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Academic research on health policy divergence across the United Kingdom since devolution has characterised Scotland's approach as ‘professionalistic’ or ‘collaborative’. This article argues that more nuanced studies of particular policy areas are needed, and offers an exploration of the Scottish approach to public involvement as an example. An analysis of policy documents since devolution reveals the shifting significance of public involvement, and the introduction of new instruments for its accomplishment. The Scottish National Party’s vision of ‘a mutual National Health Service’ is presented as a complex, even contradictory, project, which warrants further empirical attention both within and beyond the context of four-system comparisons.
Concerns about the limited influence of research on decision making have prompted the development of tools intended to mediate evidence for policy audiences. This article focuses on three examples, prominent in public health: impact assessments; systematic reviews; and economic decision-making tools (cost-benefit analysis and scenario modelling). Each has been promoted as a means of synthesising evidence for policy makers but little is known about policy actors’ experiences of them. Employing a literature review and 69 interviews, we offer a critical analysis of their role in policy debates, arguing that their utility lies primarily in their symbolic value as markers of good decision making.
Measuring research impact and engagement is a much debated topic in the UK and internationally. This book is the first to provide a critical review of the research impact agenda, situating it within international efforts to improve research utilisation. Using empirical data, it discusses research impact tools and processes for key groups such as academics, research funders, ‘knowledge brokers’ and research users, and considers the challenges and consequences of incentivising and rewarding particular articulations of research impact.
It draws on wide ranging qualitative data, combined with theories about the science-policy interplay and audit regimes to suggest ways to improve research impact.
Alongside efforts to improve evidence use in policy, grassroots demands and governance-driven democratisation are informing an ever-increasing range of public engagement processes in UK policy. This article explores how these simultaneous efforts intersect within three policy organisations working at different levels of UK policy: local (Sheffield City Council), regional (Greater Manchester Combined Authority) and national (devolved) (Scottish Government). Employing documentary analysis and 51 interviews with individuals working in these organisations, we argue that there are organisational similarities in approaches to evidence and engagement, including: conceiving of both ‘data’ (statistics tracked by internal analysts) and ‘evidence’ (external analysis) in primarily quantified terms; and a tendency to limit the authority of publics to advising and consulting on predefined issues. Yet, we also find growing interest in more in-depth understandings of publics (for example, via ‘lived experiences’) but uncertainty about how to use these qualitative insights in settings that have institutionalised quantitative approaches to evidence. We identify four distinct responses: (1) prioritising public engagement; (2) strategically using public engagement and evidence to support policy proposals; (3) prioritising quantified evidence and data; and (4) attempting to integrate these distinct knowledge types. Surprisingly (given the organisational importance afforded to metrics), we categorised most interviewees in Cluster 4. Finally, we explore how interviewees described trying to do this kind of integration work, before reflecting on the promise and limitations of the various mechanisms that interviewees identified.
This chapter builds on the debates presented in chapters 1 and 2, providing a more in-depth assessment of critiques of the research impact agenda. This includes concerns expressed in the Stern review and debates regarding the possibility of applying ‘metrics’ to impact. It then considers how the impact agenda has been defended and amended in the context of these critiques.
This chapter widens the focus of the book to explore whether there appear to be any disciplinary patterns amongst perspectives on, and experiences of, research impact in UK academia. This chapter includes an analysis of whether published perspectives on the impact agenda appear to vary by discipline (as predicted by Nowotny et al, 2001), informed by new focus group and interview data conducted for this book.
This chapter considers how the concept of ‘research impact’ has been developed and articulated with respect to two, potentially very different audiences: policymakers and the broader public. This chapter includes an analysis of recent REF (Research Excellence Framework) and research funder guidance, statements and opportunities relating to these two groups. This chapter also draws on interview data with a range of research funders
This chapter uses six in-depth interviews with high profile academics in a range of countries that have an interest in the notion of research impact: Australia, Canada, the UK and the US. Three of our interviewees are what we term ‘public intellectuals’, while the other three, each of whom works at the intersection of research and policy, we term ‘academic interlocutors’. These perspectives allow us to consider how academics working within and beyond the UK, with some contrasting views about external engagement, view notions of ‘public intellectualism’, ‘relevance’ and ‘impact’.
This chapter focuses on academics working in university-based groups that have been charged with, and funded to achieve, knowledge translation and research impact. These are, we suggest, academics working at the vanguard of the impact agenda, who we might consider as experimental subjects from whom we can learn. This chapter includes a summary of the types of knowledge brokerage roles and organisations that have been created in the UK and the perceived and stated rationales for these new roles and organisations, and an analysis of interview data providing insights into the perspectives of academics working within two such groups.
