Dear Reader,
Welcome to THRiVE News which connects stakeholders to what is happening within HRiVE Consortium. In this issue there are accounts of faculty, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers sharing research results with the public, practitioners, and policy makers to inform policy and practice.
The policy makers and funders alike expect research to end into knowledge translation for evidence-informed policies, guidelines, and improvement in practice. Researchers should think carefully about how to enhance the value accruing from their work and the investments made. A critical step is to appreciate how policy decisions are made, how policy priorities are understood and framed and how to speak the language of policy makers.
Users of research results believe that whereas researchers may conduct high quality research, they often fail to provide clear, relevant, reliable, easily understood research evidence and messages at the right time when needed. Jenny Bird reports that;
“In his Multiple Streams Framework, Kingdon identified a ‘policy window’ as the moment when three stars align: policymakers are paying attention to a problem, a viable solution is available and decision makers have the political will and ability to act.”
It is tempting for researchers to take the easy route of passive dissemination of results, but evidence indicates this approach does not work well and is not recommended by experts. An important barrier is that there are relatively few regular platforms focusing on motivating the establishment of long-lasting trusted relationships for effective engagement between researchers and policy makers. THRiVE encourages researchers to whenever possible and as reported by Jenny Bird;
THRIVE-NEWSLETTER-sept-2021“make use of persons skilled in speaking the language of policymakers and in strategic thinking, making arguments and networking. They will appropriately and strategically target research users and frame the results to motivate the recipient to make use of evidence.”