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Written by a leading expert in the field, this practical and accessible book is an essential guide to knowledge exchange, impact and research dissemination in health and social care.
Providing the why, what, who, how and when of research impact, the book helps researchers turn raw findings into useful, high-impact evidence for policymakers, practitioners and the public. It includes insightful interviews from leading journalists, science communicators, researchers and influencers in health and social care, as well as practical exercises, insider tips and case studies. The book will help researchers at all stages of their career to maximise the impact of their work.
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.
Impact has become a central part of the assessment criteria for academic worth. It has been adopted by many research funding bodies, and it is firmly embedded in the British Research Excellence Framework. However, a clear definition of impact remains elusive and guidance on how exactly to achieve it is often superficial.
This concise, informative book analyses impact across the social sciences. It draws on the analysis of the most highly ranked British impact case studies from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, as well as fifteen interviews with senior academics, providing a longitudinal and critical framing of impact. The author concludes with valuable recommendations of how and when scholars can achieve impact.
Introduction There has been much attention given to the relationship between early life socio-economic disadvantage and poorer health outcomes and disability in population health research. This association has been demonstrated across various objective and subjective measures, in both adults and children ( Nikiéma et al, 2012 ; Nobles et al, 2013 ; Darin-Mattsson et al, 2017 ; Doebler and Glasgow, 2017 ; Kivimäki et al, 2020 ). It is only recently that researchers have begun to focus on the impact on adolescent health, recognising the long
Positive circle of connection I spoke to Peter Beresford about his life and work in public participation as a service user, campaigner, researcher and teacher, particularly in the fields of mental health and disability. His work has been characterised by a commitment to ‘bottom-up’ rather than ‘top-down’ forms of research and knowledge-sharing. His early work with his partner, Suzy Croft, in the 1970s involved door-to-door participation with residents in south London to shape local planning and services. They found that most people felt disconnected from decisions in
locally on provision, uptake and resources. And how can we best recruit, support and retain link workers or navigators? Individual patients might want to know what it is like to join a healthy eating cooking class, did people enjoy it and what made them stay? A local advocacy group for people with learning disabilities might want to know how these services are funded and their fit with other statutory and voluntary services in their patch. And at a national policy level, as well as questions of cost-effectiveness, there may be an appetite for ‘good news’ stories to
our evidence centre was that it was best thought of as a process where many could contribute. That included science writers and journalists, those with critical appraisal skills (understanding the findings and strength of evidence, including possible risk of bias) and people with lived experience as staff or patients. This is an iterative process. The earlier chapter on patients and the public gave an example from our work with an advocacy group to co-produce an easy-read version of a research report with people with learning disabilities ( Figure 5.5 ). Tools are
create an output which is readable and relevant to your audience. Make it personal – bring the people back in A consistent thread running through this book has been the need to bring research to life with stories. This is what journalists do to connect the reader to the bigger issues at hand. You might want to use quotes or vignettes from your research or tell the story of why you did this research and its connection with you. You may have been motivated to carry out research on the hospital experience for people with learning disabilities when your autistic
offering up clues and fragments and professionals reading cues and subtexts to arrive at diagnoses or accounts which make sense in managing and living with their problems. She tells the moving story of a patient, Luz, who irritated the doctor with repeated demands for disability claim signatures for headaches before the uncovering of the real story of persistent family abuse. As humans, we can relate more to the single story than the general. The skill is to select the individual example or story which illustrates and resonates with a wider message. In his book on how
disability in a review on assistive technology. We consider in later chapters how design can play an important part in making research accessible. Our reviews also included quotes from frontline staff identifying aspects of research which resonated with them and how it had affected their practice. Feature articles, with case studies used in the research or vignettes of patient and staff experience, can bring findings to life. Using journalistic principles helps to make material readable and interesting, as many of the experts I talked to confirm. It is what Teresa Chinn
