Suchergebnisse

Significance This study is an experimental trial that demonstrates the potential for formal outreach strategies to change congressional use of research. Our results show that collaboration between policy and research communities can change policymakers' value of science and result in legislation that appears to be more inclusive of research evidence. The findings of this study also demonstrated changes in researchers' knowledge and motivation to engage with policymakers as well as their actual policy engagement behavior. Together, the observed changes in both policymakers and researchers randomized to receive an intervention for supporting legislative use of research evidence (i.e., the Research-to-Policy Collaboration model) provides support for the underlying theories around the social nature of research translation and evidence use.

Core to the goal of scientific exploration is the opportunity to guide future decision-making. Yet, elected officials often miss opportunities to use science in their policymaking. This work reports on an experiment with the US Congress-evaluating the effects of a randomized, dual-population (i.e., researchers and congressional offices) outreach model for supporting legislative use of research evidence regarding child and family policy issues. In this experiment, we found that congressional offices randomized to the intervention reported greater value of research for understanding issues than the control group following implementation. More research use was also observed in legislation introduced by the intervention group. Further, we found that researchers randomized to the intervention advanced their own policy knowledge and engagement as well as reported benefits for their research following implementation.

Core to the goal of scientific exploration is the opportunity to guide future decision-making. Yet, elected officials often miss opportunities to use science in their policymaking. This work reports on an experiment with the US Congress—evaluating the effects of a randomized, dual-population (i.e., researchers and congressional offices) outreach model for supporting legislative use of research evidence regarding child and family policy issues. In this experiment, we found that congressional offices randomized to the intervention reported greater value of research for understanding issues than the control group following implementation. More research use was also observed in legislation introduced by the intervention group. Further, we found that researchers randomized to the intervention advanced their own policy knowledge and engagement as well as reported benefits for their research following implementation.