Whether and when political elites pay attention to evidence-based information is crucial to the…

Despite claims that we now live in a post-truth society, it remains commonplace for policy makers to consult research evidence to increase the robustness of decision making. Few scholars of evidence-policy interfaces, however, have used legislatures as sites of study, despite the fact that they play a critical role in modern democracies. There is…

Background: This study draws on two communities theory to address two major research questions related to conceptions of research in educational practice and policy. First, how do educators conceptualise research? Second, to what extent do educators' conceptions of research align with recent US federal educational policies? Methods: We conducted…

Background: Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is an equity-focused approach intended to generate local knowledge and democratise the production of research evidence. Aims/objectives: We explore the promise and challenges of YPAR to inform education policy decision making. We focus on California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)'s…

Economics is now central to health policy decision making, within government departments and the National Health Service. We examine how and why a health economics academic unit -- the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) at the University of York, England -- was created in 1983, funded and commissioned to provide research evidence to the British…

The need for better linkages between evidence and policymaking has been well established in the literature, with a heightened focus on the relationship between researchers, research utilisation and policy development. However, fostering such linkages using a policy network approach has seldom been discussed. This article revisits a key framework…

Background: This article charts the relationships between the model of evidence-based practice (EBP), healthcare markets where providers are increasingly competing through the adoption of EBP-certified interventions, and the cultivation of experiential knowledge within self-help and mutual aid groups (MAGs). After 35 years of neoliberal reform,…

Decision makers' capacity to use evidence is a key component of evidence-informed decision making (EIDM) at a policy level. This paper describes a unique combination of EIDM workshops and mentoring to build decision makers' capacity to use evidence. It reflects how the deliberate design of sequential workshop and mentoring capacity-building…

There are growing calls for improved understandings of the role of evidence within policy development. There is long-standing recognition of the role of narratives and narrative processes in public policy. The aim of this paper is to explore the potential of policy narratives as a way to make sense of evidence use in policy. Drawing on an…

The literature on the evidence-policy nexus has been dominated in recent years by technocratic approaches such as 'knowledge translation'. Attention is beginning to return, however, to political science for its insights into the distribution of power, which are key to understanding how policy is made, particularly in the health sphere. Policy…

Recent scholarship suggests that research use is an interactive, social phenomenon, and that brokers play important roles in facilitating the exchange of research evidence. We add to this body of literature by exploring the role of brokers in the exchange of research evidence among state education agency leaders involved in K-12 science education…